From cover to cover

The range of crops is seemingly endless and selecting the right one for a shoot is vital. Jamie Tusting sorts the maize from the seed mix

- Jamie Tusting

By definition, a game cover is any crop grown with the intention of feeding and/or holding gamebirds in the shooting season.

It was at a very young age that I began to appreciate the benefits that a good game cover can bring to a shoot. Aged seven or eight, I would go out beating for the little farmers’ syndicate that my grandad was part of. On these days, we would always most look forward to ‘Rodger’s Maize’, so called because it was a sizeable block of maize on Rodger’s farm (could you have guessed?). I can, to this day, recall the clouds of pheasants that would flush from the cover crop, towering over the head of me as a young boy.

I can also remember the kale-based game covers across the shoot, mainly because of the inevitable soaking one received when beating through them. Needless to say, as an eight-year-old, this was the highlight of my day.

Tailored approach

Fast forward a few years and I run a small shoot on our family farm with my brothers, as well as overseeing the shoot on the large estate that I work for. For both very different shoots, cover crops play a vital role in the overall success of a season and it is embarrassingly obvious when the cover on a drive has not grown as planned.

This is typical of shoots up and down the country. Only a handful of the very oldest sporting estates, with their landscape and woodlands designed, planted and managed specifically for pheasant shooting, can run their shoots with no cover crops at all.

But when it comes to game covers, the options really are endless and working out the most appropriate approach for your shoot and your ground conditions can be a minefield. Each and every shoot has different topography and soil types, as well as different objectives.