Dr. Grant Woods has spent his whole career working with deer. He grew up on a farm near Republic, Missouri, at a time when there were no deer in western Greene County. Today he runs GrowingDeer.tv and has spent more than 30 years helping landowners manage habitat across the whitetail range.

We sat down with Dr. Grant Woods in Missouri, about an hour from where he grew up. He covered how one of the first trail cameras shaped his scrape research, why eastern red cedar is one of the biggest problems on Ozark land, how fire and predator trapping work together, why he plants with a no-till drill, and why wild venison may be some of the healthiest meat you can put on the table.

The full episode and transcript are below. Here's what you need to know first.

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It started on his trap line in first grade. Grant found a female fawn that had been shot in the head and poached in one of his dad's fields, and he's been fascinated with deer ever since. There were no deer in his part of the county then, and he was 18 before he harvested his first one, a button buck.

His path wasn't a straight line. He failed out of Southwest Missouri State with a 0.67 GPA, went back, and finished with degrees in computers and biology. He volunteered one summer for the Bureau of Land Management in Elko, Nevada, for $25 a week, studying mule deer winter range. After a year as a COBOL programmer for Southwestern Bell in St. Louis, he wrote his two-week notice at noon on the day his old Nevada boss called, drove back out West, and later earned a master's degree studying scrape behavior. His advice to anyone in any profession: find an apprenticeship or internship and get your boots on the ground.

While Grant was a graduate student, he gave a talk on his scrape research at a Safari Club International banquet in Kansas City. Afterward, an infrared engineer pulled him aside and told him he had built a camera a deer would trip to take its own picture. A couple of weeks later, a box showed up in the mail. The company was TrailMaster. It used active infrared: a sender and a receiver, and when something broke the beam, the camera fired. Each roll of film had 36 pictures.

Grant presented the photos at the Southeast Deer Study Group, still the biggest meeting about whitetails. The pictures showed does and button bucks using scrapes all the time, which nobody knew back then. That work led to a PhD program through the University of Georgia, studying big rubs on a South Carolina plantation, until Hurricane Hugo broke the wind gauge at 176 miles per hour and leveled most of the forest. Out of 5,000 marked rubs, he could find about four. He shifted his research and finished at Clemson.

Grant reads the early explorers to find out. Henry Schoolcraft came through this area looking for lead mines when there were only trappers here, and his journal describes a multitude of bison, deer, and elk. Early explorers wrote that they could ride a horse through the Ozark timber without knocking their hat off.

The area was mainly oak savanna, with grassy balds on the hot south and southwest slopes where the afternoon sun kept trees from growing. Those grasses and forbs were incredible wildlife habitat. Then settlers fenced the land, stopped wildfire, and put cattle on it. Cattle don't eat cedars, and cedars handle drought, so cedars took over. Today they're mainly on those same south and southwest slopes.

They shade everything out, and their needles build a thick layer that nothing can grow up through. They also hold water. Where cedars grow, about 40% of the moisture that hits them goes into the tree or evaporates instead of soaking into the soil. Grant says that has changed our watersheds. The State of Oklahoma uses satellite imagery to estimate it loses an average of about 700 acres a day to cedar encroachment.

The NRCS offers cost-share money to restore native habitat in the Ozarks, and landowners can get a good amount of help to cut cedars and burn.

On Grant's place, they've felled hundreds of acres of cedar and burned it. State biologists, NRCS biologists, nonprofit wildlife biologists, and Grant have since identified 176 native species of grasses and forbs, and he didn't plant any of them. He calls it "dropping a match and letting new habitat hatch."

The catch: you have to open the canopy first. Burning under a closed-canopy hardwood forest doesn't do much. Savanna habitat also helps on the predator side, since raccoons don't thrive in it. For more on how fire suppression changed Ozark wildlife, read Smokey Bear, Bambi, and the end of the Bobwhite.

Grant disagrees with the idea that you can't trap your way out of bad habitat. Habitat is number one, but he thinks trapping is a closer number two than most podcasts say, and the best results come from doing both. His example: turkeys live by the tens of thousands in poultry houses. Put one raccoon in there for a night and hundreds could die.

When the two work together, Grant says you end up with a super population. Daniel Boone wrote that he never went a day crossing Kentucky without hearing turkeys gobble.

Grant says about 95% of seed corn in America is coated with a neonicotinoid insecticide. When you get free or dollar-a-bag corn that's purple, green, or orange, it's often because a big producer didn't want to pay the tipping fees to put it in a landfill. It can't be fed to cattle, and the first line on the federally mandated label says not to feed it to wildlife. Yet turkeys are out eating it the day after people broadcast it, and Grant has opened up turkey crops full of colored seed.

Neonics paralyze insects, and a fluttering, paralyzed bug is the easiest meal a poult can catch, so poults get a heavy dose. One theory, which Grant stresses is only a theory right now, is that neonics may be causing turkey eggs to go unfertilized. NWTF is sponsoring a new research project on it.

Grant's point on feeders: a lot of native plants test out at more than 20% crude protein, they're more drought-proof than anything you buy, and you don't have deer swapping saliva at a tube feeder. That spreads CWD and parasites like lungworm and gut worm.

A no-till drill makes a small slice in the ground and drops the seed in. When you plow or disk, you expose the soil to a huge amount of oxygen, and the organic matter breaks down fast. Disking also compacts the soil right below the blades into what's called a hard pan. Water and roots can't get through it, and the deep nutrients plants need are cut off.

Grant learned no-till from the late David Brandt, an Ohio farmer who switched to a no-till drill after coming home from Vietnam. Over his career, Brandt built about 20 inches of topsoil, and his farm is one of two places in America where the NRCS has reclassified the soil.

Grant says most cattle are given ivermectin or other parasite medicine, which makes their manure toxic to the insects that used to break it down. Several dung beetle species are now on the endangered species list. Dung beetles carry manure about 14 inches down to feed their young, leaving small holes that let water soak in and putting fertilizer right in the root zone. Without them, cow pies sit on top of the pasture for a year or two, and nothing grows under them.

It changed turkey scouting, too. Turkey hunters used to look for scratched-up cow pies to find where birds were feeding. Today you rarely see it. Regenerative farmers are bringing some of this back by moving cattle often, skipping the medicine, and following the herd a few days later with chickens to clean up the fly larvae.

Deer are selective feeders. They can't digest fescue, so a deer standing in a fescue pasture is eating the ragweed or clover. Grant once had a trail camera catch an old buck taking several big bites of Queen Anne's lace, an exotic weed he'd never heard of deer eating, right before velvet shed. He pulled leaves from the same patch and sent them to a lab. They were super high in calcium, which is exactly what a buck is pumping into his antlers at that time of year.

That's why he plants at least eight things in every food plot. The more diversity, the better for the soil and for the deer.

Grant is working with Dr. Stephan van Vliet of Utah State University, who studies human nutrition. The best meat van Vliet has tested so far is axis deer from Hawaii, living on native plants in the mountains. This fall, they are taking 20 deer from each of three kinds of land: Grant's study sites with no fertilizer or herbicide, Chris's place in South Carolina with a little herbicide and no fertilizer, and a client's property that uses everything. They'll test two ounces of loin and two ounces of liver from each deer for more than 500 nutritional compounds.

The research isn't done, and Grant is clear about that. But he hopes it encourages more people to manage native habitat and to harvest more does, since doe harvest is slacking in a lot of places with too many deer. He eats mostly venison, wild turkey, and white bass, and says his dietitian at the Mayo Clinic tells him every year that it's the best thing he can eat.

That was one of Grant's PhD prelim questions, and he thought it was meant to fail him. So he dug through archaeology records from Native American trash heaps, called middens, and found records of about 10,000 white-tailed deer pelvic girdles from Florida to North Dakota. You can sex and age a deer accurately from its pelvic girdle.

The rebuilt herd had an adult sex ratio of about 50/50. Hunters with primitive weapons harvested about 50% bucks and 50% does, and the average buck was 3 years old or older. Grant's takeaway is that the herd was healthy because the habitat was so healthy.

