Clearing Old Cutover / 150 acres

[paulharvey]

Is cutting fire breaks and doing a controlled burn out of the question? If you only have limited 6" material I would think a controlled burn would take care of everything (except pine trees) 4" and under. You would probably need to buy or hire a good sized dozer or 80+hp tractor and disk/plow some sizable fire lines and burn maybe 20 acres at a time.

 

[t320pilot]

A control burn is Really good for the soil. The thing is, that the small trees and underbrush will still be standing. Most of it will be very rigid for quite awhile. Especially the 4 - 6" diameter trees.

 

[tonyoz]

crossroadsd, if the photo's shown in your first post are indicative of the vegetation of want cleared then I would recommend mulching for the following reasons.
1; It is lightly vegetated so you will only get a very light cover of mulch and the grasses you want should appear fairly quickly.
2; Zero till should be easy if you want to reseed.
3; If you want to do this work your self, I suggest using a wheel tractor (farm type) around 200hp and PTO driven mulcher (Fecon, FAE can supply). After the land is cleared you can sell the mulcher and keep the tractor for all the other duties on your on your farm. Buying a used dedicated mulcher can have some serious pitfalls and some can be bad enough new.
4; Because it's lightly vegetated a dozer will have to push timber a fair way to make a decent heap and in doing so will create quite a lot of ground disturbance.
5; Quality isn't expensive, it's priceless.

I wish you well with your project and look forward to your updates however you decide to do it :thumbsup:

 

[CarlR2010]

. Buying a used dedicated mulcher can have some serious pitfalls

Tony, you may have a point here! Red, can you think of any challenges in used mulchers? :laughing: Seems like maybe I've read something somewhere...:laughing: Carl

 

[redprospector]

Tony, you may have a point here! Red, can you think of any challenges in used mulchers? :laughing: Seems like maybe I've read something somewhere...:laughing: Carl

Challenges? What challenges? I can't think of any challenges I could have had with used machines. :laughing:
Really though, I walked into my Fecon with both eyes open. I bought it cheap enough that I could afford to put a new engine in it. Unfortunately, these things always happen at the most inopportune time....And besides that, there's nothing like stripping a machine down to it's bare skeleton to give you an intimate understanding of it's inner workings. :laughing:
Brand new machines can be challenging at times as well. You may not remember my adventure with a Terex PT-100G.

 

[UncleBuck1]

Spray it then burn it would get rid of a bunch of that.

I'm in the same boat as the OP (but on a smaller scale) and need to clean up about 25 acres of cutover that I want to put into pasture.

After a bunch of research I went with the spray and burn approach. Everything was sprayed a few months ago ($85 per acre) and is set to be burned soon ($25 per acre). Far cheaper than either mulching or a dozer with a shear blade and no topsoil disturbance issues.

 

[redprospector]

I don't know how a burn would work where the OP lives, but this was burned in a forest fire 13 years ago.
Not near as much rot as you'd think either.


Look into it good before choosing a burn to create a clearcut. You could have this kind of stuff to deal with too.

 

[ShearHeadMS]

That's alot of snags to cut hahahah!!!

 

[redprospector]

Yes sir it is.
Here's the stuff off of about 6 acres that was to hard to mulch.

The rest of it mulched up pretty good.

 

[ShearHeadMS]

I'll tell ya what Red!! I wish our operator with that bron could make half of his work look like that!! Did ya haul the logs of for anything merchantable?