Native Browse Is the Diet. A Food Plot Is the Supplement.

Deer eat hundreds of plant species, and no single food dominates their year. This guide sets Missouri Extension's protein requirements by age, sex, and season beside Mississippi State's crude protein figures for common native plants, then adds Missouri's seasonal chart to show how far one plant's protein moves between summer and winter. It closes with a way to grade a tract by the calendar and a place for food plots in that grade.

Missouri Extension's nutrition guide (Pierce, Vandeloecht, and Flinn, reviewed November 2022) treats white-tailed deer as browsers that eat woody browse, forbs, hard and soft mast, and some grass. Food habit studies have identified more than 600 plant species in Missouri deer diets. Deer often pick growing tips, the most succulent and nutrient-rich part, and no single food dominates the year, because selection depends on palatability, availability, and season.

Protein need changes with age and activity, and Missouri's table sets it out.

Lactation is the heaviest protein demand on does. Deer milk averages 8.2 percent protein, and does with twins need more. Hardened antlers are about 45 percent protein, but body growth and maintenance come first, so short protein in spring and summer shows up as smaller antlers. Missouri calls a 16 percent diet generally optimal for antler growth.

Its pen illustration is real and easy to over-apply. Two-year-old bucks fed 8 percent protein grew half the antler mass of bucks fed 16 percent, and by age 4 the 8 percent bucks grew antlers 20 inches smaller. The guide describes these as studies of pen-raised deer. Captive animals on a formulated diet are a different case from a wild herd working through a woodlot, though the gap does show that having something green to eat is no nutrition plan.

The University of Georgia's prescribed burning review (Hopper, D'Angelo, and Kohl, 2021) gives one band instead: 13 to 16 percent protein for optimal growth, citing a 1956 study. That is a different synthesis from Missouri's activity table, so use both as ranges and do not average them.

Energy is the other half. In fall deer seek carbohydrates to store as fat, which is one reason acorns and grain draw them. Missouri says breeding males can lose up to 30 percent of their body weight, and does spend about 20 percent of the energy cost of producing fawns during pregnancy and about 80 percent during lactation, with peak milk production 10 to 37 days after birth. Late summer and winter are typically the most stressful times in Missouri, when food is short and antler growth, lactation, or rut recovery is still running.

Mississippi State Extension's P3618 is a field guide with crude protein ranges and a preference class for common plants. Its authors (Hamrick, Strickland, and Demarais) say the list covers common selected forages in Mississippi and the Southeast and not every plant deer eat. They left out strawberry bush because deer prefer it so heavily that it is rare. The page prints a range, an average, and a preference class for each plant, compiled from published studies, and it does not say which season each value came from.

Set against Missouri's requirements, the averages sort into two groups. Ragweed, ticktrefoil, partridge pea, and pokeweed average 17.5 to 25.9 percent, inside or above the 14 to 22 percent lactation band and above the 16 percent antler figure. Greenbrier, blackberry, wild lettuce, and old-field aster average 11.3 to 13.2 percent, above the adult maintenance range and the 11 percent yearling figure but under the lactation minimum of 14. That comparison is ours, made across two publications, and neither one draws it. It suggests that a woods with only woody browse and acorns is a different property from one that also grows reachable forbs.

The four high-protein forbs are also the ones Missouri's early successional guide says ground-level disturbance promotes, along with asters. Mississippi State adds that ragweed and partridge pea seed persists in the soil and often germinates after prescribed fire or soil disturbance, and that ticktrefoil grows well after prescribed fire. Blackberry is a common early successional plant after timber harvest. Our early successional guide covers the pounds of forage and the cuts and burns that create it.

Missouri's Figure 5, printed in the PDF version of its nutrition guide, shades the seasons in which each food is available and prints its protein range.

Greenbrier's printed range reaches 35 percent in spring and summer, well above the lactation band, and falls to 5 to 12 percent in fall and winter, around the adult maintenance range. Sumac follows the same pattern. Missouri's text gives the reason: many native plants and browse species with high protein mature during spring and summer and become less palatable in fall and winter, and as summer goes on protein tends to fall while lignin rises. In fall and winter it names soft mast, acorns as a primary food, sumac, greenbrier, coralberry, clovers, and lespedezas. Acorns and corn are low in protein and high in energy, which makes them staples wherever they grow.