About 5% of Americans buy a hunting license, so Grant says hunting has to be fun and beneficial to last. Youth hunts are well-intentioned, but a 10-year-old can't go buy a bow and go hunting the next week on their own, and recruitment from those programs is low. The National Deer Association has found more success recruiting adults in their 20s who have a budget and can decide to go again next year.

Meat is a big draw. Grant calls it "fork to field": feed people a good meal first, explain the health benefits, then take them to the field, often starting with a crossbow because it's quiet, has little recoil, and is easy to teach safely. We ran the numbers on what each hunter is worth to conservation in How much $$$ is one hunter worth?

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This transcript is lightly edited for readability. Filler words and crosstalk have been trimmed.

Kyle Veit: Welcome back to the Ozark Podcast. We are here in the beautiful state of Missouri. I am joined by co-host of the show, Kyle Plunkett. How's it going, buddy?

Kyle Plunkett: Going good. Anytime we can get up to Missouri, I'm pretty happy.

Kyle Veit: Dude, the creeks you drive over, the rolling hills that we see here, it's a sight to see. We are up here to meet our special guest of this episode, and that is Dr. Grant Woods of GrowingDeer.tv. Grant, I want to hear where you're from and how you went the route of, you said you were a naturalist in Yellowstone. What did you study in school? I know obviously you have your PhD now. Let's just start from ground zero.

Dr. Grant Woods: I grew up 45 minutes to an hour from here, right on the edges of the plateau, not quite this deep, by a little town called Republic, Missouri. I was out in the country, raised on about a hundred acre farm. Typical farm back in the day: a two acre patch of milo, fence rows getting bigger, a little patch of corn, a little patch of watermelons. In hindsight, awesome wildlife habitat. Quail everywhere. I grew up quail and rabbit hunting, because there were no deer in the county. Western Greene County had no deer. I wish I could remember, but I heard at the barbershop or somewhere that they were gonna restock deer. And I was like, man, just to see a deer.

I remember it so clearly. I was in first grade and I was running my big trap line like a Yukon trapper. It was just box traps, little rabbit box traps out of scrap barnwood. I had to do my chores first in the winter. It used to be cold and snow back then. My dad hadn't left for work yet, and I found a female fawn in one of his little fields. Shot in the head. Been poached. And ever since that moment, I've just been fascinated with deer and really disliked lawbreakers, especially in relation to wildlife. I mean, passionately dislike them.

I'm 62, I don't mind saying. Boys my age wanted to be in the army or a policeman, all great professions. I just wanted to work with deer. Deer biologist just wasn't a word then.

Kyle Veit: Be outside, be around deer.

Dr. Grant Woods: Yeah. So all through high school I was that weirdo. "What are you gonna do when you grow up, Grant?" "I'm gonna work with deer." "No one works with deer." "Well, I'm gonna work with deer." And I promptly went to college up here at Springfield. It used to be called SMS. It was known as a teacher's college. I was the first guy in my family to go to college, so I just thought you went to college. I didn't know different colleges specialized in different things.

Typical story: little kid from a great family, country boy, probably a little overprotected, goes to the city and gets in trouble. I still have a great record. I made a 0.67 out of 4.0. I got kicked out of school, not put on probation. Thank goodness for tennis. I made a C in tennis. I just didn't show up to class. I will say, to be fair to myself, I've hunted all over and been very blessed, and the biggest turkey I've ever killed in my career was that spring. Also the first turkey I ever killed. And I caught more white bass that spring than I probably have in any 10 years since then.

Kyle Plunkett: That's hilarious. And you still ended up with a PhD, so I think you're doing okay.

Dr. Grant Woods: Good parents and God's blessing. Never give up on your kids. So I stumbled through undergrad somehow. My roommate, Terry Patterson, was a football player, a defensive back, and he would go to football study halls six nights a week. So after I failed out of school, I'd go to football study hall. I was the smallest guy in football study hall. We had one night off, and I didn't hunt quite as much. And if you try at school, it's easy. I made great grades from then on.

I'd heard about these things called computers, and Terry was gonna take a computer class. I said, you know, everybody needs to know a little bit about computers. Well, I have a real logic brain, so it was an easy A. And I've been married to the same woman for decades, folks, so this is not teasing or anything, but literally there were girls on that side of campus, the business school. In the biology building back then, there weren't many girls. A bunch of dudes. So I said, "Hey, I'll take another class with you." I ended up getting a degree in computers and in biology. Zoology was the wildlife degree there.

While I was doing that, I worked in Elko, Nevada, for the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management. I volunteered one summer for $25 a week. That covered your meals, laundry, gas, everything. And I was blessed to have two great bosses, a fisheries biologist and a wildlife biologist, good men and good biologists. They took me from that academic point of view to boots on the ground, which has held with me till today. We were out in the mountains studying mule deer winter range in the summer. How much food is there? How do we set hunting seasons based on the amount of food? Real, tangible work, which I was just fascinated with.

Kyle Veit: I have to think that sticks with you so much more than just reading something in a book. Actually going out into the field, applying it, looking at it, touching it, feeling it. It has to stick with you so much more.

Dr. Grant Woods: I would tell everyone, whatever profession you're in, bricklayer, truck driver, biologist, doctor: apprenticeship, internship, whatever. Get in there. We offer internships. No money in it. It just costs us money. But that's how much it impacted my life. We have a new young man from New York starting now. He'll be here for a year. Matthew. I hope he makes it, 'cause not all interns do. So Matthew, work hard. You've got work to do.

So I got back, and there were no jobs. Not being political, but Carter was president, interest rates were 18%, and wildlife is a discretionary income field still today. I was a really good computer programmer. I sent out one resume to Southwestern Bell, before AT&T bought all the regional Bells, and got a job like that. COBOL programmer. Moved to downtown St. Louis. I had to wear a tie every day, and I didn't even know how to dress. That's how country I was. I rode a van pool. I lived out at Creve Coeur Lake, for you St. Louis people, 'cause they had a bow range and I could fish. I'm like, my gosh, who would live any closer to St. Louis than that? It was 45 minutes away.

Kyle Veit: Just so you could be out there doing that stuff on weekends.

Dr. Grant Woods: Yeah. Shooting my recurve bow and fishing with my Zebco fishing rod, probably. I'd been there about a year. Hadn't taken any vacation. Very good worker, conservative guy. My boss from Nevada and I stayed in touch, and he called me up early one morning, his time, just kind of joking. He said, "Why don't you quit that high paying job, come back out here, and have some fun?" At noon I wrote out my two-week notice on the old green and white computer paper and walked out the front door without telling anyone, 'cause I had two weeks of vacation. That was my two-week notice.

I loaded up my Datsun pickup, for those old enough to remember. Little five speed, four cylinder Datsun, the precursor to Nissan. I put my best fly rod, my Black Widow recurve bow, my Coleman camp stove, and my sleeping bag in my truck, and called my parents and told them I'd quit my job, which they thought was crazy. Of course. And I drove to Nevada, knocked on the door, and said, "I sure hope you've got that job you talked about." Folks, don't be scared. Take a chance and follow your passion. Seriously.

So they gave me a summer job for half the summer and said, "Hey, Grant, we have no budget for this. We just kind of squeezed you in. You've gotta get a job, son." In that day, and probably still today, if you've got nothing to do, you either go to grad school or become a real estate agent. Well, I didn't wanna be a real estate agent, so I started calling around. It was mid-summer, and everyone had given all their scholarships away. I called back to the school I went to, and they said, "We've got nothing in biology, but we need computer teachers, and you've got a year of real world experience." That was big back then. So I taught computers to pay my way through my master's, and I did it on scrape behavior about 20 miles this way.

I shared off camera a little earlier that I was speaking in Kansas City. Safari Club International called the school and said, "Hey, you got anyone? We have a national banquet. We just need someone to talk about wildlife for 15, 20 minutes." The only kid they had doing anything on game animals was Grant, working on scrape behavior. "Send him up." I had a chunky little $2,000 camcorder, as they called them back in the day. It was horrible. And a battery about the size of a Caterpillar battery.

Kyle Veit: Would it last you like 30 minutes?

