I have finished tearing out about 8 acres of small trees. I burned the brush, trees, and stumps. Now i have clear land, except for all the bits of tree, root, etc laying everywhere. There are lengths of tree(branches, roots, small trunks) up to several feet long laying everywhere. What is the best way to get ride of this leftover wood, so i can start farming the land?
Perhaps a tractor or truck with a Haro, its like a heavy duty large rake. And/or a machine with a Thumb on the bucket for the larger stuff. What equipment do you have?
Hi Watglen, In the beginning the less you have to roll the trees around the easier it will be to clean up the mess. The roots can be brought to the surface with a ripper and the limbs and brush can be rounded up with a brush rake.
There is also the old fashion method...get 2 - 4 people and trailer; drive slow while they throw the limbs and such on it. Depending on the trash it can be very efficient.
Take a field cultivator or chisel plow that has the shanks close together. Drag over your land. It won't take long for it to "Ball Up". Sometime 50 to 100 feet. :Banghead When it does head for the turn row. You will probably have to get off your tractor and stomp the trash out of your plow. Then go again. Makes for a long day but works pretty good.
That's what i'm going to have to try. I was looking at it again last night. The area is a mixture of stump holes, tall grass, wood trash, dirt/ash piles. Oh yeah, and water and mud in the low spots. I just know the grass will plug the cultivator, and the wood will jam a disk, and the dirt piles will have to be leveled first. I NEED A DOZER! This is gonna to take some doin'
ok, i tried my 3pt hitch chisel plow. Teeth are in 2 ranks, around 1' spacing. The end result is the machine plugs with grass in just feet. If it doesn't plug with grass and sod, it pulls up all the trash and leaves it behind. I will try the disk tomorrow, to see what it does with the sod, but i just know the wood is going to jamb the blades. A dozer and root rake seems to be the only way.The ground is so rough its not fit for anything 'cept tracks. I am going to look at building some sort of rake for my CAT 257b multi-terrain loader. At least it has tracks. Any thoughts on tine spacing?
Hi watglen, Type in Fleco Attachments and go to rakes. They make a quality product that works. That will give you an idea what a brush rake looks like.
Without seeing what you have I may be way off, but how about taking this in layers of trash so to speak. Take your chisel plow back there and do not set it down in the dirt more than an inch if possible. Then rake up the wood trash and get it out of the way for the disk. If you have a subsoiler those shanks normally are thinner than chisel plow shanks and will cut through grass or roots better. It might be you need to make more than one pass with the chisel plow before you try to disk it. If you clog up with grass you might be able to back up with plow on the grow and back out from under the grass and if little dirt in it come back and burn the piles.
+1 Don't try to work the ground, just pull the plow to pick up the trash. BTW it's going to take a while. If you have a lot of green grass round up it and let it die. If you just run one row of shanks it makes it a lot easier to get the trash out. Once you disc it and throw dirt on the debris it's going to be harder to do something with.
When I was youngster , they would fence in and put livestock on it, hoofs and manure would get it ready - Sometimes the county also had a huge bog ? harrow( 22" scalloped disks) that you could borrow . Put on as much weight as possible, and usually had to be towed with dozer. harrow would cut up- kick up small stumps
Is this a bog plow? http://www.romeplow.com/tmr.html
Thats it
Just wondering, should you include in the how to handle stress contain "unless electric fence" It is right funny.
I would use a brush grapple. The one I have has tooth spacing of about 7 inches, justs bolts onto a bucket. Good for everything from twigs & grass to larger sticks and even logs. Very handy!
We use a Kobelco ED 150 bladerunner. Awesome for clearing land. Hoe and Dozer in one really nice unit. Cant replace a dozer but sure does a nice job for a Hoe.
From one farmer to another. If you want it done fast and right, here is what you need. A dozer and root rake would be ideal for the primary sweeping and grading. How level is the area to clear? Alternatively a small tracked skid steer with root rake would work as well but would be much slower. Since we have our own hoe and dozer, once the 8ac is windrowed in a mess of sticks and dirt, I'd go through and shake it all out with the hoe and root rake and pile everything. It will actually burn this way. Once you have raked it with the root rake go through a chisel plow at about 8 inches deep. This will loosen everything else that is there. If you are bringing up a lot of big sticks you might have to rake with the dozer again. If not you can go to the next step. You need a stone rake and a stone picker and just keep at it. Use the stone rake to windrow the stones/sticks/roots and the stone picker to pick up the windrows and pile them in the fencerow. Chisel plow again and repeat until you are satisfied. Should have to pass the stone rake and stone picker 2 times. This is optional but we then pass our LaSole land plane to give a very nice finished look and make a nice smooth seed bed that you can actually no-til your crop into the following year. Pic1: D5M and rake Pic2: T7060 with 10ft chisel plow Pic3: Stone picker and stone rake Pic4: 6200 with stone picker doing finishing pass Pic5: 9250 with 36ft land plane
Total Equipment cost per acre: $27,500.00:drinkup I couldn't resist. If it's only 8 acres the flatbed trailer is a good idea. If you will take a piece of plywood and bolt some flat metal on two corners where you can hook a chain. You can drag most of the stuff off your trailer once your loaded. Sometimes this cuts the work in about half and sometimes this about doubles it. I friend of mine limed 40 acres with a truckbed trailer and a shovel when he was a kid. They dumped the lime out by the house and every afternoon he would shovel a load on and go out behind the house and spread it by hand. Their farm needed Limed and that's what he had to work with. I guess the moral of the story is, the "want to" is more important than having the right equipment sometimes.
