Creating a Hunting Opportunity

Creating a Hunting Opportunity

A prescribed approach to wildlife habitat and authentic Southern attitude help make The Rival TV a successful digital hunting content venture.

The guys at The Rival TV are all about opportunities. The online series—which follows two brothers and their two friends as they hunt deer across the country and on the land they own and lease in the Southeast—was founded on seizing opportunities, and creating them, even when the odds, and the hills, are steep.

 “This is far from an agricultural field here, okay?” laughs Blair Goins, standing on sloping, stony ground at the group’s lease in Waterloo, Alabama. “This is rolling hills, holes in places, rocky ground, pretty much poor soil… but hey, it’s working.” 

Blair’s brother, Bart, a video production specialist who shoots much of the footage for The Rival TV’s wildly popular social channels, jokes that he “does most of the work here,” but Blair is quick to point out that one of the best opportunities the brothers seized was hooking up with conservationist Chad Yeager, who actually does do a great deal of work on the property. “It’s a really neat piece of land,” says Chad, “but it’s tough ground.” 

Over a few seasons, Chad—along with Blair, Bart and the group’s fourth member, Joe Shults—have transformed the 1,600 acre lease into what Blair describes as “a restaurant for deer,” with successful food plots that attract whitetails in spite of the tough terrain. The Rival guys credit Chad—“He was already doing some of what we were trying to learn to do,” says Blair—but connecting with Chad to up their game was just another in a long line of opportunities seized.

Blair and Bart are quick to share memories of hunting on public land, “where the only food plot we’d see was at the neighbor’s fence line,” Bart jokes. The brothers grew up hunting together, agreeing it was “in their blood,” but Bart had another talent that paired with the brothers’ hunting acumen and ambition. “In high school, I bought a little camera,” says Bart. “Took it out to the woods a lot. We didn’t always get good footage, but I knew I wanted to be on a hunting show.”

The brothers accumulated enough “good stuff” over the years to put an audition together, and after years of submitting tapes here and there in the outdoor world, they were accepted to Drury Outdoors’ “Dream Season” reality show in 2010. “The Bama Boys had made the cast… We were proud to be the first team ever for Alabama and we wanted to do the state proud. Can I get a ROLL TIDE?!” says Bart.

The “Bama Boys” rode that state pride and their most successful hunting season ever to a win on the show, and worked with Drury Outdoors for the next 8 years. “We were in the stand together all the time, we were lucky we didn’t kill each other,” laughs Bart. “We knew the TV landscape was changing, and we wanted to adapt and make something of our own,” says Blair. The Rival TV was born, launching on digital platforms with the goal to “encourage and motivate the Southern hunter,” says Blair.

“I didn’t come from the hunting industry like these yahoos,” says Chad of the other three Rival guys, and admits that he isn’t the most proficient hunter. “So my role was: Let’s see how we can create the habitat.”

“The guys that we were hunting against in these reality shows, they were slamming big deer left and right,” says Blair. “And I give Bart credit… He always says, ‘Luck is something we can’t bank on; getting lucky is not going to put that deer in front of you.’”

And then here’s that word again: “You’ve got to grow deer and you’ve got to be able to present an opportunity.”

The Rival TV guys hunt all over the country, including on leases throughout the Midwest. But Blair says the show’s emphasis on Southern hunting is what sets it apart. “We want to create really good content for the Southern hunter because, let’s be honest, it’s more challenging to hunt in the South.”

Tips For Southern Food Plots

Midwestern farms tend to draw deer where soybeans are either left after harvest or planted adjacent to commercial farm acreage, but not only is farming different in the South, the deer are, too, says Blair. “Pods aren’t their preference,”  he says, and so the team worked with Chad to develop a Southern-focused food plot program featuring clover in the warm months and cereal grains in the fall.

Clover is a go-to. “Clover is one of your most economical things to plant, because not only is it pretty inexpensive, it's also going to grow for at least four or five years if you take care of it,” says Blair. “You might get more than that in the Midwest.”

“Taking care of it” means giving it a good blank slate to start by killing out any grass in the plot, and then keeping the weeds out to reduce competition for moisture. Blair warns, too, that “it takes time to get the clover built and it kind of looks rough for a little while,” but it will get lush and feed deer for 10 months out of the year in the South.

Drill in a cereal grain mix for fall. Even if the clover is knee-high, Blair says don’t mow. “We’re going to drill right back through it,” he says, with rye, wheat, and oats for constant feeding in the cold months. “Wheat will only grow at about a soil temperature down to 52 degrees, where a cereal rye will grow down to about 28 degrees,” says Blair. “So when it gets super cold, we need deer eating on these fields and we need them to continue to grow, and cereal rye fills that gap.” 

Take care of the soil. Chad says that everyone wants to know what the team plants, but what he wants everyone to know is the importance of soil testing. Besides helping assure success, it also saves money by helping avoid excessive fertilizer use.

Working in a brassica mix in the fall can help attract deer and improve soil health, says Blair. Since the team manages land in basically the same way as a no-till farm, the tubers on radishes and turnips help break up the soil.

The Massey Ferguson 4710 For Land Maintenance In Tough Terrain

Getting the food plot mix right is one challenge; getting them in the ground in some tough terrain is another, especially on this Waterloo lease in North Alabama. “You’re planting on the side of a ridge, it’s a real pucker factor,” laughs Chad. “But with this tractor… It’s made planting and maintenance work ‘up there’ so much easier.”

“This tractor” is a Massey Ferguson 4710. “The reason we picked Massey… We knew we needed a heavy tractor,” says Chad. “To plant this rugged terrain, you need something that feels stable, and the stability of this tractor has been amazing. I've never once planted a single portion of this land that made me feel uneasy,” he says.

“We moved around to a lot of different brands and we settled on Massey because of the functionality that it has, the simplicity that it has in the operation station, and the value of the machine,” says Chad.

“The transmission is phenomenal. It's a Dyna2 transmission, so you can go from a high and low at a second. And then the fuel efficiency… It uses very little fuel,” he says.

It’s also very often the “star of the show” on The Rival TV. “We have fun producing down at the farm,” says Bart, “just trying to get really quick shots on how we use the Massey tractors, which is easy in itself because the thing's such a beast out there working.”

Hunting Industry Influencers

While the guys are creating opportunities for big deer encounters on their land, their videos create opportunities for “the everyday hunter that doesn't have huge pockets and huge funds,” says Bart. “We're just trying to share our successes and our ways of doing things,” he says.

Blair says he and the guys aren’t necessarily “influencers,” but admits they have “a sphere of influence … So many times I’ve seen somebody put something on social media and you never see those people really testing what they’re doing,” he says. So besides the impact shots—“Everybody wants to see the big deer go down,” says Blair—The Rival TV wants Southern hunters to see how to create the opportunity from start to finish. “The more we do, the more we learn, and we are giving it the stress test to make sure you actually see us doing these things,” he says.

“So our goal here is to keep it warm-hearted, make it fun, include family… But also be clear on what it takes to set up our hunting opportunities so we can all rag each other about who kills the biggest deer,” says Blair.

“Or who makes the best shot,” says Chad.

And while he may be an expert at habitat, Bart adds: “It ain’t gonna be Chad.”

By: Jamie Cole

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