Spring Turkey Calling Masterclass: Lessons from a Champion

Turkey hunting will humble you in a lot of ways, but nothing stings quite like working a fired-up gobbler for forty-five minutes and watching him walk the other direction. Most of the time, that's a calling problem — not a gear problem, not a location problem. A calling problem.

We sat down with a 3-time NWTF champion caller to talk through what separates hunters who consistently kill birds from the ones who consistently don't. The answer isn't volume. It isn't an expensive slate call. It's understanding that calling is communication — and communication is situational.

Calling Isn't Just Sound — It's Strategy

The single biggest takeaway from this session is that effective calling is situational. A sequence that pulls a bird at a dead run on opening morning in Mi...

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Spring is Here - A Serious Hunter's Guide to Chasing Midwestern Gobblers

There's a moment in early April, somewhere between the last hard freeze and the first green tinge on the hillsides, when a gobble rips through the timber at first light and something primal fires in your chest. It doesn't matter how many springs you've done this. That sound does something to a person that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't heard it while crouched against a white oak in the dark, shotgun across their knees, palms sweating in forty-degree air.

Eastern wild turkeys are one of the great hunting animals in North America. Not because they're the biggest or the most dangerous, but because they will humble you in ways that deer and ducks simply cannot. A mature gobbler has survived multiple hunting seasons by being suspicious of everything. He's spent his whole life eating and avoiding being eaten, and h...

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What to Look for When Buying Hunting Land

Not every piece of ground is a "Trophy Property". Some tracts hold deer occasionally. Others produce mature bucks so consistently you start taking it for granted. The difference between the two isn't luck, and it isn't acreage — it's whether a property checks the right boxes. And if you're serious about being set up for this fall — food plots planted, stands hung, TSI and  other habitat work done — the window to buy is coming up faster than most people realize. Summer prep starts very soon.

If you're evaluating land and asking yourself whether it has the bones to become a legitimate trophy producer, here's what you need to look for.

1. Diverse, Year-Round Food Sources

Whitetails are calorie-driven animals, and matu...

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Fire built the Midwest. For thousands of years, periodic wildfire and intentional burns set by Native Americans shaped the prairies, savannas, and open woodlands that defined this landscape. The tallgrass prairies of Missouri, the oak savannas of Illinois, the grasslands of Iowa and Kansas — all of them evolved with fire and depend on it to stay healthy.

Today, less than one percent of the Midwest's original native prairie remains. Without fire, woody invasives creep in, dead thatch smothers new growth, and the diverse plant communities that support whitetail deer, wild turkey, bobwhite quail, and countless other species slowly disappear. Conservationists call this process the "green glacier" — and it's one of the biggest threats to rural land quality in our region.

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If you're an estate planner, financial advisor, or CPA working with high-net-worth families, you've probably noticed something: land is different. It doesn't behave like a stock portfolio. It doesn't move like residential real estate. And it certainly doesn't feel like a bond. Yet most advisors treat it the same way they'd treat any other illiquid asset—with a referral to a generalist agent and a hope that things will work out. They usually don't.

Over my years working with families, advisors, and institutions across the St. Louis region, I've learned that land isn't just another asset class to liquidate. It's a category unto itself—one with unique risks, hidden complexities, and surprisingly high stakes. And if you're advising clients who hold significant land or farmland, you need to understand why treating it differently isn't optional. It's essential.

Why Land Is Fundamentally Different

Let me start with the obvious: land is illiquid

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