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Food to Feed White Tail Deer

White tail deer, like other deer, are herbivores or plant-eaters. Their diet is dependent on the habitat that they live in and the season. People often set up deer feeders or place food outside to encourage deer to spend time in a certain area for wildlife viewing or hunting purposes. White tail deer will consume a wide range of foods from nuts to twigs. They require five to eight pounds of food per 100 pounds of body weight each day to maintain their weight, according to New York Antler Outdoors.

Fruits and Nuts
- Whitetail deer enjoy wild apples and persimmons -- fruits that typically grow in the wild. They also like to feed on nuts such as pecans, hickory nuts, beech nuts and carbohydrate-rich acorns. Whitetail deer seem to prefer retrieving and eating white oak acorns from the ground instead of red oak acorns, most likely because of the sweeter flavor the white oak acorns possess.
Cultivated Vegetables and Fruits
- Whitetail deer enjoy eating vegetables from crops such as sweet potatoes, soybeans, potatoes, beans, wheat, rye, oats. Farmers will often find deer feeding in and on the edges of their crop land. Homeowners may be bothered by deer coming into their gardens for food. Orchard owners may have deer visit to eat fallen apples.
Wild Plants and Grasses
- Flowering weeds and non-woody perennials make up a certain percentage of a whitetail deer's diet. Deer can often be seen feeding in fields that are rich with wildflowers in the springtime. Red clover, wild roses and dandelions are part of the whitetail's diet when it can find them. The deer will graze on wild plants and grasses in forested areas that afford them concealment as well as nutrition.
Corn and Hay
- You can provide chopped corn kernels sweetened with molasses or whole kernel corn as a food to supplement the whitetail's natural diet. It can be spread on the ground or placed in a deer feeder for distribution. Clover, alfalfa and trefoil are appropriate varieties of hay to feed whitetail deer. Hay that's fed to horses, such as timothy and orchard grass, is not an appropriate food source.
Other Foods
- During the winter season when vegetation is low in some areas, whitetail deer will eat fallen twigs, leaves and buds -- whatever they can forage for nutrition. They will also eat wild mushrooms, even those that are poisonous to humans. The male deer's body drains its reserves of calcium and phosphorus to create antlers, while the female's body draws upon those same minerals when she becomes pregnant. Some people place mineral blocks on the ground for deer to lick or place commercial deer feed with a high protein content in deer feeders to counteract the natural depletion of the minerals.

Animals & Science