When a casual deer hunter takes on a 200-acre farm in Missouri, a series of mishaps and ambitious projects evolve into a lifelong commitment to the property— and the giant whitetails it grows
The Secrets of Making a Big Buck Property
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When Rick Dahl bought the farm he would spend the next two decades coaxing into a prime deer property, he had no earthly idea what he was doing.
It was 2003 and Rick and his buddy, Tim Collins, had decided to purchase a 200-acre cattle farm together in central Missouri. Ever practical, the two simply referred to the place as Redbird, after the country road they drove down to get to it.
“I didn't have a big grandiose vision about what ultimately the property should look like,” says Rick, who was 38 at the time. “I was just young and energetic and looking for ways to relieve stress from the daily grind of work. Being able to go out there and just piddle-fart around, quite frankly, was appealing. You start doing some habitat or hunting project, and that sometimes ends up making sense and now it's the way it's been for more than 20 years. And other things I did early on didn’t stick, many of which I’ve long since forgotten about.”
Now 60, Rick’s goals for Redbird revolve around intensive management for older age-class deer, and he targets bucks that are at least five years old. But if you look past all the big shoulder mounts hanging in the basement at the Dahl home—including a 168-inch buck his son, Hunter Dahl, killed at Redbird in 2023, and a 173-inch buck shot by a good friend a few years before—you’ll find plenty of basket-rack eight pointers tucked away in closets or hanging in storage rooms.
“In those early years you hunt, and sometimes you're successful, and you learn things. And over time, you shoot enough 100-inch 8-pointers and start to decide to hold out for something a little bigger,” says Rick. “That property, and our philosophy about it, really was an evolution that took place over several years.”
As the Dahls began to experiment on the farm property, they came to learn—through much trial and error—how to grow food plots, conduct prescribed burns, chip away at timber stand improvements, and create strategic access to stand sites for effective hunting setups. Rick dove headfirst into quality deer management (he’s a former chairman of the National Deer Association) and also embraced smart technology like onX and cellular trail cameras to help him learn his property and hunt it strategically. Ultimately, the Dahl family has taken on other properties and shot big deer on other farms, but Redbird has remained the beating heart of their family’s deer season, and much of their life together.
“And over time, you shoot enough 100-inch 8-pointers and start to decide to hold out for something a little bigger,”
Picking a Property— and the Right Projects
The first time Rick and his buddy Tim set out to conduct a prescribed burn at Redbird, they were fully prepared—or so they thought. They wanted to begin the process of eliminating the fescue in the open fields to allow for early successional annual forbs to come through. Rick and Tim had created a burn plan, made fire breaks, and phoned everything into the county. When it was time to burn, however, the wind was sportier than they’d planned.
“Today my experience has taught me, if you don't want your wind to be more than 10 miles per hour, don’t burn when it’s 15. But back then we didn't know it made that much difference. We just didn't think about those things. We went ahead and did the burn.”
With just the two of them on the fire line (and Hunter, who was about seven years old, spectating) they set about starting the fire. At one point, the flames took off toward a distant creek.
“Why we thought it was a big deal to stop that fire, I will never know. The creek was a perfect fire line, yet the fire went beyond the original line we set for it and it was like, 'Okay c’mon Tim, we gotta go down there and get this fire out.' So we start down there to work on that. Then we look back up the hill, and the fire has jumped the fire line on the other side. It was headed right toward the side-by-side.”
By the time Tim and Rick ran uphill to the UTV, the flames had already gobbled up the quad and were racing clear across the property. The tires were melted and the vehicle was totaled, and the two men realized they’d better call for help. The fire department arrived on the scene and had the flames under control in short order.
“After you burn a side-by-side up, you tend to freak out. Hunter is out there screaming, you think the fire's gonna engulf the world. But once the fire was contained, I remember the head guy on the fire crew asking me, ‘Why didn't you just let it burn?’ It was just going to burn to the gravel road and stop, and there was nothing but fescue in the way, which we were trying to burn anyway. But in the heat of the moment your brain starts doing funny things.”
There were at least two more learning experiences with prescribed fires at Redbird. One involved an ER visit for 20-odd stitches for a chainsaw wound; the other ended in Tim driving a tractor missing the front wheel off its repair block in his panic to cut off a fire headed for his beehives.
