I was surprised to see just how many whitetail management products were offered at my local Agway store.

The Indiana Agway sponsored a seminar today about whitetail nutrition. The speaker was Ron Wenning of Bighorn Wildlife Products and owner of Knittle and Frey Ag Center in Williamsport, PA. Mr. Wenning was representing Whitetail Institute products, as well as his own Bighorn Minerals, which he developed to promote antler growth.

Although much of the presentation was geared toward selling the products, there was some good information provided. Although I didn’t learn a lot of new information, it was good to get reminded of a few things about food plots and supplemental feeding. Mr. Wenning has been in the business for more than 40 years, and he represented the products well. As an added bonus, those in attendance got a 10 percent discount on all of the whitetail nutrition products. I bought two bags of Whitetail Institute’s deer food, as well as a 25 pound bag of the presenter’s mineral mix. I’ll just add the minerals to my regular mix of food and shelled corn before loading it into my feeders.

They held a small drawing for a few products to conclude the seminar, and I was the lucky winner of a bood entitled Pennsylvania Deer and Their Horns. The original edition was published in 1915, and a second edition was published in 2o02 so that some key information in the book could be updated. The new sections in the book were written by Mr. Wenning, Brian Hill of the Quality Deer Management Association, and Karl Miller, a noted wildlife biologist from Georgia. I know Brian Hill from my Deer Steward certification courses through the QDMA, and I have certainly read plenty of Karl Miller’s work over the years. I’ll be interested to see just how much has changed in whitetail thinking over the last 100 years. I’ll put the book on top of the stack of books I need to read over the next couple of months.