</font><font color="blue" class="small">( Thanks for the voices of experience. After bush hogging a field of brush, you leave a field of stubble, many of which are still rooted in the ground.
Would discing loosen these up enough to rake out or would you have to chisel plow running fairly shallow before raking. Trying to decide what implements we will need to buy to make all this happen as efficiently as possible, keeping in mind the budget constraints. )</font>
If you really want to do this on a budget, just keep it mowed. The stubble will eventually rot. This may take a couple of years. I've got a couple acres of pasture which were fairly densly overgrown with 1" saplings (and a couple larger). Repeated mowings have turned it into a field of grass/clover (it was a pasture years before I bought the land). After 1 year, it was still pretty rough. Now (4 years later) you are hard pressed to find any of the old 1" stumps. This area does tend to be on the wet side, so that may have helped the rotting process along...
The real trick with this is how to seed it to something you want. I did not need to seed it... the grass/clover came in naturally. But if you do need to seed, you'f probably want to scrape things up a but. You could try the scarifiers on a box blade (I happen to own a boxblade, so I may be suffering from the old saying: "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"). Another alternative would be to try to rototill it. A a 3 pt hitch rototiller can be expensive to buy, but you can generally rent them.
John Mc