Eventually though, the two landowners got the hang of things, and Hunter lost his fear of prescribed fires (“he was scarred for years after that”). Today, the Dahls regularly burn Redbird in rotating cycles, which they keep track of using custom onX line tools.
Essential Tools for Property Management
In the early days of Redbird, Dahl had to rely on physical maps to plan his habitat work and property strategy. He made photocopies of aerial maps that he would color-code with highlighters. Then Google Earth came out, which allowed more flexibility. Then, sometime in the mid-2010s, he discovered onX.
“I do remember thinking, this is a real gamechanger,” says Rick, who had been looking for a way to calculate the acreage of his food plots for planting and planning new ones. Food plots were another major project in those days.
“Early on I wasn't thinking about what deer need to flourish and which one of the critical factors—food, water and cover—was the most limited on the farm,” says Rick, “Now I think, what's the food situation? Is there something missing? What's the water situation? What's the cover situation? I think a lot of people—early on—tend to gravitate toward food plots. They think that's the answer to everything. Like, 'all I've got to do is plant a food plot and that's going to draw the deer into it at just the right time, and I'm going to shoot the deer.’ I know that's the way I was. So I was spending a lot of time refining my craft, and I mean that because I knew nothing about farming when I started."
Dahl was a savvy enough deer hunter to recognize a few key features that he liked about Redbird that he wanted to enhance. There was a healthy balance of open fields—mostly filled with fescue, row crops and timber. The variety was sprinkled across the property which would allow the property to hunt bigger than its 200 acres.
“I also liked the fact that it had a gravel road all the way around the perimeter of the property, with the exception of one side. Some people might look at that and say, ‘Well I don't like that because nosy folks can drive down the road and see into the property. But one of the unique things was there weren't a lot of places where you could look into the property.”
Heavily wooded fence lines and shrub cedar helped provide a natural buffer around the farm, and over the years the Dahls have learned how to encourage that cover and create year-round security hedges. He tracks it using line tools in onX, and has even applied the idea to create stealthy access. Several of the stand-entry trails around the property leverage that thick cover for concealment when climbing into stands. Where natural cover doesn’t exist, Rick and Hunter plant just a few rows of Egyptian wheat, which can grow 8 to 12 feet tall. The two have gotten so good at creating smart access that, if they’re quiet, they can routinely climb into stands overlooking fields where deer are already feeding.
“Access is a top priority when trying to kill mature bucks,” says Rick.
Because the Dahls’ property and their management and hunting needs change throughout the year, their onX account looks totally different depending on the time of year, too.
In the late summer, the Dahls conduct trail camera surveys using corn. This is a way to assess the buck-to-doe ratio on the property, estimate the total deer population, and see what kind of bucks—new and familiar—are on the property. During the survey, their onX map is covered in bubbles of overlapping trail-cam waypoints. They rely on onX’s “Waypoint Radius” tool to visualize how much of the farm they think their survey has managed to cover, and where the deer that are showing up on camera might be coming from. For instance, if there are several doe family groups on a particular camera and a bachelor group of bucks, Rick can look at the radius—usually set to 400 yards —and identify which bedding areas fall inside that, and which he thinks the deer are using.
“If you’ve got three to four trail cams you're trying to manage, you probably aren’t going to forget where you put one. But when you’ve got 40, if you don’t have them on onX, there’s a good chance you’re going to forget one. The battery is going to run out and quit telling you it’s out there. Then three years later you find it and think, ‘Oh, that’s where that thing went.’”
In fact, onX integrates with Bushnell and Covert cameras (and, starting in July, Moultrie) to provide status details and photos for individual cameras within the app. Rick also leaves dated reminders in the notes section of trail camera waypoints, such as “New batteries in all cameras at Redbird, except for by pond. 12/3/24.”
This feature is key for also leaving notes at stand sites in the fall. Every single stand site is marked as a hard-sided blind, pop-up blind, and treestand with the appropriate parking spots and entry routes. Anyone who hunts a stand leaves a note in the waypoint for every sit that includes the date, wind direction, and what, if any, deer they saw. (They always see deer.) This helps Rick and Hunter decide which stands are being overhunted, or perhaps overlooked, where they tend to see which bucks, and what might need reevaluating. Meanwhile, Rick has burn and bedding areas outlined with custom shapes, food plots and ag crops color coded by location and acreage.
