Hunting Scenarios with a KestrelMet Food Plot Weather Station

Do you constantly monitor your local weather conditions during the hunting season so you know when the conditions are best for hunting? Do you spend a lot of time tilling, planting, and growing food plots each year so you can have a healthy deer herd on your property? Finally, does the concept of combining those two things make a heck of a lot of sense to you? If so, you’re in the right place. We’re here today to talk about the KestrelMet food plot weather station and how it can help you with a few different hunting applications, perhaps in many ways you haven’t thought about before.

What is a Food Plot Weather Station?

First, let’s clarify something – what exactly is the KestrelMet food plot weather station? Because honestly, most hunters don’t think about needing weather stations. Basically, it’s your own localized weather station that you can place in a food plot (or anywhere really). The KestrelMet 6000 is a food plot weather station that can help you monitor weather and meteorological conditions right at your food plot or agricultural field. Wish you knew the exact wind direction and speed near where your hunting blind is? The weather station can tell you whether the wind is right for you to hunt it without spooking game or if you should just find a different spot to hunt that evening. Wouldn’t it be nice to know the exact temperature and humidity so you knew how to dress for a given hunt? The food plot weather station can tell you that information too. With one of these, there’s no more need to check a bunch of different weather stations or apps for weather in the broader region – you can monitor everything directly where your food plot is located.

The KestrelMet 6000 comes with a sturdy metal tripod mount so it will stay in place after a short 20-minute setup process. There are also add-on sensors to measure solar irradiance (essentially how much sun/solar energy a given area is receiving), soil moisture (at three different depths), and soil temperature. This can be very helpful information when you’re first planning a food plot because you can monitor a given area to determine if and when the conditions are best for planting or determine if you need to change your irrigation plans. Before you seed it, you can decide if the soil is warm enough or if there is enough soil moisture so that the seeds will germinate.

Importantly, all of this data can be transmitted to you via a cellular connection and the unit is powered by a photovoltaic panel. This means you can set it up in a remote food plot area with no external power source and monitor conditions right from your favorite mobile device. With a data dashboard, you can keep track of a full suite of meteorological conditions from anywhere you want. Frankly, if you’re serious about hunting food plots, a food plot weather station can be a huge help.

How to Use a Food Plot Weather Station

We’ve already mentioned a few different options for using a food plot weather station, but let’s dive into the details a bit further.

• Planning a Food Plot Location – one of the first steps when planning a food plot is determining the right location for one. Beyond picking an open area clear of trees, there are some other things you should know before you commit to planting it. Once you have a few potential areas you’d like to check out in further detail, you can use the KestrelMet 6000 to measure the amount of sunlight it receives (i.e., whether it gets enough sunlight to grow your crops) and the wind speeds and directions. This can all help you decide if the location is a good one for your intended food plot plans.
• Planting Food Plots – after planning the right location, it’s important to plant the food plot when the conditions are right. For example, if you plant some seeds too soon (when the soil isn’t warm enough or there isn’t enough moisture in the ground), the seeds won’t germinate very well and you may spend a lot of money and effort for very little return. The weather station can help you determine exactly when the conditions are right, so that you can have a lush soybean field or brassica plot before you know it.
• Maintaining Food Plots – of course, once your crops are growing, you still need to keep track of how the overall food plot is doing. During drought conditions, the plants will likely suffer and you may even need to irrigate your food plot to keep it going until deer season. The food plot weather station can help monitor the soil moisture at different root zones (based on the crop you plant and how deep the roots are) so you know when you need to step in with additional irrigation when Mother Nature isn’t supplying it.
• Monitoring Hunting Conditions – assuming it has served you well up to this point, think of how you can use a weather station for hunting! Let’s say you need a west wind to blow the scent from your hunting blind away from the food plot and back toward your entry trail. Or you’re waiting for a big cold front of a certain magnitude before you start hunting the food plot. Or further still, maybe you hunt by the barometric pressure or want to show up after a rainfall event. From the comfort of your couch (or while at work), you can watch your dashboard to get updates from your weather station on all of these measurements. And these measurements aren’t general conditions in the region – they are directly from your food plot! Talk about local intel.

In short, a food plot weather station can be an immensely useful tool for hunters, land managers, and farmers alike. If you want to take your food plots and hunting to the next level, consider how you could use one on your own property.