Food plot vs. bait pile: What's the difference?

Michigan's likely move toward antler point restrictions in the northeastern Lower Peninsula has raised some questions about disease transmission, an issue that has simmered since the state instituted a baiting ban in August 2008. For some hunters it makes no sense to ban baiting but allow food plots, which are also designed to attract deer.

GNO asked Dr. Steve Schmitt, a wildlife veterinarian with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment, to explain the difference between a bait pile and a one-tenth-acre food plot. Here are his comments:

• "For me it's pretty easy to visualize. A small food plot is still a much larger area than even a large pile of sugar beets, a 15-foot by 15-foot pile. That's bringing the deer together in a closer concentration, and that's where the direct transmission takes place."
• "The other thing is that once that food plot is eaten it's gone and it's not being replenished, where a bait pile or food site is being replenished with more apples or sugar beets being dumped on it in the exact same spot. An apple or an acorn only falls once from the tree and it's not replaced."
• "That's not saying that some of those small food plots might not bring deer into contact with each other a little bit more if you didn't have that, but it's a lot more spaced out than a feeding site. When acorns are there the deer could concentrate some, or they could concentrate in an alfalfa field in the spring, but in all of those it's usually not close enough contact."
• "We're trying to limit the things we can control and reduce the contact between deer. Obviously you can have some transmission taking place in a world where no feeding or baiting or human concentration of deer takes place. To maintain itself, every TB positive deer has to transmit it to another deer to keep things perfectly level. If that deer transmits to 1.1 deer then it's going up, but if it transmits to .9 deer, then it's going down. And that's what we're talking about."