Dr. Grant Woods: Probably. You'd get a sweat up going out there. I didn't have enough money in the budget for stands, so I'd just climb trees and sit on limbs. No safety harness or anything. God's with me, 'cause I should be dead. I'd filmed some deer using scrapes, and I don't know if anyone had ever filmed deer using scrapes at that time. Some shop in town helped us convert those to still images, 'cause all we had was 35 millimeter slides. No PowerPoint.

I went up there and gave my presentation. Everyone was really fancy dressed. I'm still indebted to Safari Club International, but that wasn't my crowd. They all killed elephants and all this stuff. I'm killing button bucks. I sat down, just nervous, and a 10 or 11-year-old kid comes up and says, "My dad wants to talk to you in the hallway." Oh man, I've boogered this up. I've offended someone. I go out there and the guy says, "Hey, I like your presentation. Your technique's kind of crude, but I like it. By the way, I'm a big hunter, and I'm an infrared engineer." I didn't know what that meant. "And I've come up with this camera that a deer will trip and take a picture of itself, if everything works right." Well, that's the first trail camera.

I could hardly believe it. It'd be like someone telling me, "Grant, you're flying to Jupiter." I gave him my address, and a couple weeks later I got a box in the mail and opened it up. Oh my gosh. A little note: "Call me when you get this." That company was called TrailMaster, and it was active infrared. There was a sender and a receiver. And you had a 36 picture roll of film. You didn't waste any.

Kyle Veit: When you say active, a receiver and a sender, that's like a garage door, where you have a laser going across and it bounces back?

Dr. Grant Woods: Exactly. If something broke that beam, it would take a picture. You could adjust the sensitivity a little bit. Not much.

Kyle Plunkett: So you'd set something on one end and then have the camera on the other point, pointed at it?

Dr. Grant Woods: Right. And you're out in the woods. Trees are never level. It was so crude, but it was state of the art.

Kyle Veit: That's the first one ever.

Dr. Grant Woods: The first one that we know of, or that people around me know of. Actually, a guy from Europe just called me. He's writing a book about trail cameras, and he gives us credit for being the first, too. So I did good research and got my thesis published. The big meeting in the deer world is called the Southeast Deer Study Group, and it's still today the biggest meeting about white-tailed deer, period. People from outside the Southeast come to it. It's the meeting. And I'm so nervous. A little pointy-headed graduate student from a nothing school, with Texas A&M, the University of Georgia, and Mississippi State there, the powerhouse wildlife schools. But I had these slides that no one had ever seen. Turns out does use scrapes, and bucks and button bucks use 'em all the time. All this stuff we tape for you guys now. But no one knew that back then.

So it was a big time publication. Not boasting. It was the technology, not me. And to tell you how much I'm not boasting, I started getting offers to go on for my PhD.

Kyle Veit: Man, I'm good. I'm a big shot now.

Dr. Grant Woods: They didn't want me. They just wanted those trail cameras, 'cause you couldn't buy 'em. I had six of 'em. They just wanted the six I had. They didn't care anything about me. I got selected and went to the University of Georgia. I already had a master's, but it was a PhD track program, so I could use those cameras longer. I was doing my research on a plantation in South Carolina on rub behavior. Great big rubs. We didn't call it a rub unless you could climb it with a tree stand. I didn't know it at that time, but that was due to a really aggressive doe harvest. It was one of the first quality deer management programs in that part of the South, shooting a lot of does and letting bucks get older. So of course you get bigger rubs. We didn't know why at the time. We just thought, oh my gosh, these deer are Frankenstein. They rub big trees here.

The research was going great, just slamming it, and then Hurricane Hugo was this storm out in the ocean somewhere. I'm from Missouri. Then it's getting a little closer, like it's gonna come in at Charleston, and I'm 17 miles out of Charleston, right up the river on this plantation. So I go to the plantation manager, who wasn't that much older than me, and say, "Hey man, you think I should leave and go back to the university?" "Nah, it'll be like a bad thunderstorm." I don't know if you remember Hurricane Hugo, but it broke our wind gauge at 176 miles an hour and leveled most of the forest. I could barely find my cameras. Of the 5,000 rubs I had marked and was studying and following, I found like four.

So right in the middle of my program, I had to shift. Joe Hamilton, still buddies, was a wildlife biologist for the state of South Carolina. Great guy, way ahead of his time. He started the Quality Deer Management Association, now known as the National Deer Association. Very artsy guy, very poetic guy. He was working on another plantation and said, "Hey, you can just shift your work over here." And that plantation, by the way, is where the movie Forrest Gump was filmed, or a big part of it. That oak tree, the old house.

Kyle Plunkett: Oh yeah.

Dr. Grant Woods: I was there when they were filming that. I'm really mad at them, 'cause I had this great big buck. We called it the Magnolia Buck. Deer don't rub on magnolia trees a lot, but this buck rubbed on magnolia trees, and when I'd find a magnolia rubbed, I knew it was that buck. I'd published in a deer magazine about this buck, 'cause it had pictures and all this stuff. And one of the set guys, coming in early in the morning to get the set ready, ran over that buck. Joe literally dug a hole and buried that buck. I was back at campus by then, with a copy of the most recent deer magazine that had his pictures in it.

Kyle Plunkett: So the Magnolia Buck is buried on the Forrest Gump set?

Dr. Grant Woods: Yep. Somewhere. And that house in the movie, they built it just for the movie and then tore it down and re-sowed the yard.

Kyle Plunkett: Really?

Dr. Grant Woods: There were air conditioners about the size of a vehicle out back. It was just a facade, just for the movie. The only rooms finished were the ones they filmed in. And that log they're sitting on, fishing at the end? I've sat on that log many times. Before the movie.

Kyle Veit: That's pretty cool.

Dr. Grant Woods: Anyway, I had to transfer due to the hurricane, to Clemson. Dr. Larry Marchinton was my professor at Georgia, and he stayed on my committee at Clemson. They gave me a long leash, 'cause we were doing cutting edge stuff, and that's where I really spread my wings. And here's a little story for you. Am I okay? 'Cause I'm just rolling here.

Kyle Veit: You're great, man. This is good.

Dr. Grant Woods: This is just a lesson for y'all. Just live life right. I'm serious. I was that good student. We used to have to pay a nickel for copies. You'd put a nickel in a little basket by the copy machine in the secretary's office. If she was gone, a lot of people made copies for free. I didn't. And the secretary liked me. So when little timber companies called in with a project that wasn't big enough for the professors to work on, she'd say, "Hey, we've got this PhD student who might be able to help you." That's kind of how I started consulting. Some lucky breaks, blessings along the way, a lot of cool stuff. By the time I graduated, I had a pretty good client list. And I said, man, I'm having fun. I'm doing hands-on work just like in Nevada, boots on the ground, helping landowners all throughout the whitetail range. I've been to New Zealand. I've been in Canada. Daniel was just in Canada working. Do I wanna sit in a classroom, or do I wanna go do this? There was no master plan. Everyone thinks, boy, Grant had a master plan. I was just following my passion.

Kyle Veit: Just doing what you wanted to do at the time.

Dr. Grant Woods: Just following my passion. And I think there's a lot to that. As long as your passion's not something illegal, following your passion can take you a long ways. Through all that process and the hundreds of landowners I've been so blessed to work with, I've failed so many times. I tell people now, I'm sure I've made every mistake a minimum of five times, some 10 or 20. Hopefully I'm out of mistakes now when I come to lay out your property or recommend timber stand improvement or whatever we're doing. I'm probably getting pretty close to not having that many more big mistakes.

Kyle Veit: So you're pretty dialed in now. You've spent the time, you've put in the boots on the ground work, you've done the research, and you've really put together this holistic picture of what you've seen work and what you've observed. Is that kind of how you came to the philosophy? I'm trying to connect it back to where we started, on soil. Is that the journey you took there?

