SAE Visit #1: Maggie's Food Plots

     For my first SAE visit during my student-teaching, I went out to one of my junior's food plot stands that she had created during her freshman year. Her name is Maggie Fijal and her love for the outdoors and hunting was the driving force behind the creation of this SAE project that she keeps running throughout the entire year. She loves to hunt every season of whitetail deer, from archery all the way up to late muzzleloader season in January. In order to promote more hunting success, she installed a few food plots on a friend's property. Since Maggie had to talk with the landowner and develop a contract agreement for her food plots, this made her project an Entrepreneurship SAE Project. 

    Before the visit, I contacted Maggie and asked for the best time of the summer for Doug and I to come out and meet her and her father. She told me that sometime in June would work before field hockey practices started, so we made the trip on June 27th. I took a look at her records in AET and she sent me one of her Excel sheets that she uses regularly to keep track of her expenses. 

    Some of the seedings she did on her plots included white clover, oats, buckwheat, and peas. In the photo above, you can see one of Maggie's hunting shacks sitting along the edge of one of the food plots she created. Maggie keeps track of the dates she seeds the plots, when she fertilizes them and keeps a budget for her project. I spoke with Maggie about the pros and cons of her food plots, and what she wants to change in the future. She mentioned the idea of implementing a corn crop into one of her plots to see how the deer tend to work that crop compared to some of her clover and pea plots. 

    Mr. Brown has always graded the SAE program on a Pass/Fail scale. If the student has a functioning SAE project and Mr. Brown sees that records are being placed into AET, then the student receives a passing grade on their report card for the current marking period.