First year that I've put food plots in for a long time. I also bait, the pheasants, squirrels, turkeys, and blue jays appreciate the bait as well. In my findings and opinion, Big bucks hit the bait at night, you might be able to get them there but mostly the bait brings in does and little bucks that just bust you in your stand. I admit that shooting a doe over bait would be easy and way less fun but i'm not going to complain when I want to put meat in the freezer. No one complains about guys shooting bears over bait. I've found that less corn in better so the deer come to check maybe eat alitte and then move on you don't want them camped in front of your stand.
Now on to food plots, the deer would walk right past my corn to get the plots, why eat dried out corn when there nice green leafy growth 100 yards away. This also seemed to get the deer to move earlier in the day and less at night. I don't see much of a difference with baiting and food plots especially if you hunt travel corridors, you are still congregating deer that normally wouldn't go that way and bringing deer from other areas.
As far as the advisory meetings, I’ve only gone to one and it seemed like an hour of worthless talking for 10 minutes of decent info. They aren’t bad to go to you can atleast voice your concerns whether they Listen or not. I remember we asked them about low partridge numbers and any plans for them and I got and answer of “yes the numbers are low” and the g&f guy sat back down and that was the end of the discussion on that.