Dr. Grant Woods: Yeah, a long journey. I've bought, and had other people buy, I'm sure thousands of tons of fertilizer and lime and all that stuff. And I wanna say this right now: I owe such a debt to the people that allowed me to help them, 'cause I learned so much from them. I don't need to brown nose anyone. I'll just tell you that. They'd say, "Grant, I wanna do my own thing on this food plot," and we'd try it, and we'd fail. We just learned so much through that trial and error that you can't do in any university setting. We were working north to south, and no graduate student is blessed to have that budget or freedom. They've gotta stick with their study design, which they should. We're gonna state a hypothesis, state how we're gonna test it, test it with the appropriate test, and publish our results with no bias. That's how it should work. With landowners, you're like, "Wonder what happens if we try four times more seed than we should?"

Kyle Veit: Let's throw some money at this thing and see what happens. So now when you think about the Ozarks and applying everything you've learned here, how do you consider our habitat when you go into a new property that's mostly been left alone, left up to nature? And when I say left up to nature, I know certain invasives have probably been introduced and taken over. How do you see the Ozarks as a whole, and then break apart the strategy for how to manage it?

Dr. Grant Woods: I'm gonna flip that just a little bit. I'm a big reader, and one of the things I love to read is the early explorers. Everyone thinks of Lewis and Clark, and that's certainly valid. Daniel Boone, that's awesome. He spelled like I do. He wrote a lot, but he didn't spell too good. But there was an explorer right here, 20 miles this way on Beaver Creek, a guy named Schoolcraft. He was looking for lead mines when there were just trappers in this area, and he kept a journal like Lewis and Clark. It's not as well known. It's shorter. I've been reading those and I'm fascinated by 'em, because they give us an accurate view of what our habitat looked like.

And I've been through these cycles. I just donated a whole bunch of college textbooks, but I've still got a few about soil science and pH and adding fertilizer and balancing all these issues. And Schoolcraft talks about a multitude of bison and deer and elk right here. Just right over here. Some of these explorers talk about how they loved it 'cause they could ride their horse through the timber in the Ozarks and never knock their hat off their head. You almost can't do that anywhere now. Go down to the Buffalo River wilderness area. Can you ride a horse anywhere there, with trees every two feet? When you guys drove up here, there were cedar trees all over the highway.

Kyle Veit: We were just baiting a bear the other day, going through the trails, and all the trees are overgrown. It literally knocked my hat off, and I was like, what the heck?

Dr. Grant Woods: That's a great example. This area was mainly oak savannas or balds. You've heard of the Bald Knobbers, a group of vigilantes based out of the Branson area here. Bad guys back in Civil War days. They were named for the balds, 'cause they met on these grassy south and southwest slopes that were nothing but grass. Bald. Those are the hottest parts, where the sun really bakes down in the afternoon, so trees didn't grow. Those are all grasses and forbs, incredible wildlife habitat.

European settlers got here, and of course they're gonna fence that off, try to stop wildfire, and put their cows on there, and that all seeded in. If you see cedars now, they're mainly on the south and southwest facing slopes. Cedars are drought hardy, and cattle don't eat cedars, so they selected for cedars, and that's a huge issue. The NRCS is doing a great job giving out cost share to restore native habitat in the Ozarks area, and landowners can get quite a bit of money to fell all those cedars and burn. On my place, we have felled hundreds of acres of cedars and burned, and state biologists, NRCS biologists, biologists from nonprofit wildlife groups, and myself have identified 176 native species of grasses and forbs. I didn't plant any of 'em.

Kyle Plunkett: They're all coming up since you got rid of the cedars? From the seed bank in the soil?

Dr. Grant Woods: I got rid of the cedars and introduced a lot of fire. I mean, a lot of fire. I've had fire departments from many places respond to fires here. None of 'em ever got out. No one's ever gotten hurt. But you know, you've gotta cook one every now and then.

Kyle Veit: They're like, oh, Grant's burning again up there. We gotta go check 'em out.

Dr. Grant Woods: The sheriff's office calls us all the time. I call that dropping a match and letting new habitat hatch. But you've gotta open up that canopy. Burning under a closed canopy hardwood forest doesn't do anything.

Kyle Plunkett: It just removes a little leaf litter. I wanna talk burn strategy and some of the how-to stuff. But my dad was talking about this maybe a year ago, and he's followed your channel forever. I remember when we first started doing food plots on our little property in Arkansas, thinking, how are we gonna do this? We've never done this before. And he's like, "Well, I've got this YouTube channel." This was when YouTube was starting to get really cool. Anyway, long story to say: cedars. You can correct me, 'cause you'll know. Don't they produce something in the soil that messes up the microbes and the microbiome and kills other plants around them? Or is it just that they grow so dense they shade them out?

Dr. Grant Woods: They shade them out, and their needles make a thick carpet so nothing can grow up under 'em. So they're just terrible. A couple other negatives of cedars: on average, 40% of the moisture that hits a cedar goes into the cedar or evaporates off. It's literally changed our watersheds.

Kyle Plunkett: Cedar trees have changed the watershed.

Dr. Grant Woods: Yeah. Because 40% of the water that used to percolate through the soil is now staying in a cedar tree or evaporating back into the air.

Kyle Veit: That's a big number.

Dr. Grant Woods: Huge. Now, that's where there's cedars. It's not 40% everywhere. My yard isn't 40%. The State of Oklahoma publishes that, statewide, they lose an average of about 700 acres a day to cedar. This is based on satellite images. You don't see 700 acres in one place, but just watching cedar encroachment, with a really sophisticated analysis, they think they're losing an average of 700 acres a day, year round, to cedars.

Kyle Veit: No way.

Dr. Grant Woods: So it's a massive issue, folks. I believe we are doing a horrible job of managing the habitat we have, and the best plan we can have is to restore native habitat. When we read these early explorers, they're seeing way more critters, way more abundant critters, than anyone sees now. And everyone says, yeah, there wasn't any development then. Well, I'm managing a relatively small place compared to Stone and Taney County, and I've made a difference on deer size and turkey numbers. We have an awesome amount of turkeys. In savanna habitat, raccoons don't thrive, so you reduce those nest predators just by managing for savanna habitat. I love turkeys, so I manage for savannas, and we trap every legal day we can.

Kyle Veit: I was gonna ask you about trapping and how much you put an emphasis on that, because I've heard a lot of people say that habitat is so important that you don't really need to focus on predators. Basically saying you can't trap your way out of a bad habitat.

Dr. Grant Woods: I totally disagree. I've had clients north, south, east, and west. Some clients don't do the habitat so much, but they trap with super intensity. Some states allow year-round trapping, and you would love to turkey hunt there. The best is both, and habitat is super important. But let's look at it this way. Turkeys live in poultry houses by the tens of thousands. A few die. You put a coon in there one night. How many do you think would die?

Kyle Veit: A lot. 10, 20, 30?

Dr. Grant Woods: Hundreds. Because they're flying into the windows, getting away from it, all this stuff.

Earlier today I read, and we published this several years ago, about neonics. About 95% of seed corn in America has this really wicked insecticide on the coating. I'm not picking on anyone from NWTF or NDA or any of the other great nonprofits out there. I'm a Silver life member of NWTF, and I'm member number 18 of QDMA, now NDA, so I can speak. 'Cause I'm a brother.

Kyle Veit: You're in the family.

Dr. Grant Woods: When you get free corn or dollar-a-bag corn that's purple or green or whatever, the reason you got it is that a big corn producer didn't wanna pay the tipping fees to have it put in a landfill. It's cheaper to give it away. That coating is so toxic they can't just dump it out. It can't be used for cattle feed or anything like that. And the first line, the federally mandated line on that label, says "Danger: do not feed to wildlife." I have pictures of it. Yet most people that get it are broadcasting it, and the turkeys are out there the next day. "Oh, they're eating all my seed up." NWTF just came out today. They're sponsoring a new research project on this. I got a lot of heck when I first published this a few years ago. You can check the channel. We published that neonics are bad. When you're killing turkeys and you open up the crop and it's full of green or orange or purple seed, that's poison they're ingesting.

Kyle Veit: Oh man.

