Deer hunters who own property increasingly are managing it to benefit whitetails, namely to produce more deer, or bigger deer.

It's also true that working with land, as deer hunters, is a benefit unto itself. It's fun to do, and has the added benefit of extending the whitetail season to a year-round activity.

On a recent Saturday, a gang of us who hunt together in northwest Wisconsin got together to put in three food plots. Each was about 1-2 acres in size, and a variety of "crops" were planted in each.

Whether the crops ultimately take hold or not remains to be seen, and will depend to a large degree how well the land is prepared, and whether enough rain falls and various other natural conditions conspire to benefit the undertaking.

Norb Berg, who with his four sons owns the property, started the food-plot process by testing the soil of the plots, determining from the tests the acidity of the soil and how much lime would be needed to prepare them for planting.

In further preparation, plants on the land were killed off with Round-Up (twice, over a 10-day period), the land was chisel-plowed, fertilized and a seed bed was made with a drag.

"I put lime on some of the plot land at a rate of about 12 tons per acre over two years," Norb said.

The plots were seeded with mixes from, among other sources, the Whitetail Research Institute (www.whitetailinstitute.com) that included various types of clover and chicory, as well as other seeds.

Finally, the seeds were lightly tamped down with a makeshift roller made out of two 55-gallon drums welded together.

The entire process required a fair amount of equipment — including a tractor with disc, and a four-wheeler and a drag. Perhaps 10 of us contributed our labor —though we could have gotten by with about half that number.

Will any of us see more deer, or bigger deer, as a result?

Maybe, over time.

But the benefits of the work and expense involved in food plots go beyond those types of outcomes. Like a duck hunter who in the off season works on his decoys, or spends that time training his dog, working on deer-hunting land at times other than the hunting season itself enhances the entire hunting experience.