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 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 (which is plenty
of work in itself) then 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 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:
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. Excavators can get very high leverage, and are the most
efficient at burying the results, but the track loader makes the best
all-around clearing machine.
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
mature tree stumps (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.
