Interviewer : Okay I'm gonna count it down, five, four, three, two, one. Welcome to Whitetail Rendezvous. And we're gonna welcome Doug Gestrara... is that right Doug?

Doug : Yup Doug Kostreva

Interviewer : From Hornybuck Seed Companies, up in Wisconsin, Doug's just an amazing guy, and I'm so happy to welcome him to our community today, Doug welcome.

Doug : Thank you so much, I appreciate being on your show and thanks for having me.

Interviewer : Doug, lets talk about your company a little bit. Just give us about a couple of minutes about your seed company, why you started, and then we'll go from there.

Doug : Well it started many, many years ago back in the 80's. I'm a third generation farmer, living on the same farm my grandparents built in 1917, back in the early 80's there was no such thing as a food plot. As a farmer we grew crops and vary rarely did you leave crops for your deer, sometimes they weren't ripe so you left them and then deer got to eat them during the winter, and alfalfa you left in the winter you leave a little bit taller... so the deer would be in it eating.

As things started progressing, we started to find out that we did leave corn because it was too ripe to put in the bin, it wasn't ripe enough to put in the bin, it was a little too wet, we'd leave it in for the winter we'd find out the deer would migrate towards it and we noticed the next year that we would have better deer volume, because deer are very ritualistic, they remember where their food source is from the year before.

So the very first thing I ever planted which was crazy enough to say was carrots, and my dad said I was absolutely insane nuts for doing it because carrot seed was so expensive in the day, which it still is today, and I went and I kind of dug them up a little bit and the deer started coming in and eating them, and I started putting more and more food plots in, I started trying different things. At the time there was no... [inaudible 00:00:2:00] weren't big, this wasn't big, there was no such thing as a radish or a turnip even in those days, you just never grew that for deer.

Then I started planting several different things, and the market started to go, I just only did it for myself, then I ended up having a landscaping company, a startup landscaping company and I was doing that and I started planting for some of my customers who had their weekend warrior cabins, cause I lived 50 miles north of Green Bay, so we are kind of what we call vacation land, so a lot of people have their weekend warriors, they come up and they have their cabins on lakes [inaudible 00:02:38] on their property, and they wanted to have deer in their backyard.

So as I'd put their lawn in for their cabin, they asked if I could plant something so they could watch wild life, and that's really how this all kind of came to plan so to speak, more by accident, but like you said, there's no such thing as an accident and it happened for a reason and the good Lord up above is the one who geared me in this direction, and we started up the seed company just basically by putting things together to make it work for people, to help people to grow deer.

Interviewer: Doug let's switch it up now, and talk about your love for deer hunting. So how you got started on that.

Doug : I think I was very blessed to have a very hunting family, my father took me hunting, way back as long as I can remember. And I know as a kid, I know that there's no kid that can sit still, there's no kid that is that great in a deer stand, but he would always try to figure out a way to make time to take me somehow, some way, and back when I was a young kid many years ago, there was not a lot of deer, there was actually a thing called party tags. And you were only allowed to shoot one doe among five people, and bucks were very small. Anything with three inches, if they had three inch pikes in Wisconsin that was legal game and you shot it,