Dr. Grant Woods: A lot of it. A neonic is a neonicotinoid. We used nicotine to dart deer way back in the day, and nicotine is so cruel. We didn't know any better. It just paralyzes you. The deer's eyeballs are looking at you, but it's paralyzed. So it paralyzes these little insects. Well, your little poults run around eating insects, and an insect that's gotten a big enough dose of a neonic is kind of fluttering on the ground. That's like wiggling a June bug in front of a bluegill. What do you think that poult's doing? They live off insects, and those are the easiest ones to catch. So they're getting a super dose.

And they just studied this. People say, "These old gobblers and young gobblers are infertile." I never met many teenagers that were infertile. We've got super high pregnancy rates. So I'm just being honest here: that theory doesn't hold any water whatsoever, at least not totally. But it turns out neonics may be causing these eggs not to be fertilized.

Kyle Veit: Interesting.

Dr. Grant Woods: It's just a theory right now. Let me say that so clearly. But gosh, there are better insecticides. There's a better way to do this. It's just like people thought planting fescue in the Ozarks was good. What a catastrophic event. Everyone says we have no quail anymore. I grew up with quail. Well, a baby quail is about the size of a bumblebee. It can't walk through a fescue field. It's dead on sight. Too thick. Little turkey poults have a hard time going through all that stuff, too.

Kyle Veit: So talking about turkeys, trapping, and insecticides here with neonics, maybe break down some of your other broader philosophies. How do you approach management on land? You talked a little bit about fire. How much do you focus on trapping, burning, letting the sunlight come through, TSI, all the stuff I know you focus on?

Dr. Grant Woods: I would agree with the mass of podcasts out there that say habitat's number one. I disagree on trapping. It's a closer number two than a lot of people say. You can make a difference trapping. Again, I have the advantage of doing this. We've been incorporated 33 years, with all these clients all throughout the range. I've walked these properties, and I've been blessed to turkey hunt on these properties. Those people will remain nameless for obvious reasons, but it works, period. If you combine habitat work and trapping like we have here, you end up with a super population. And it's fun. I like standing on the ground here and hearing 20 turkeys gobble. I don't mind that one bit.

Kyle Veit: I would love that.

Dr. Grant Woods: We have roughly 900 acres we're working with now, 870-something, and we moved 139 nest predators last year. Coons, possums, skunks. That might not sound like a lot. What you don't know is we moved 115 the year before. So I do agree with everyone that says trapping is hard work, and you have to do it every year, because juvenile males are gonna move in. You create a vacuum. Deer are not territorial. Scrapes and rubs don't mark territory. They don't do that at all. But almost all predator species are extremely territorial. When you see coyote poop on the road, they're probably marking the boundary of their territory. Coons, the same way. So you create a void, and they move in.

We lobbied hard to get MDC, the Missouri Department of Conservation, to extend the trapping season closer to nesting season, 'cause those are the most important nest predators you can take off. Will we ever be at a hundred percent? No. The federally protected birds, hawks and owls, take their share. Crows take their share. Snakes. I read a paper recently, done in South Missouri, finding there are more rat snakes, the big black snakes, now than they've ever recorded, 'cause we don't manage the habitat like we used to. We don't rip a fire through all the time, stuff like that. So there are a lot of things that want a turkey sandwich or a turkey egg. Can we make improvements? Unequivocally. Will it be perfect? No, I doubt it. Daniel Boone wrote in his journal that when he went across Kentucky, there was never a day he didn't hear turkeys gobbling.

Kyle Veit: Wow.

Dr. Grant Woods: How many people have a season where they go, "Boy, I didn't hear any turkeys gobble all season long"? Daniel heard 'em all year round. So: savanna habitats and a lot of fire. If you own land, or you're a state agency or federal agency managing for wildlife, I think we should focus on replicating the habitat that was here pre-settlement. And how do we know what that was? There's no Google Earth from back then. There are these people that wrote these books. I think that's the best we can go on, and I think they're pretty accurate.

Kyle Plunkett: How quickly have you seen some of the improvements happening on properties, from the start date to when you're getting reports back going, "This is working"? I'm talking deer, turkey, quail, bear, whatever people may be going for.

Dr. Grant Woods: Heaven forbid we do bear. They're just big, nasty raccoons. Teasing. My buddies are bear hunters. We have a property right now in South Carolina that's been on our show a lot. The guy bought 500 acres. It was a gnarly pine stand and some weeded up ag fields. There was not much redeeming about it, to tell the truth. He'd never owned property before. He wanted one place for him and his family to hunt. They'd been on some leases. It's highly eroded red clay. There's nothing that even resembles black dirt. Just solid red clay. We're almost three years into it. If he doesn't kill a big buck this year, I'll be shocked. And turkeys: Daniel and I were not really turkey hunting. We were working, with a shotgun thrown in the buggy, and heck, I don't know, we saw 50 turkeys that day. Not really trying to hunt, although it's awful tempting for me. I'm supposed to be focused on writing my notes here, and it's, "Was that a gobble I heard over there?"

Kyle Plunkett: Write it right into the contract. Part of the management fee is we get to take a turkey as we're working.

Dr. Grant Woods: George has been on our show a lot, too. George is down in Texas. His dad had planted 2,800 acres in pines, so it was closed canopy before we got there. I said, "George, we've gotta cut a bunch of trees. We need to make a bunch of food plots." It was a pretty big project. He'd always disked. He had like five disks sitting out there in what we called the boneyard. I got George to try our process. We call it the Release Process, releasing creation's potential. We thinned the timber and did a lot of burning. If George doesn't kill a 180 this year, I'll be shocked. They used to kill 180s before his dad planted all this land, and it's been closed canopy forever. They were just disgusted and about to give up hunting. And now they're in the game. And this is Texas. George is so much in the game that he says he's not putting out any more protein feeders.

Kyle Veit: Hmm.

Dr. Grant Woods: Because you don't need to. There's just that much food on the ground. A lot of native plants test out at more than 20% crude protein. Why would you pay someone else? Think about that. They harvest it, sell it, someone buys it, probably modifies it, puts it in a pellet, bags it, ships it. That's wholesale, then it gets retail. Or you can just grow it by dropping some matches and killing some trees. And it's more drought proof.

Kyle Plunkett: It's native.

Dr. Grant Woods: Yeah. And you don't have a bunch of deer licking out of a little tube feeder. Not just CWD. There's lungworm, gut worm, a lot of parasites. We don't know each other that well. If I licked my Andes mint ice cream and passed you the spoon, you probably wouldn't wanna lick on it. Well, we want our wildlife doing that?

Kyle Veit: It's just a congregation of saliva and an opportunity for disease to spread.

Dr. Grant Woods: Of a lot of diseases.

Kyle Veit: I was gonna ask you about the no-till drill you mentioned earlier, and why you go that route versus a plow. Even a couple years ago, with all the resources out there, sometimes you just miss something. We did a food plot, plowed it up, turned up the soil, and planted it. But having watched your channel and learned a little more, I realize there's a different way. Why do you go the no-till drill route?

Dr. Grant Woods: Again, God never disked the land, right? The buffalo went over it, or elk, whatever, and maybe turned it a little bit with their hooves, half an inch deep. Killed some plants. Compaction, trampling. A no-till drill allows you to just make a little slice in the ground and drop a seed in. When you plow, disk, cultivate, all these names out there, you expose that soil to a huge amount of oxygen from the atmosphere. Pre-settlement, the only air getting down there was going down a wormhole. Did y'all know the earthworms were imported? They weren't here originally.

Kyle Veit: No, I did not know that.

Dr. Grant Woods: You've gotta read more. And dung beetles. Dung beetles are almost extinct throughout much of North America. We had all these species of dung beetles, just like you see on Nat Geo in Africa. And it's so cool. They're the perfect aerator. They go down about 14 inches and carry dung down there to feed their young. They leave a little hole, a little smaller than a pencil, so water can infiltrate, with no compaction, no tractor running over anything. And they're putting fertilizer right in the root zone. It's like God created the perfect fertilizer system: "Y'all don't do anything. Just sleep, 'cause I've got it taken care of."

