Hello BeeJay42,
Candidly; with your needs, I am afraid a 7 foot flail shredder
with cast hammer knives will not be heavy enough to do
your clearing.
Backing over this type of brush trying to mow it even with a
mower in the rear invites heavy brush being driven into a
radiator or coolant hoses.
What you require for this is work a FECON Forestry Mulcher.
This machine will be able to mulch the trees and heavy brush in
one pass below the ground level so you never have to deal with
them again and shred everything the first time.
Renting a FECON self propelled track drive mulcher will let you
work in comfort for very long periods and at night then refuel
and grease the machine as needed.
Renting a forestry mower which is a heavy rotary cutter mounted
on a timber skidder loader is an option, but anything hit by the
forestry mower can and will travel hundreds of yards simply due
to the speed of the forestry mowers rotary blades.
Added to this if there are persons, animals or residences nearby
people can be killed or impaled by the projectiles ejected by the mower.
There are many instances of this occurring with rotary cutters.
The 60 acres of scrub you mention in your writing is not very much in
total acreage to deal with. especially since it is new growth on crop land.
You could break it up into 15 acre blocks to do the land clearing using a
forestry mulcher to clear it economically for you.
You will need to plan your shredding work working from the center of
each 15 acre block and working in a spiral pattern to save time and
fuel as backing up and turning around to do the next pass will take
much more time when clearing.
You will be able to overlap and shred the thicker brush again needed.
Using the forestry mulcher will be faster and easier as they are designed
to do this and it will be able to chip up entire trees that you break up and
push down with the mulching head while driving over them.
You will have no need for a PTO powered wood
chipper when you are running
the forestry mulcher.
Limbs the size you mention are too large for PTO powered mulchers and
require a motorized wood
chipper with a hydraulic loading arm.
Again I must empathize that the self propelled forestry mulcher will do all of
this for you in one pass.
Please understand I am not trying to spend your money; I only want you to
have zero problems as using your Massey Ferguson 285 row crop utility tractor
as it is not ment for this type of work even with a flail shredder.
Once you have the 60 acres of scrub shredded and mowed down
with the forestry mulcher you will be able to buy the right flail crop shredder
to maintain it.
The one time rental cost of a self propelled mulcher can be added to the value of
the 86 acres of land as a maintenance cost to make it tillable again.
You will find that it will take less time to clear the land than you think using a
forestry mulcher of the right width.
I only wish to help you, not get in your way.
A one time rental of a forestry mulcher will save you hundreds of hours of manual labor
as clearing brush with a small machine is very intensive expensive work as the small
flail crop shredder mowers will break as they are not ment for this work.
The cost of repairs for damage from heavy brush can and will be expensive.
If you can rent a self propelled forestry mulcher for 7 days you may have this 60 acre
block of scrub land cleared to your satisfaction and mulching all the weed trees below
the ground as you encounter them and the land will be tillable this year.
Leon
Edited for proper grammar, punctuation mistakes and sentence structure 2/26/23.
