(Photos courtesy of Moultrie Mobile)
July 01, 2024
By Lynn Burkhead
When I first visited with Mark Olis, Senior Brand Communications Manager for Moultrie , about the Moultrie Mobile Feed Hub system , it was easy to get excited about what he was telling me about. Unlike some of the products I had seen at the Archery Trade Association’s annual ATA Show, this new product and supplemental feeding system was music to my ears, thanks to the magic of cellular connectivity that can reach deep into the deer woods and help change the way we hunt.
While the concept of adding white-tailed deer to the grocery table with some sort of supplemental feed like corn or protein pellets might be foreign to hunters in some states (the practice isn’t legal everywhere and is regulated in others), it’s a way of life each autumn in many states around the country, including my home state of Texas.
As Olis shared the new product features with me — remote monitoring of feed and battery levels, running feeders on command, adjusting feed times remotely, and receiving alerts on when a feeder is clogged or power supply is low — I knew it would be well received in the Lone Star State where I live, as well as throughout much of the South, Midwest, and Great Plains, where deer hunters can rely on this practice as they add another possibility to their hunting bag of tricks.
The Need to Feed Around the country, there are a variety of reasons hunters adopt the practice of supplemental feeding as they manage and hunt properties each fall for whitetails, either to curtail numbers as recommended by a biologist, to put venison in the freezer, or even to tag a trophy buck headed for the wall. Such efforts can help influence deer movement, provide a nutritional boost to properties where food is scarce, and help a landscape’s deer herd maximize its potential by aiding does at critical times of the breeding cycle and bucks as they shed antlers and prepare to grow next year’s headgear.
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In a few places like my home state, the use of such feeders — which is really nothing more than a food plot situated in a barrel, in my mind at least — can help make the chance of harvesting a whitetail a real possibility in a place where it isn’t always easy to accomplish.
For example, let me tell you about a hunt I enjoyed a few years ago with my two sons. We traveled down the serpentine stretch of asphalt-covered roadway known as Interstate 35. After a day of travel in our SUV and as novices chasing bucks and does in the southernmost counties of Texas, we settled in for the night, eagerly anticipating senderos filled with whitetails the following morning.
The next day, the early winter morning was everything a deer hunter could want while sitting in a Lone Star State deer blind as the sun came up begrudgingly behind heavy cloud cover, a scene straight out of a John Cowan painting depicting the richness of the sporting life in Texas.
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The early December date meant the rut was kicking into high gear for the region’s Muy Grande whitetail bucks and the does that would deliver the species’ next generation.
Sitting inside a fiberglass box blind with my young son Will, we were surrounded by potential Boone and Crockett caliber bucks, which filled us with anticipation. Meanwhile, a little over a mile away, my other son Zach and our good friend Kelly Jordon, a professional bass fisherman with Major League Fishing, were in a similar spot. Despite our collective experience as veteran deer hunters — Jordon being not just a championship-level bass fisherman but also a seasoned deer hunter — there was surprisingly little activity on that promising morning.
Or nothing moving that we could see, that is. Because in a landscape literally filled with whitetails, the wall of vegetative protein the South Texas Brush Country is known for concealed whatever deer movement there was that morning. With a smorgasbord of nutritious vegetation available, local whitetails didn't need to roam far from their overnight bedding spots to find sustenance. It's a land where nearly everything is edible.
When sunrise came and went, there was almost nothing to be excited about whitetail-wise, even though we were hunting on a big ranch that was the South Texas version of a theme park for deer hunters. But when a nearby feeder filled with corn began to rattle and spin golden nuggets a half-hour into the day, everything changed and there were soon whitetails on the move. An hour later, after a nice buck had worked the area looking for does, my son Will was soon gripping and grinning a set of big Texas deer antlers destined for his wall.
The following morning as Will and I worked on management hunt doe patrol, Zach would repeat the scene with his own great buck and our trip from the Red River Valley where we live to the Rio Grande River region that separates two nations was finally complete, thanks in part to the magic of South Texas, its famous whitetail deer herd, and the irresistible lure of golden nuggets of corn that make a difficult outdoors task a lot more possible.
