Northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) is one of the many grassland bird species that have undergone precipitous declines. Stronghold populations persist in regions that undergo active management and retain small-scale agriculture (< 20% of a property). Within these landscapes, the value of fields to birds is in part driven by crop choice that determines the available food and cover resources within a field. We used arthropod sampling and a molecular technique to investigate the effect of prescribed fire, seasonal disking and agricultural crops on the arthropod prey and diet of bobwhite broods. We found that bobwhite broods did not consume arthropods proportionally to their abundance. Prescribed fire, disking of fallow fields and crop choice affected local arthropod biomass. We determined that the proportion of varying land covers within an estimated foraging range influenced the probability of arthropod orders occurring in the diet of bobwhite broods.