Fence LIne cleared in Woodruff

[todd K]

just bought 96 acres of land in woodruff, needing fence line cleared. Mostly small ( 5 inch ) hardwoods and sporatic, so not very dense in most areas. trying to avoid cutting down the larger stuff by just going around. Looking to have someone with forestry cutter of some sort do the fence line of basically 10,000 feet. mostly level or low rolling hills. loggers want to clear cut, I just want fence line cleared, then the scrub brush/small trees inner acres cleared with leaving the large trees intact. Any recommendations on who to call and pricing. dont need stumps removed.. just mulch cut will be fine.

 

[deerseeker001]

Welcome from Wisconsin

 

[mguitas]

:welcome:

 

[Sysop]

I'm planning on getting a BushHog RMB-1445 for my tractor to deal with the same sort of chore... Gives a 14' reach to a flail mower and they do a great job of shredding and mulching everything in their paths. Perhaps you might want to consider something similar.

 

[Briana03]

Welcome to TractorByNet!

We moved your thread to the Projects forum.

 

[Gary Fowler]

From your first picture, a 50 HP or larger tractor with FEL and bush hog should take care of that. Any thing too large for the bush hog can be pushed over with the FEL on a larger tractor. Even better would be to bush hog all you can get then get a backhoe in to dig out any tree that the bush hog leaves that is in the way of a straight line for the fence. We cleared the back side of our fence line with my B26 TLB and my brother in law with his NH 2030 CUT and bush hog. It had lot of small stuff with over grown vines that I just pushed back into the woods with the B26 since the NH had a cab and the vines were taller than the tractor. I dug up lots of smaller pines and a few larger pines that were 10+" in diameter at the base and 30 feet tall. It took a couple of days to clear out 1/4 mile of fence row 20 or more feet wide. There was also a lot of dead and down timber that had to be pushed back into the wood line.

 

[rd_macgregor]

There are lots of ways this could be done, ranging from hand tools to big-time, heavy-duty machinery (Aside: In the Owning/Operating section, there is a thread on "Bush Hogging the forest". I think a forestry mulcher would be great for this application, ie, when the trees get above 3" or 4" in dia, where a regular bush hog or flail mower would struggle.) I suspect a bush hog might be problematic both because some of the trees are kind of large and because you want to maneuver around some larger ones; I haven't found a bush hog to be a precision instrument. There are lots of toys, er tools, available that might help. Mowers/flails, tree shears, Piranha tooth bar, grapple rake, ratchet rake all have their uses depending on the size and accessibility of the shrubbery.
Unless you want to pay for equipment able to handle the biggest of the material you want to remove, it will take some maneuvering and implement switching to get the job done; the flexibility of a skid-steer with a mulching head would make this easier, but it might not be the cheapest way to go.
Finally, when you say "fence line" do you mean there is actually a fence there (there are lots of threads on wrapping fence wire in equipment!). I'd hate to run a chainsaw, mower, flail or mulcher into a wire fence.
Bob