Clearing Land for Pasture

By Neil Shelton

A track-loader clearing tall oaks

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.

If you’ve only got a tiny patch of ground to clear, and it doesn’t matter how long it takes, then by all means do it by hand. You’ll save quite a bit of money, get a quite a lot of exercise and you’ll 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, it’s up to each person to decide how big a piece of ground has to be before it’s considered more than a tiny patch. If you’re thinking that clearing land only means going out with a chain-saw and cutting down several trees, you’ll 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, if that’s your goal, 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:

a bulldozer ,

track-loader ,

or excavator .

Of the three, there are more bulldozers available for hire in most areas than the other two. Track loaders, if you can find one, are probably the most cost-effective because they can push from higher on the tree, thus gaining quite a bit of leverage.

If the timber you’re clearing is predominately made up of valuable species like white oak, walnut, red oak or hickory, straight and tall enough to yield at least one 8-foot log per tree, then you should locate someone to buy the logs. You may not make a lot of money, but the wood will go to some useful purpose and you’ll have a lot less material to dispose of afterward. If this is what you want to do, you’ll want to have your operator push all the trees over so the loggers can cut them up on the ground. This is really critical, because even very large bulldozers or loaders cannot push out stumps of any size (no leverage) so if the loggers come first, and fell all the trees leaving stumps in the ground, they’ll have to be dug out, which is very, very time consuming.

How many hours of machine time your clearing will take depends on a lot of variables including the size of the timber, the slope of the terrain and the rockiness of the ground, but you should probably count on it taking approximately twice as long as you expect.

If the woods you want to clear is mostly brush: too tall to bush-hog but no marketable timber, you might consider hiring a skid-loader with a tree-shear (see photo). Operators of these tend to charge about

A tree shear mounted on a skid-loader

half to two-thirds as much per hour as a bulldozer and in some cases can save you quite a lot of money. They also save on topsoil loss since the trees are clipped off about flush with the ground instead of pushing out the roots and carrying the whole thing to a pile as with a bulldozer. You need to remember that these stumps will sucker until you find a way to kill them.

GETTING RID OF THE TRASH

In the past, when land has been cheap and money in short supply, the slash and stumps were just pushed up into a pile and left there for the ages (stuff like this takes a very long time to rot). You can do this too, but it's better to get rid of the brush for a number of obvious reasons. The best way to do this, unless you have access to some pretty large and expensive equipment like a smoke-less combustor or a large tub grinder, is to burn everything you can and bury the rest.

Needless to say, burning has it's risks. Not only do brush piles of mature trees make a very hot fire (for a few hours) but they can smolder and hold hot coals for over a week. A fire that looks like only so much burned coal and ashes can spread far and fast if a wind comes up. In other words, you need to be prepared to keep close tabs on your fire for five to ten days and not completely dismiss it's potential danger until you can run your bare hand through the ashes. I like to keep a few gallons of water close at hand all the time I have a fire going and either a back-pack sprayer or a gardener's watering can for application.

While it is not completely impossible to burn tree stumps, it is very difficult, even with equipment, and most people prefer to cut them from the trunk of the tree after they've been felled, then bury them. Alternatively, you can haul them to be dumped somewhere else, where they can be put to some good uses, such as providing fish habitat at the bottom of your pond, or as erosion control in bare hollows and ditches. I've even seen rather attractive fences made from tree stumps, less the dirt in the root ball, lined up so that the roots make an barrier to traffic. Of course, if you can get the dirt out the root ball, you might as well burn them.

PREPARING THE A SEEDBED

After your bulldozing is completed and the brush piles burned, what's left isn't very pretty. If you had large trees pushed out, then you'll have gaping holes that can swallow a large tractor wheel, not to mention lots of rocks, roots and ditches. Since you're presumably going to be using this ground for a long, long while, you need to smooth out the high and low-spots, pick up the rocks and remove or kill all the roots that can turn into brush in a short time.

People with plenty of resources generally use a road grader or six-way dozer to do this job, but if you have the use of a farm tractor (the bigger the better, but most any size will do) you can pile or windrow the rocks and roots with a trash rake. A straight blade or box blade will probably come in handy as well.

Finally, you'll want to smooth and till your future field with a disk harrow. When you've done this, you should have a smooth bed without too many rocks, ready to accept your seed.

SEEDING YOUR PASTURE

You may be thinking that, if you're not clearing the land for pasture, then you can just stop there, but remember that whatever your intentions for your land, you need some plan to prevent erosion

At this stage, most ranchers will seed the area with a cover crop, something like winter wheat or rye that will grow up over the fall and winter, to be disked under for "green manure" in the spring. This is a good policy because it further pulverizes the seedbed and adds organic content to the soil as well as limiting erosion.

Finally, it's time to seed your pasture.

As with so many things these days, this is a subject that is fraught with controversy. That's because of tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea). Tall Fescue is by far the most popular pasture grass in all areas of the United States where it grows well, that is, most of the eastern United States. In fact, there are 40 million acres of American grassland devoted to Tall Fescue. Fescue grows well on a wide variety of soils and persists despite low pH and poor fertility. Individual plants grow as a bunch grass, but aggressive self-seeding quickly results in dense sod. These traits make fescue an attractive choice for lawn, pasture or erosion control plantings, but fescue is also especially prized by landowners for its ability to bounce-back after drought or heavy grazing.

Unfortunately, there are some problems associated with fescue. Problems with foaling mares in particular, and with "fescue toxicosis" in grazing animals. Further, fescue grows so well in so many different soils that it is considered "invasive".

We'll not spend too much time on the controversy here, but I have included some links below that may help you make up your mind as to whether to plant fescue or not. You shouldn't decide one way or another until you've thoroughly investigated both the advantages and disadvantages of fescue for your situation.

KEEPING IT THAT WAY

Finally, you've bulldozed your trees, burned the slash, tilled and seeded the ground. Now the long-term work begins.

Plan on bush-hogging your field at least once every two years, annually is better, lest it starts to revert to forest. You may also want to consider "selective" herbicides that kill broadleaf plants (i.e. weeds, but ignore or even encourage grass to grow. Of the two, bush-hogging is by far the cheaper method, not to mention being a lot more ecologically friendly and far more predictable.