Dried Distillers


NEBRbruiser

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Has anyone tried using dried distillers to get more deer in front of your game cams?? The smell drives the deer crazy and they can smell it from forever away. I'm trying to come up with a good quality and balanced nutritional ingredients to mix with it to use. Dried distillers is very cheap too! $4/50lb bag where I get it. For those that don't know what dried distillers is, its the byproduct from making Ethanol. And here in Nebraska we have plenty of Ethanol plants around. Anyone experimenting with it or any other mixtures??

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No Ethanol plants close by here so never tried dried distillers.

We just started experimenting with a new type of protein pellet. I understand the vast majority of protein pellets are made using milk. With that type of protein pellet they suggest mixing it with corn until the deer get used to eating the protein. This new type we're trying is a lactose free protein pellet. We recently put 100# in the only protein feeder we had for a test run & put a Cudde flash cam on it. The protein feeder had been empty since May. The deer discovered the protein on the 2nd day. They wipped out the 100#'s during the next 5 days. No mature buck pics but lots of pics of young bucks & does. All total we got 238 pics of deer at the feeder, day & night with that flash cam. Should have gotten more pics but the batteries were dead when I went to check the camera & the feeder was empty. Got 3 days of pics till it died.

We bought 4 more 300# protein feeders, set them out, and filled them this past weekend with the same stuff. We made a trough protein feeder too and loaded it. We put a Cudde flash cam on the trough. No cams on the other protein feeders yet. I'm going to move some trail cams to some of the other protein feeders tomorrow.

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Thanks for the info. Yeah makes it tough if you don't have any ethanol plants close. Who makes the protein pellets your using? I've tried a type of them in the past but didn't have much luck at all. Here in Nebraska, I don't concentrate as much on feeding protein as we have all kinds of soybeans/corn for them. I'm focusing a little more on other nutritional needs. The pellet I used that time once it fell from my auto feeder and got wet and swelled up to where nothing would go near it.

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It's a MS company & I think the name of the company is Magnolia Outdoors. Only problem is (for the time being at least) you can only buy it by the pallet. There's 40 bags to a pallet @ $10/bag. A friend of one of my good friends gave the 1st 2 bags to us for a test run. That guy owns the company. We took the bait, hook, line, & sinker.

The baiting & feeding laws changed here a couple of years ago. We used to be able to feed deer anything we wanted, any way we wanted outside of the season. Now there's certain times you can feed deer corn & other times you can only feed them protein. You can only use a covered feeder to feed unless you get a special permit to put feed on the ground in front of a trail camera.

Edited by Rhino
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Yep couldn't justify it with only 1 or 2 protein feeders. 5 + a trough is another story.

You think that part of the MS baiting law is crazy, get this. It used to be illegal to bait at all during an open deer season. Now baiting is legal provided:

1) It's an above ground covered feeder or stationary spin cast feeder;

2) It has to be more than 100 yards from a property line;

3) It can't be within 100 yards of a stand or within sight of a stand regardless of distance;

4) You can only use protein pellets from Oct. 1st (opening day of bow season) through Nov. 30th;

5) From Dec. 1st through the end of February corn, protein, or corn + protein;

6) From March 1st through June 30th protein pellets only; &

6) From June 30th though Sept. 30th corn, protein, or corn + protein.

That's in addition to the other rules in my prior post. Mineral licks are allowed provided they don't contain corn or grain.

Our deer seasons run from Oct 1st through Jan. 31st. (Feb. 15th in the SE portion of the state). Depending on what part of the state you hunt, peak rutting could be anywhere from the end of the 1st week of December to the end of the 1st week of February. It's late December where I hunt in MS.

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They can be as strict as the local GW wants to be. There's been an ongoing battle for a while now about baiting here. This was their solution...at least for the time being. The odd thing was, their solution included regulating the feeding of deer out of season.

It also prohibited putting grain on the ground in front of a trail camera without first being granted a special permit. If you're granted a permit, it's only good for 21 days and any grain put on the ground has to be removed at least 10 days prior to the season. I don't know how long it takes to process an application. I don't bother with baiting the ground in front of a trail cam with grain here. Too many problems with pulling hogs in around my neck of the woods. I stick to other options that are legal.

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Yeah, I'm sure the hogs can be a pain in the neck. Bout as bad as the coons and squirrels here! What is the fine if they would happen to see some corn on the ground? And if you had your camera already moved why would someon bother cleaning up the corn. Sounds like way to many rules to even make it worth while for a GW. What are they going to do take off on a walk and see if they stumble across some cams? Doubt it. In NE they are actually cuttin back on GW's. Fewer of the them and now they pretty much spend most of their time responding to call in's. Happy hunting

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Just got 5 more bags of dried distillers. $5/50lb bag now. Also a 50lb bag of dried molasses for $11. Guarantee a guy can mix up your own great mixture for 1/4th the price of the mixtures with big bucks on em. You could make an irresistable mixture of corn, soybeans, dried distillers, and dried molasses. Deer wouldnt leave your feeders alone!

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