Dream Farm with Bill Winke

I have several large groves of cedar trees on the new farm and while a few pockets of cedars can be valuable wintering areas, large mature thickets are of little value to any of the wildlife on this property. I would love to see these bluffs holding more ruffed grouse like I grew up hunting and feeding and housing more whitetails. The first step toward that goal is getting kwhunting kwwhitetail

There are two kinds of landowners in the recreational land market. One category has end users (legacy owners). They plan to own the land forever and leave it to their heirs. The other category is made up of investors. Those with the investor mindset may use the land also but they don't plan to own it forever. It is just a stepping stone to something else - maybe something bigger. When you are l

This is episode 3 in a 7 part series called "My Journey" in which I talk with a young man named Ethan Stubbs about my journey to assemble my first dream farm. Along the way, I answer his questions and offer advice to anyone starting on this journey. In this episode I focus on a wide range of topics, but I think the most important one is how make sure you are buying quality when buying a farm tha

Knowing how to buy land is a definite skill you can learn. Buying land is not like buying most things, where there is a single and usually well defined way to make the transaction. With land, there are lots of ways to structure the deal and being creative may well get you into a piece of land that you otherwise thought was unattainable. In this episode, I discuss some of the ways to buy land, bu

Deer hunting land can take many forms, but one thing is a constant, you have to have food. The old saying is very true: "Find the food, find the deer." Anything you can do to help feed the deer better is a bonus, but if you are serious and want to consider the maximum food plot acres needed to support a thriving deer herd, you can find a few suggestions in this video.

My farm has lots of open acres that need cover and what better to plant in those areas than trees and shrubs that wildlife like to eat. I decide on chokecherry, wild plum and redosier dogwood. While the cherry and plum trees are not pure browse plants for deer, the dogwood is known to be a preferred browse, especially during the late season. I experiment with planting these species in a number

I have been planting oak trees from acorns since the mid-2000s and have had good success (in most cases). This past fall, we planted about 13 acres this way on the new farm. In this episode, we show the results (how many trees came up) and go through the steps involved in direct seeding acorns to grow oak trees.

The farm has been in a moderate drought all year. The spring was particularly dry, meaning that everything I planted was set back by the dry conditions. It is time for another update to see what is growing and what is not and what I will need to do to fix the weak spots so there will be plenty of food for the deer on the farm this fall and winter. Ah, the challenges of growing food plots. I had

On the farm we owned in southern Iowa, we flipped the buck to doe ratio so that there were way more bucks than does. I think the ratio was around 3 bucks per doe by the time we cut back on doe shooting. It was a challenge to do, but necessary to keep things in check. It was really interesting to see how the deer herd responded to that change. Did all the bucks leave during the rut? Was that ra

Interior food plots create a lot of value for any whitetail hunting property. Not only do that offer great places to actually hunt, but they also increase property value should you ever decide to sell. In this episode, I talk about where to create them and how to create them. In the process, we make two more of them on the farm.

As the season approaches, the farm is finally starting to shape up. We check the status of all the plots and projects and finish rescuing the final two. We also compare the progress of two of my Wintergreens plots. One was broadcast into dead grass and the other was drilled into tilled ground. The difference is how they are performing at this point is amazing. Some plots are doing great while othe

My dream farm has a shocking number of wild apple trees growing on it. I am not entirely sure how they got started, but there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of them on one part of the farm - ranging from one to 30 feet tall. In this episode, I discuss wild apple trees and my plans to plant hundreds more of them on the farm. Is this something that will work in other places? I think we should fin

I have three fields on the farm that nearly touch. I planted each of them using a different method. The soil is more or less the same; I planted Whitetail Institute Winter-Greens in all three at roughly the same time. Then I fertilized them equally. Yet given all these similarities, one field did much better than the other two. Here, I show which one performed the best and why it was so product

In this episode, Ethan and I discuss the maximum sized hunting farm from the standpoint of manageability and we also discuss how much land is required to grow mature bucks. We also touch on whether a 40 acre tract is realistic in a managed neighborhood. Finally, Ethan asked me what I wish I had known when I started the process back in 1995 that I know now.

Making an interior food plot is the very best thing you can do to improve the hunting and the resale value of your property. This is especially true if you are a bowhunter. These staging area plots are the last place the deer will be on their feet in daylight before going to their nearby bedding areas in the mornings and the first place they will be on their feet when they leave their bedding ar

I have been making low budget food plots for 20 years. You can make them almost anywhere - your land, permission farms, family property - I even know a guy that made one on public land. You only need hand tools and some effort to greatly improve the quality of your hunting with these small staging area plots.

I am starting to accumulate the items I will need to manage this farm. In this episode, I go through the items one by one. There are a few I still need to get, and I did forget to include my corn planter (that was stored in a nearby building - out of sight out of mind). You don't have to spend a fortune to manage hunting land, you just need the right pieces of equipment. Here is what I am using

Not only do I dive into why we sold the farm that took me 13 years and lots of effort to put together, but also I dive into how to sell land, especially hunting land. Since I couldn't find a good replacement within the time allowed by the 1031 tax exchange regulations, we ended up trading into commercial real estate. I also touch on that process and whether that worked. There is also a downside

I took logs off a number of farms during the years when I was building my dream farm. That brings up a lot of questions about when to cut them (as soon as possible) and how to cut them. I am sure I will need to come back with at least one or two more episodes about logging your farm to really cover this subject well, but in this episode I get the conversation started.