This data, combined with a big picture overview of the property and all its waypoints and mapping of key features—again: food, cover, and water—gives them as much information as possible about what spots might give them the best chance to kill a mature deer. As they think about optimizing existing blinds and setting potential new stands, they also routinely rely on the line-distance tool. This helps them estimate shot distances (they’re both bowhunters, too) and envision shooting lanes.
As each season progresses, Dahl drops waypoints to show where everyone has harvested deer and turkeys, so that overtime he develops a personal historical map of harvest data. This allows him to visually identify the most productive parts of the property, and those areas that could use some more rethinking.
The Work Is Never Done
The manual labor required to maintain a deer property helped shape Hunter’s career path. Instead of pursuing a four-year college degree, he went to a local technical college and received his degree in heavy equipment operation. Then he founded and managed a hauling business, where he contracts with numerous road construction companies to build roads, parking lots, and more. In the meantime, Dahl’s daughter got engaged under the old gnarled oak by the fish pond— the first project Rick and Tim ever did at Redbird.
Today Hunter is in his mid-20s and Rick is retired, and they spend their free time maintaining Redbird and dreaming up new projects and stand setups. While they feel like they’ve generally got habitat management and strategic stand placement efforts figured out, there’s always something to learn in their quest for mature bucks.
“I get much more push back on the turkey hunting side than I do on the deer hunting side,” says Rick. “Hunter's convinced he knows more about turkey hunting than I do. I think I've still got him bamboozled into thinking I know more about deer hunting than he does.”
“onX integrates with Bushnell, Exodus, and Covert cameras to provide status details and photos for individual cameras within the app.”
When Rick Dahl bought the farm he would spend the next two decades coaxing it into a prime deer property, he had no earthly idea what he was doing.
It was 2003 and Rick and his buddy, Tim Collins, had decided to purchase a 200-acre cattle farm together in central Missouri. Ever practical, the two simply referred to the place as Redbird, after the country road they drove down to get to it.
“I didn't have a big grandiose vision about what ultimately the property should look like,” says Rick, who was 38 at the time. “I was just young and energetic and looking for ways to relieve stress from the daily grind of work. Being able to go out there and just piddle-fart around, quite frankly, was appealing. You start doing some habitat or hunting project, and that sometimes ends up making sense and now it's the way it's been for 23 years. And other things I did early on didn’t stick, many of which I’ve long since forgotten about.”
Now 60, Rick’s goals for Redbird revolve around intensive management for older age-class deer, and he targets bucks that are at least five years old. But if you look past all the big shoulder mounts hanging in the basement at the Dahl home—including a168-inch buck his son, Hunter Dahl, killed at Redbird in 2023, and a 173-inch buck shot by a good friend a few years before—you’ll find plenty of basket-rack eight pointers tucked away in closets or hanging in storage rooms.
“In those early years you hunt, and sometimes you're successful, and you learn things. And over time, you shoot enough 100-inch 8-pointers and start to decide to hold out for something a little bigger,” says Rick. “That property, and our philosophy about it, really was an evolution that took place over several years.”
As the Dahls began to experiment on the farm property, they came to learn—through much trial and error—how to grow food plots, conduct prescribed burns, chip away at timber stand improvements, and create strategic access to stand sites for effective hunting setups. Rick dove headfirst into quality deer management (he’s a former chairman of the National Deer Association) and also embraced smart technology like onX and cellular trail cameras to help him learn his property and hunt it strategically. Ultimately, the Dahl family has taken on other properties and shot big deer on other farms, but Redbird has remained the beating heart of their family’s deer season, and much of their life together.
“If you’ve got three to four trail cams trying to manage, you probably aren’t going to forget where you put one. But when you’ve got 40, if you don’t have them on onX, there’s a good chance you’re going to forget one. The battery is going to run out and quit telling you it’s out there. Then three years later you find it and think, ‘Oh, that’s where that thing went.’”
Here's an example of a mock property that uses onX tools the way the Dahls do on their farm.
“If you’ve got three to four trail cams trying to manage, you probably aren’t going to forget where you put one. But when you’ve got 40, if you don’t have them on onX, there’s a good chance you’re going to forget one. The battery is going to run out and quit telling you it’s out there. Then three years later you find it and think, ‘Oh, that’s where that thing went.’”