Because P3618 prints no season, read its averages as a ranking of plants against one another and use Missouri's chart for the calendar.

Mississippi State calls cool-season and warm-season plots a nutritional boost and one part of the diet puzzle, a supplement for winter and summer stress periods. It says active management of native vegetation is at least as important, may be more cost-effective than plot production, and that most of the diet is forbs and leafy browse. Missouri says cool-season plots of oats and winter wheat mixed with clovers and other legumes supply protein in winter, when protein foods are generally unavailable, and that food plots are not a replacement for natural food sources.

Figure 5 puts numbers on the plot foods too. Forage soybeans print at 25 to 35 percent protein in summer and fall. Red clover prints at 15 to 30 percent and ladino clover at 17 to 27 percent in spring and winter. Turnip tops print at 17 to 24 percent and roots at 12 to 15 percent in fall and winter, and corn at 5 to 8 percent.

The Tennessee fire trial in our early successional guide compared thinned and burned woods with warm-season food plots, and the Oak Fire Science brief reports that plots produced more available forage than every woods treatment except the retention cut with fire. The authors suggest plots as a way to buffer browsing pressure while the herd is reduced, not as a way to hold an artificially high herd. The brief's management line adds that if both the deer population and the forest are managed, food plots may not be necessary for appropriate forage availability.

Purdue says most grasses, apart from cereal grains such as wheat, have little nutritional value for deer and are rarely eaten, and Missouri says deer eat very little grass of any kind in summer. Native warm-season grasses earn their place as fawning and winter cover and as fire fuel. Missouri ranks mowing as the least desirable way to maintain early successional vegetation, because frequent mowing lays thatch on the seed bank and growing-season mowing destroys fawning cover, and its nutrition guide says to avoid mowing pastures during the peak fawning period of May 15 to July 1.

Invasive shrubs complicate the menu. Purdue Extension says bush honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and Japanese stiltgrass do not provide quality forage, and that deer eating them means too many deer, too little food, or both. Mississippi State lists a different plant, Japanese honeysuckle, at an average of 10.6 percent protein because deer use it, and labels it a nonnative invasive that often overwhelms and replaces native flora. Both statements can hold. In our reading, a honeysuckle thicket that has replaced ragweed, blackberry, and greenbrier is a nutrition loss, since the honeysuckle average sits below the lactation and antler figures.

Presence on a list is not preference either. Poison ivy appears among the plants Purdue says deer select, while Mississippi State rates its preference low to moderate.

Purdue says that once a young forest's canopy closes, forbs and brambles are shaded out and woody browse grows taller than deer can reach. Density then matters for whether the stems that do grow last. Missouri says that when an area holds more deer than the habitat can support, the quantity and nutritional quality of vegetation decrease over time, and the herd shows poor body condition, lower recruitment, and small-antlered bucks. The Georgia review adds that where deer are abundant, browsing pressure could keep plants from reestablishing after a burn. A stem at 19 percent protein that is browsed to a nub in June is not July forage. That is our reading of these sources and not a measurement.

Mississippi State's conclusion says learning these plants gives a starting point for monitoring deer use and relative browsing pressure, which indicate habitat conditions and population status. Purdue suggests the same thing, that looking for its listed species helps you gauge forage quality in woods and open areas.

Learn ten: ragweed, ticktrefoil, partridge pea, pokeweed, wild lettuce, asters, goldenrod, greenbrier, blackberry, and sumac. Walk the tract once each season, and for each plant write down whether it is present, whether deer can reach it, and how hard it has been used. An unbrowsed ragweed stand in July beside a herd you know is there is a different fact from stems bitten to clubs. The tally will not give you a lab number. It shows which season is empty.

Then read the gaps with this rule, which is ours: the sources support each piece and none of them tested the sequence. If the plants are missing, the fix is sunlight or disturbance. If they are present and bitten to nubs, the herd is ahead of the food. If summer is full and late winter has nothing green, that gap is the case for a supplement, and FDR's food plot design guide covers placement and sizing on a real parcel.

Opinion, kept apart from the citations: if the only green deer food on a tract in July is a plot, the herd is living on a supplement, and we would spend the next chainsaw day on sunlight before buying a different seed. That judgment follows from the distance between Missouri's requirement table and the closed-canopy forage figures in the early successional guide. No trial measured antlers on your ridge.