Clearing the pasture of locust trees. I have a loader mounted tree shear which makes cutting them down easy. I have a 42 hp Brush Bandit
chipper which grinds them up. But getting those devils into the
chipper is hard work, and slow. Maybe chipping isn't worth it, but I was doing that to avoid large piles laying around. What do other folks do with trash trees cleared out of pastures? I can't burn safely, I'm afraid of starting the county on fire. After I get through the locust, I've got about 50 acres of 3-10 ft cedars to clear; those are much easier to feed into the
chipper.
When i started re-clearing my land (it had been bull dozed about 10 years before, but then ignored afterwards) I was very wary of burning. But I developed my own little system of burning which, while quite slow and labor intensive, disposed of hundreds and hundreds of cedars/saplings/whatever leaving little trace of their existance.
I would cut and and haul all of the cedars and pile them in one pile, and everything else in another pile, and I would burn (always in the same spot) between the two piles. the cedars, with just 2 or 3 weeks of drying, would go up like torches, and I would use them to "layer" the other other stuff which generally did not burn as well.
I would feed the fire manually, pulling from both piles as necessary, and so I could control how big the fire got. Sometimes I would allow the fire to burn down, and then re-arange unburned trunks and stumps, and then pile on more fuel.
I always had a few buckets of water around, but by keeping the fire small, by always burning on the same spot (so there was no ground cover to burn), and by burning on a Saturday when I would be spending the night, and not departing and leaving the ashes unattended, I never had any problems.
I should add that the biggest trees I was dealing with were about 4 or 5 inches diameter; by far the most numerous were the Ozarks cedars (which i am told are not really cedars, but that's what everyone calls them- I burned hundreds and hundreds of them over 3 years)
EDITED TO ADD: The main thing is to watch the wind- you don't want to be burning on a windy day. At least where I was, morning was always less windy than afternoon.