Well, now we have earthworms. Most species are awesome. They go forward and something comes out the back end. But they don't eat green vegetation. If you disk and oxidize all that, it goes away real quick. If you just let it decompose slowly on top of the soil, it's different. Now check this out. This is so fascinating to me. I learned this from David Brandt, a brilliant farmer in Ohio. He just passed away, unfortunately, in a car accident. He came home from Vietnam, couldn't afford the diesel to plow, sold all their implements, and bought a no-till drill. Over 30-plus years of a brilliant career, he just mastered it. A lot of mistakes along the way. A world leader. People from all over the world toured his place.

Folks, let me use this to explain how quickly and how much difference you can make. He's one of two places in America where the NRCS has come in and reclassified the soil on his side of the fence. In his career, he built about 20 inches of topsoil.

Kyle Veit: Holy cow.

Dr. Grant Woods: Which all my professors said can't happen. A thousand years for an inch, and he did it in 20 to 30 years. And by the way, a ton of topsoil per acre is about the thickness of a piece of typing paper.

Kyle Veit: Oh, wow.

Dr. Grant Woods: So when you see dirt blowing across the road when someone's disking on a windy day, and you've probably seen this, dust blowing behind the tractor, there's tons leaving that field. And that light stuff is your best soil. You're also compacting soil. When that disk goes over, it fluffs up the top four, five, six inches, however you've got it set. But right below that, physics: the tractor is a heavy, vibrating, perfect compactor going forward, and it transfers some of its weight to the disks while it's pulling. And that's on narrow disks, a quarter inch or an eighth inch thick. That's compacting the soil and creating what we call a hard pan.

For you doubters, you can test it easy. Get a half-inch rod, a piece of rebar, something that's not hollow, maybe a fiberglass electric fence pole, and just push it down into the soil. It goes in easy, and then all of a sudden it just stops. That's the hard pan. Water's not going through it. Plant roots aren't going through it. Those deep soil nutrients that plants need, they're not getting access to them. That creates J-rooting, and I've shown that on my own food plots. You pull a plant up, and the root goes down two, three, four inches and goes sideways, 'cause it hit the hard pan and can't go through it. Or if you're in duck country and you drive by a rice field that's been harvested and isn't flooded, there's water ponding out there 'cause it can't infiltrate. So the farmer has to irrigate the next year. We can get out of this.

And by the way, for the turkey hunters out there. I'm rambling, I'm so sorry. You don't know how passionate I am about helping people.

Kyle Veit: Oh, this is so fascinating. You have no idea.

Dr. Grant Woods: Most of y'all have never seen a dung beetle. When I grew up turkey hunting, some farmer would be feeding his cows, maybe a little corn in the mix, and if you had permission, you'd find the cow pies scratched up. Recently, turkeys are using this field. Man, I'm hunting here. You almost never see that anymore. I challenge anyone out there: you rarely see where turkeys are scratching cow pies.

Kyle Veit: Why did the dung beetle disappear?

Dr. Grant Woods: Because every cow out there has got ivermectin or some parasite medicine going in it, and that comes out in a toxic poop pile, and the critters that used to break it down are dead. A lot of dung beetles are on the endangered species list in America because of that. You've seen cow pies out in the pasture you could throw like a Frisbee, just oxidized. That never used to happen. Three, four, five, six days later, it would be gone. Flies, maggots, worms, dung beetles turned it into fertilizer.

Kyle Veit: Just completely absorbed into the soil.

Dr. Grant Woods: Yeah. Now it's a toxic waste site on top of the soil. You pick 'em up and throw 'em like a Frisbee. And for the cow guy, because it's laying there for a year or two, it's not growing any grass. Got 80 cows pooping over an acre? Think how much grass you're losing.

Kyle Plunkett: I had no idea, A, that we had dung beetles, or B, that cow poop used to actually just go away. I grew up around enough cows on my grandparents' property that I just assumed. And I used to hate it, 'cause my four wheeler would get covered in cow poop. You'd drive over what you thought was dry, but the bottom was wet, and it'd get thrown up all over you. I just figured that's how it always had been.

Dr. Grant Woods: And turkeys scratched that stuff up to get the maggots, or whatever corn didn't get processed through the cow. That was a big thing, scouting for turkeys that way. That was widely known.

Kyle Plunkett: So could you put cows on a property and not give them medicine, and go backwards in time and keep rebuilding?

Dr. Grant Woods: People do that. Those are regenerative ag farmers. We were just talking about this. What you're doing is moving the cows, maybe multiple times a day, so they're not just in one spot. Like buffalo. They're just replicating the buffalo. Again, we're just learning from the past. And then the smarter farmers follow the cattle about three days later with a chicken wagon. The chickens act like the old migratory birds. They scratch, and by about three days, the larvae, the maggots, can I say maggots, are big enough for the chickens to eat. You're feeding your chickens protein, the chicken turns it into something really good coming out the other end, and you're cleaning up all the flies. Chickens are extremely effective at turning waste into something we want to eat.

And those pasture raised eggs with no medicine in them are high dollar eggs. So the farmer is selling regen ag, grass fed, grass finished beef, not by the pound but at a super high dollar, because there's a limited supply. And then he's selling pasture raised eggs. He's not using any insecticide, so he's saving money there. He's not planting anything, 'cause if the cattle are grazed right, the good native plants will grow back up: switchgrass, buffalo grass, gamagrass, all these cool things.

We're doing a project here. Here's a spoiler for you.

Kyle Veit: Here we go. We like this.

Dr. Grant Woods: I'm not gonna tell you the result, 'cause I don't know it yet. We're working with Dr. Stephan van Vliet. The guy's so smart. I'm just a lowly deer biologist, and this guy's wicked smart. He used to be at a big East Coast school, and Utah State got him out there. He's one of the world's leading human health and nutrition guys, and he studies what we eat. It's widely known that wild caught salmon have the best ratio of omega-3s and all this stuff. People can live off wild caught salmon. It's just super healthy. He's tested a lot of that, and it's good. But the best meat he's ever tested is axis deer from Hawaii.

Now, there were no deer on Hawaii. God made it a bird sanctuary. The only mammal species was a bat until man started moving stuff there. Someone put some axis deer out there long ago to hunt, or whatever they were doing. It's done a lot of damage, 'cause that habitat wasn't made for deer. But he tested some that are living on native plants in the mountains of Hawaii, and it's the highest quality meat he's ever tested. Because think about it: a deer eats a little bit of this, a little bit of this. Not in Iowa, where they eat soybeans or starve, because there's no native vegetation in most of Iowa.

A mutual friend introduced us, and I talked to him. There's a graph in a lot of nutrition textbooks where you look at the width and length of the muzzle, and it kind of tells you how selective a feeder an animal is. A big elk or a buffalo or a cow: "Just give me more. Give me grass. I'll turn it into meat." Deer don't digest grass. They don't have the right microbes in their gut. You see a deer out in a fescue pasture, they're eating a ragweed or a clover. They're not eating fescue. They can't digest it. That's a tough one to get people to believe. "Well, I see deer out behind my house all the time." You might see me drive by a place that serves snails, but that doesn't mean I'm eating those rascals.

So we're doing a project this fall. We're taking deer from three of my study sites here, the pure gold standard, with no fertilizer, no herbicide, nothing like that. From Chris's place in South Carolina, which is just getting started. He still uses a little weed juice, a little herbicide, but no fertilizer. And then from one of my clients where, if it's in a jug, they put it on the land. And we're gonna test the quality of that meat from a human consumption point of view. We're all taking 20 deer. Two ounces of loin and two ounces of liver. They test for over 500 nutritional qualities in that meat.

Kyle Veit: Really?

Dr. Grant Woods: Different compounds. Not just N, P, and K. Different compounds, different combinations. And I'm so excited.

Kyle Veit: Man, that's gonna be cool.

Dr. Grant Woods: I'm so excited, because I think not only is this gonna encourage more people to manage native habitat and good quality food plots without using all the junk out there, but we need a way to get people to harvest more does. Doe harvest is slacking in America. Every hunter says we need more deer, but a lot of places, we have so many deer they're hurting the habitat and hurting themselves. And all of a sudden, people may realize the best meat known on the planet that you can put in your mouth, and I'm not saying this is true yet, 'cause the research is not done, but there's good indication it might be, comes from that wild, free-ranging deer. Not a deer going to a corn pile. I'm talking about one making a living off native groceries. That could be the best meat you could give your family.

