[Tororider]

If you give us some more info on the type of soil and specific trees you are taking down we can probably give you better advice. That being said.

I have a 32hp JD 4310, 28.5hp at the pto, so a similar sized tractor to what you are thinking about. I just cleared about a half acre of my property for a food plot. Most of the trees I took out were not 12", in fact I only had to pull say less than twenty stumps even close to that size so it is do-able, but if you are going to have to do a lot of trees that size it is a lot of work. On most of the bigger ones it took both my dad and I, one on the tractor pushing the stumps with the FEL and the other, normally me, on the ground with an axe watching to see where the main roots needed to be chopped out. You could do this by yourself, but if you had someone to help you it would make things infinitely easier and less time consuming. I would love a backhoe and you can find numerous threads on here talking about their usefulness. From what I have heard and read, not firsthand knowledge, a backhoe would make digging out stumps a much more manageable task, no axing sounds like a good thing to me!

If you get a brushhog you can take care of trees about 2-3" and smaller. The brushhog would also work for the thickets but you would run into problems with the vines tangling around the blades. If the vines only run 8' high there is a possibility you could push/pull them down with the front end loader. Ours grow at least 30' into the air but are not thick so I am able to single out individual vines and tackle them that way. I think if I had to try and move a mass of vines it would be problematic.

Hope that helps.