Older Supplemental Feeding Systems Had Problems When I first got started in Texas deer hunting back in the late 1980s as a college student at the University of North Texas, supplemental feeders were far more crude than they are today, typically an old metal barrel welded onto three legs and covered loosely with a chained lid on top. To the bottom of that barrel, you would screw in a timer unit that had a metal spinner plate, set the contraption up in a good spot, pour in a 50-pound bag of corn, set the timer to go off early and late, and drive away.
And between that spring or summertime “fill ‘er up” session with hunting buddies or lease members, all kinds of things could go wrong, particularly if you lived a good drive away from your hunting property in an age before cell phones, computers, and the Internet.
The only way you were able to ascertain everything was working was to make an actual road trip to your hunting property or lease and take a careful look at your feeder. Only when you were physically there — and you had removed the lid, climbed up to take a look inside the barrel, and run a test cycle — could you be certain that everything was functioning properly and deer were responding to the feed being broadcast on a regular basis.
Sometimes, problems developed in the form of a severe thunderstorm that rolled through the area with heavy rains, high winds, hail, and even tornadoes. When that happened, you might arrive and find one or more feeders turned over and lying on the ground. Or, if it was still upright, the lid could have been dislodged, rain could make its way inside, and the broiling Texas sun would do the rest in the form of mildew and mold that ruined the feed.
Even if the unit was still upright, that didn’t mean all was well because sometimes, corn cob debris from a 50-pound bag of gold nuggets — which can be bought at just about every hunting supply store or gas convenience store in the Lone Star State — was blocking the downward flow. And when that happened, the feeder’s drain spot would get clogged up and no corn would ever be able to make it through to the spinner plate.
At other times, problems had arisen when mice and other little critters had found their way inside the feeder’s timer assembly, which sometimes wasn’t very well constructed. Once critters made it into the box, they made themselves quite at home in the middle of the wiring, often severing it and rendering the contraption useless until it could be repaired.
I'll admit it was quite disheartening — and more than a little frustrating and expensive — when you'd travel many miles to your deer hunting turf, only to discover that what you thought were months of continual daily scattering of corn was actually a mirage and the landscape was a virtual whitetail ghost town.
Moultrie Mobile Feed Hub Solves Feeding Problems As I stood at the ATA Show listening to Mark Olis explain the Moultrie Mobile Feed Hub system and how it would solve many of those problems, I smiled big and wished I had enjoyed access to such a product years ago.
So what exactly is the Moultrie Mobile Feed Hub and how does it solve some of the dilemmas noted above? Well, it's a three-part system that has first, a cellular timer — and one that works with almost all of the major brands of feeders on the market — that will communicate readings and settings to and from the Moultrie Mobile App . It will also send alerts for feeder clogs and low battery power.
Next, there is the Feed Level Detector, something that is placed at the top of the feeder and communicates with the timer as it scans the contents below.
And finally, there's the Moultrie Mobile App mentioned above, which allows users to activate and manage their feed hub through an annual subscription plan. With that activation, users can remotely check feed levels, adjust the feed cycle duration, alter the timing and scheduled days, or even dispense feed on demand to put it on the ground before and/or during a hunt.
So what do you get with this Moultrie Mobile Feed Hub system, after putting it into play on the ground you hunt? In addition to tapping into first-of-its-kind cellular connectivity for controlling virtually any spin-cast feeder, you get something that is smart, powerful, convenient, and more than a little cool.
And all of that adds up to giving a hunter peace of mind that with the approach of a deer hunting adventure, good times are ahead. This means that, unlike the scenarios I painted above, you can rest assured that your feeder is working properly even though you're hundreds of miles away and days, weeks, or even months from actually climbing into a treestand.
And when you do that, all that’s left to do is wait, watch the sunrise, and see what might happen. Because in the deer woods — especially when you’ve got the Moultrie Mobile Feed Hub working in your favor — you just never know, now do you?