Happy Farm Friday!
This week, 5th generation grower Hawkins Gebbers is here to share how he manages the deer population in our orchards to ensure that they make it through the winter without damaging our crops. Our growers find great JOY in working with Mother Nature to protect and nurture our land & wildlife while growing the best crop possible.
Video Transcript:
Hey, it’s Hawk!
I got you out here on an awesome day. When Winter hits in the Orchards, Wildlife go crazy because they got to get food and a lot of their natural sources are covered by the snow. So, there’s a lot of wildlife that we love we want to nourish and protect them while we keep them away from the buds in our Orchard. That would be like, mule deer. Deer are an amazing creature and we want them but we just can’t have them in the Orchards eating all of the buds, which are next year’s crop. And they’re full of nutrition we’ve decided to have a few of these strategic feeding stations just to supplement them keep them healthy so they can make it through the winter. So we discussed with some various knowledgeable people on the topic of like what deer need to be healthy in the winter. Obviously the best case scenario is natural winter feed but as we’ve lost a lot, they’ve told us if you put out nutrient-rich alfalfa, a little bit of sugar – which is nice because we have cool apples and some salt the deer will actually select exactly what they need to supplement their diet, so we have a lot of confidence in kind of what we’re doing out here that it is helpful. And that’s kind of what we’re doing out here!
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