Kyle Veit: Really.

Dr. Grant Woods: I remember an old Jeff Foxworthy skit from long ago. He had these buck teeth in, and a little whiteboard out by his old camper in the woods, and he said, "Now I just don't understand this. My wife gets on me about going deer hunting. But I spent a hundred dollars on a new bow and $300 on my lease," and on down the list, "and I killed a doe last year that got 50 pounds of meat, and that's the best meat on the planet. I think she should be thankful we eat the best meat in the neighborhood." Well, it turns out that skit may be true. And maybe we can justify buying that land or doing this stuff because we're feeding our family.

I'll take that one step further, on a serious note. I've had a kidney transplant for over 30 years. I'm so blessed in so many ways. My sister gave me a kidney, and finally the meds I take every day killed that one. And my daughter, 19 years old at the time, gave me a kidney and saved my life. So I live that life, folks. Why not go for the gusto every day? Because you really don't have any stress in your life until you're laying there hoping it goes beep one more time. That's stress. The rest of the stuff is just noise.

I've been eating venison since I was a starving graduate student when I got my transplant, all the way to now. In my freezer, there's a little bit of venison left from last season.

Kyle Veit: Time to restock it. Time to get it back full.

Dr. Grant Woods: I go to the Mayo Clinic for my healthcare, and every year I meet with a dietitian. "What are you eating?" I primarily eat venison, a couple wild turkeys, some white bass. "That's the best stuff you can eat." I hear this from the Mayo Clinic. Because think about it: a deer takes a bite here, a bite there, a bite there. A cow in a cow lot is only eating what's in the trough, and three cows have already pooped on what's in the trough. They're not getting a full complement of minerals. And our farmland has been disked to death. Spinach has about 40% less iron in it than it did when the Popeye commercials made it famous. I don't wanna go down the green beans. All these things are not near as nutritious as they used to be when our soil was healthier.

The world leading scientists like Stephan think that a lot of these childhood diseases we never heard of before are because, even though we're eating plenty of calories, we're malnourished. And you go to the store and buy some synthetic vitamin cooked up in the lab. No, that's not doing it, folks. Phytonutrients are the game. That's what all these world leaders that are way over my head in the science world talk about. And it turns out that if you eat pasture raised beef, pasture finished beef, or a white-tailed deer or a wild turkey or whatever, you can get the phytonutrients in you without eating the plants.

Kyle Veit: And it passes through the animal to the meat.

Dr. Grant Woods: Yeah. And think about how many different plants a deer eats, if they're available. They're getting it all. I'll point this out in one special way. Just a couple years ago, there was an old buck I was trying to kill. He wasn't that big, but he was an old buck, and he'd been whipping me for nine or ten years. I finally killed him. I had a trail camera set right before the season where I thought that rascal was cutting through, and sure enough, he showed up. And there's a Queen Anne's lace there. That's an exotic weed. It's not from America. It's considered a weed species. I'd never known deer to eat it. I never heard it in college. No one ever said, "Hey Grant, deer eat Queen Anne's lace."

Now, this is right before season. So what's happening? Deer are starting to pump calcium into their antlers. The antlers are built out of protein all summer long, and right before velvet shed, they start pumping calcium. Hardened antlers are mostly calcium and phosphorus. He walks by, just happenstance, takes four or five big leaves off this Queen Anne's lace. I see the video just by chance when we pull cards a couple days later. I run out there and pull some leaves right next to where he ate, so probably not the best ones. He's smelling what he needs. He's seeing the sun shine off of it. I'm just pulling random leaves. I send them to a lab, and they're super high in calcium. Exactly what that buck needed that day. And that's how deer work. But you've gotta have good quality native habitat with a lot of diversity. So in my food plots, I'm always planting at least eight things or more. The more diversity, the better for the soil and for the consumer, the deer that eats it.

Kyle Veit: To give them the options of different nutrients and sources of food. So would you classify what you do as basically regenerative agriculture, but for wildlife?

Dr. Grant Woods: It's the same thing, except I've modified it. I've learned from a lot of regen ag guys, and maybe they've learned a little something from me. We call it the Release Process, because regen ag at a big scale doesn't work for guys like me who don't own that much land or have a 40 foot no-till drill and all that stuff. I just stuck on the word release, 'cause I really feel we're just releasing the soil's potential.

Kyle Plunkett: Just releasing what was already there and letting it have a chance to come back.

Dr. Grant Woods: Here's a great book if you don't believe me yet, and if you're a hunter, it's an awesome read. One of the first known white buffalo hunters in Kansas was a young man named Mead. He took his buckboard wagon and a couple buddies. The buddies chickened out the first time they saw some Native Americans, but he kept doing it. He lived through the whole buffalo harvest. So sad. He was part of that buffalo harvest, and he helped found the town of Wichita and laid out its streets. He was a brilliant guy and a smart observer, and he took notes about the plants and animals he saw. Another little mini Lewis and Clark. He talks about encountering Native Americans, hiding in hollow stumps of trees, whatever. It's a fascinating read.

Kyle Veit: It's his journal? Mead's journal?

Dr. Grant Woods: Yeah. I can send you a link. You can get it on Amazon or wherever you buy books. I've recommended it to so many people, 'cause it's firsthand observations of what the prairie was like. He talks about being on a horse in grass as tall as his head.

Kyle Plunkett: Wow, man.

Dr. Grant Woods: And all the diversity of plants, and all the elk. You don't think about elk and grizzly bears on the prairie, but they were thick out there. Lewis and Clark talked about 'em, too. And the white-tailed deer were kind of limited to the drainages across Kansas, 'cause there were so many predators. His observations were fascinating.

One of my questions on my PhD prelims, and folks, I'm on the other side of the desk now, so I know: they already know if you're gonna pass or fail. That's just them getting an excuse to fail you, or making you miserable one last time. I can be honest. One of my questions was, "What was the adult sex ratio and age structure of white-tailed deer pre-European settlement?" And that's when I knew they wanted to fail me.

Kyle Veit: That's quite the question.

Dr. Grant Woods: How can you answer that? I literally cried. Okay, well, I might as well go down swinging. I guess I'm gonna fail. Four years of my life, gone. So I go to the library and start digging. Archaeologists had dug up Indian trash heaps. We call 'em middens. They were just a trash heap outside an Indian camp, and when it got stinking, they'd throw a layer of dirt on there to keep the scent down. And I found records from archaeologists, from Florida to North Dakota, of about 10,000 pelvic girdles out of white-tailed deer. I didn't find the pelvic girdles. I found the records. Well, you can sex a deer based on the pelvic girdle very accurately, and you can put 'em into age classes really accurately: fawn, yearling, two, three, four, five. What I call management age classes.

So I rebuilt, and I don't know if anyone had ever done that, the sex ratio and age structure of white-tailed deer pre-European settlement. Bucks and does. I didn't find any fawn records, 'cause a fawn's pelvic girdle hasn't calcified, so it decomposed.

Kyle Veit: Oh, 'cause it's still growing. It's still soft.

Dr. Grant Woods: Yeah. But I knew they were out there, 'cause I kept finding all these two, three, and four year olds. You had to have fawns somehow, folks. So I rebuilt that deer herd, and the adult sex ratio was about 50/50. The harvested sex ratio, too. Now think about this: these are primitive weapons. No G5 broadheads. And they still harvested 50% bucks and 50% does. And their average buck was three years old or older. That's what was on the landscape. I'm not saying they were magic managers or telling some romantic tale. That's just what was here, and the deer were healthy 'cause the habitat was so healthy.

Kyle Plunkett: Man, that is cool. I have an anecdote, and I wanna see if you agree with it or don't. It kind of leads into a question. Kyle and I are always talking back and forth about our generation. We do a podcast, but we also hunt and fish and all that. What's gonna get the next generation of outdoorsmen and women excited about conservation and hunting and fishing and heritage? We were talking with Austin Booth of Arkansas Game and Fish, and that's where we heard, maybe officially from Game and Fish for the first time, that it's the game species of waterfowl and game species of mammals that are being kept up.

