" Clearing Land for Pasture" by Neil Shelton

Land clearing is serious business. The trees you are about to remove may well be a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty years old, especially if they're growing in less than ideal conditions. Once the clearing is done, your land will need consistent annual effort to keep it from growing up in brush and weeds. If you don't plan well, both for getting the clearing done and for keeping the land clear, then you risk losing your time, your sizable investment and perhaps a century-old forest. Think it over before you clear.

Stripped to the essentials, there are two ways to clear land: by hand or by machine. That's if you've never done much clearing by hand. If you have, then you may very well feel that the only way is by machine.

Some people will suggest a third method: goats, but I'd warn you that this method is much more popular among those who haven't tried it yet. Goats aren't going to eliminate anything much over four or five feet high, and despite what you may have seen in the comics, they can be rather finicky eaters if they don't happen to cotton to what you want to get rid of. Goats are a good solution for keeping cleared land cleared, but not for clearing it in the first place.

If youve only got a tiny patch of ground to clear, and it doesnt matter how long it takes, then by all means do it by hand. Youll save quite a bit of money, get a quite a lot of exercise, and youll also be treating yourself to quite an education in the process. If you actually ever get finished, you probably will choose to hire equipment if there ever is a next time.

Of course, its up to each person to decide how big a piece of ground has to be before its considered more than a tiny patch. If youre thinking that clearing land only means going out with a chain-saw and cutting down several trees (which is plenty of work in itself) then youll be getting the full helping of acquired education.

Personally, my acquired education on the subject tells me that the only amount of land where clearing by hand is worth the time and effort is in situations where machinery would not have room to work without damaging buildings or other desirable trees and plants in the process. In other words, pretty small places.

Using machinery, you can go from dense forest to pasture or garden soil, in about two years time.

GETTING RID OF THE TREES

Your biggest single expense will probably be what you spend to take the trees down. In the case of small acreages with small timber to be cleared, it may be that you would save money by hiring one of the smaller bulldozers the size of the Caterpillar D3 or the John Deere 450 but if you have over two acres of mature trees to be removed, bigger is almost always better.

There are three machines you can hire to remove grown trees:

Read more:
" Clearing Land for Pasture" by Neil Shelton