Kyle Veit: It was like, all these bird species are disappearing off the landscape, but the waterfowl, where it's treasured and you have these organizations stood up to protect these animals, they're flourishing. They're growing.

Kyle Plunkett: And now you're talking about how maybe the best food you can be eating, if vegetables aren't cutting it anymore 'cause we have pesticides and insecticides on 'em, and with your mega farms and all of that, is free-ranging native wildlife. Deer, turkey, all of that. Is there a world where the revitalization of hunting and the outdoor lifestyle gets married and merged, to where game species are being intentionally cared for because modern man gets to a place where it's actually the best thing to be eating? And we see a resurgence of that lifestyle?

Dr. Grant Woods: I think we're trending that way. We've got 350 million people, plus or minus, in America, so deer would get really skinny pretty quick around here. So I'm not sure that's the total answer. But as far as retaining hunters, let's be really clear about this. Depending on which study you read, there are all these numbers, but let's take the middle: about 5% of us buy a hunting license. We're not gonna win it by voting. That's totally a fantasy. That will never happen again, in my mind. So it has to be fun, and it has to be beneficial. And this is how we've done it. I'm sure you all know the Pittman-Robertson Act and Dingell-Johnson.

During COVID, we saw this huge uptick in hunting and fishing. People were inside and wanted to go outside, and a lot of 'em found out it's fun. Now it's our job to retain those. You've probably heard of R3: recruit, retain, reactivate. And we spent all these millions and millions taking youth hunting, and it sounds so good, and it's great. But you take a 10-year-old kid hunting, he or she goes hunting once and has a great time. They can't go buy a bow or gun and go the next week by themselves. So what good groups like NDA, the National Deer Association, have found out is that we need to be recruiting these 20-year-olds. They've got a budget, hopefully they've got a job, and they can make the decision to go hunting next year if they liked it. And meat is a big play for them. That's called field to fork. I call it fork to field. Let's feed 'em first, teach 'em about the health, and then take 'em to the field.

That's where we're seeing the most success. And I'm talking downtown Louisville, Kentucky. I'm not being mean, folks, I'm just being super candid: people you might not look at and stereotypically say, that's a hunter. It's hard to camouflage purple hair. I'm just being facetious. They give them a free good meal, explain the health benefits, and usually introduce them with a crossbow. It doesn't go bang real loud, it doesn't have a lot of recoil, and the yardage is limited. It's easy to teach people to use it safely and effectively. Those programs are limited by budget and instructors, but they're super successful. And then those people can have kids and make them hunters.

I think a lot of groups are barking up the wrong tree. I won't call their names out here, 'cause they probably won't admit it in public yet. We've spent millions and millions taking kids hunting. Great intentions, and a lot of great times, I'm sure. But there's a real low recruitment rate. This is statistically proven. When we take young adults, or even older adults who maybe used to hunt, there's a really high percent we can recruit back into being a hunter. And we need hunters to manage wildlife and to fund wildlife. Wildlife management is expensive. And you said it best earlier: we take care of what we appreciate, what we feel we need. We don't really feel we need clean water, 'cause we pollute it like crazy. We don't feel we need to recycle, 'cause you about gotta beat people to recycle, and that's one of the easiest things we can do for the planet. So it's gotta have value. I was taught this way back in undergrad: we need to conserve, the wise use of a resource. A lot of people think preserve, which is setting it aside. When we set critters aside, they don't last too long. We've gotta conserve.

Kyle Veit: So to wrap it all up, I'm gonna ask you a question. Why do you do what you do? The work that you do, the education you promote, the channel you run, everything you've done. What is it that drives you?

Dr. Grant Woods: This sounds like some romantic, whimsical thing, but it's not. It's that 6-year-old boy being so fascinated by seeing that dead deer. I can remember my dad was a real strong man, much stronger than me, and we drug it up to the pig house. I just knew he was gonna skin it out and I was gonna put it on my bedroom wall. Mom had a different plan, of course, so it got nailed up in the barn. The only thing we knew about tanning was salt, so we rubbed some salt on that thing and nailed it up to the barn. I'd do my chores, and I think the right word might be fantasize. I'd go out there and rub the hair. It got brittle and fell off after a while. But I might see one of these in the wild someday.

And that hunger, it didn't come easy. I was 18 before I harvested my first deer, a button buck. So proud of that deer. For a hundred years, no one in my family had harvested a deer. We just had that drive to go. And I still have that drive and appreciation, and from what I've been blessed to learn, we can do a better job taking care of the habitat. We can get rid of all the nitrates running down the river. I'm sure y'all know about the hypoxia zone. I'm as pro farming as anyone on this planet, but that's a farmer cost. That's nitrates from nitrogen fertilizer leaching out of the soil. We can clean that up. Over every acre on the planet, there are over 30 tons of nitrogen in the air we breathe all the time. We just gotta plant some legumes in our rotation, put that nitrogen in the soil, and stop plowing.

So what drives me? I think we can have a better planet. We can. And it's not complicated. We don't have to have some magic deep lab carbon vacuum. We know that plants will pull more carbon out of the air and put it deep in the soil profile than they release, if we're not disking all the time. Deep in the soil profile, 50 inches down, 60 inches down. Good soil's black. We all know that. Well, carbon's black.

Kyle Veit: Yeah.

Dr. Grant Woods: When you see a gray field, that's because the carbon's gone. We just gotta take it out of the air and put it back in the dirt. We can't get rid of carbon. The recipe for photosynthesis, the product, is C6H12O6. Six carbons. Plants die if we don't have carbon, folks. We just gotta put it back where it belongs. So it's that passion to help people understand these simple processes and not make it complicated. Have fun deer hunting. I get caught up in big buck bubble land every now and then myself. I like to grow big deer. I like to watch 'em. I don't kill that many. I think big deer are just a sign of healthy habitat. I use that as an index. Body weights are just as thrilling to me. "Oh gosh, that doe weighed 190 pounds. Things are cooking out here."

Kyle Veit: You geek out over the body weights too. I bet you do.

Dr. Grant Woods: I do. Big time. And I also call Daniel to help me drag 'em up the hill. But yeah, that passion. It's the passion.

Kyle Veit: That makes sense. Well, at the very least, you've got me excited. I'm thinking about how I can fill my freezer and feed my family high quality meat from animals I've already spent the money on, with the gear and the bow and all the stuff. Basically, at this point, it's just gas to get out there after 'em. So you've got me looking forward to the season already.

Kyle Plunkett: Well, I love that we went from the first trail cameras and scrape and rub research to growing deer to, no, we can help the planet with this stuff. If people think hunters or outdoorsmen don't matter, I think they're wrong. I know I'm in the most echo of echo chambers here, but we all agree it's true. We can actually make an impact, not just on your little property where you live. You can make every stream you'll ever interact with healthier again, or every lake, every part of the woods. It's just human flourishing. I know we got philosophical, but that gets me excited.

Dr. Grant Woods: And maybe help solve or reduce some childhood diseases, 'cause we're feeding our kids a little better. That all starts in the womb, with prenatal health. I have two daughters. My wife and I have lived through all this. I didn't know all this stuff at that time. I wish I would have. But I still raised 'em on venison, so they turned out okay. We can all do better, folks, and I'm gonna end my part with this. I've been blessed to work all over, and I personally don't think I've ever seen a property at its full potential, soil wise, production wise. We're still degraded. And we're watching those little incremental changes at Chris's place in South Carolina. We're growing a black layer on top of that red clay. South Carolina lost an average of 17 inches of topsoil during the cotton farming days. I'm not mad at those guys. They didn't know any better. They were just trying to make a living. Get over it, folks. We're way past that.

Kyle Veit: Yeah.

Dr. Grant Woods: But we can regenerate that soil. We can do so much more. We can clean up our streams. We can stop the invasive eastern red cedar, or Johnson grass. We should learn. Stop moving invasive species. That doesn't work. No one's mad at pheasants, but there are very few examples where we brought a critter or a plant from one continent to another and it worked out well. There are very few examples, but there are a lot of catastrophes. And we can do it, just working together. It's not a money thing. It's just working together.