True. However, short of the dozer and the land plane, pretty well every farmer has all the equipment I mentioned. Why hand pick if you don't have too? Actually, I can clear my own land for about 5-600$/ac. That is ready to plant, not ready to pick sticks. Warren
Rake
Its called a "Father" I think he thought it would build character......
It might have been to keep you sober and off the streets. ROTFL :notworthy There is such a thing as "Economy of Scale" Just like you wouldn't "Pick up Sticks" clearing a 1,000 acres when your only clearing 8 acres you need to look around and use what you have or can borrow IMO.
Been there, done that, rocks as well as sticks, 'down to the size of your fist, boy'! Rn'R.
Ok Roddyo. Smaller then without touching anything. Every farmer has a loader tractor. Buy a stone bucket for it. 1500 dollars. 190$/ac plus 1 man labour (15$/hr). I can easily completely pick 3 acres of sticks/stones with a stone bucket in a 8 hour day. So 40$/ac labour. Plus fuel. That depends on the tractor and price where you are. Lets say $60/day. Or 20$/ac. So mechanical cost is 250$/ac. 4 guys, at 15$/hr. Can 4 guys pick an acre a day? That would be border line and a lot of sore backs. Certainly won't be very happy with you after the 8th acre rolls around. But for argument sake lets assume 1ac/day. 8 hour day. That is 960$/ac to pick by hand. Plus you **** off your hired hands. Labour is NOT cheap. Tractors don't get disgruntled and always show up the next day. Tractors work at a constant pace. Tractors have a/c, air ride seats and radio. Keeping employees is hard enough, don't make it harder by making them do unnecessary work that is going to cost you a lot more. Picking by hand should be a last resort in anything bigger than an acre. Pic1: 6110 with stone bucket, small tractor, very common size on almost all farms Pic2: TV-140 with wider heavier stone bucket. Pic3: A300 bobcat with Houle Stone bucket.
Root Rake I think we already covered that in post #7 Watglen was talking about making some kind of a root rake for his skid steer. That's a great idea if he wants to do it. We was all giving him advice on how to clean it up without buying any equipment. Picking up chunks by hand, Using a Chisel Plow for a Root Rake or Looking for a stopping point, running a Bog Plow over it and calling it good is something almost everyone that has cleared land for 10 or 20 years has done at some point. Granted all these methods were "Hi-Tech" in the 70's. and there is a lot better tools today than we had back then, the old ways still work. It's true, you can't pay someone to pick up chuncks. It's also true that alot of people can't or won't spend $2,000.00 or so for a piece of equipment that they feel they really don't need. If that's the case, 2 people with a 16 foot trailer can pick up a lot of chuncks in a weekend or two. Especially if they have kids. Some people call this "Sweat Equity".
I bought a 185 acre farm last year, cleared 20 acres with my own excavator, chisel plow root rake and disc. With renting dozer, etc one thing I have come to realize is its cheaper to buy ground than to clear it - at least around here. I only farm part time so time is precious. I still have about 12 acres to go. This area was logged, so I have a million stumps. Am thinking about hiring someone with a big dozer and cutting blade. They claim you can cut the stumps, save your topsoil and still plant on top of it - you just can't knife in N, or work the ground - which we no-till anyway. Any thoughts? The thought of digging up all those stumps and burying them just wears me out.
Some good thoughts have been shared here and one thing should be very obvious there is more than one way to handle this. However ask them for referrals and go talk to at least two people who they did this for and ask them. Oh, do be sure those two were farming before they planted land cleared this way,they can then tell you advantage and disadvantage compared to the person who did their only planting on land cleared this way. I am not saying this does not make sense and will not work...but think a lot of it will depend on the size of the stumps your field has. There is no way I would try to plant over say a 2 foot stump as sooner or later it rots and that may not be pleasant to run a tire unknowing there is a hole there. This is from experienced with our lawn as we had stumps like that ground below grade and covered and then had holes show up as they rotted.
"4 guys, at 15$/hr. Can 4 guys pick an acre a day?" To begin with I believe only the OP knows what his trash really is. So it may be way to much to even consider my suggestion of picking it up to it may only take 2 people an hour to do so. But the one thing I do know is there is not just one right way and the suggestions are that, suggestions. As someone so well pointed out...your attitude and what you have plays a large part in anything. A small farm owner and operator who has no FEL. Do have two tobacco barns, does that make up for that?
Enviroset, you can't get a bulldozer big enough to cut off stumps with a blade. A stump is what you hook up your winch line up to pull your D8 out of a swamp. Depending on the size of them. They are very strong, and are mother nature's perfect anchor.
The cutter blade will work it's just hard on equipment in stumps and you might have to pay a little extra. The reason it's so hard to cut stumps is you don't have the leverage of the tree to help. The best way I know to explain it is like trying to cut a loose piece of rope vs a tight piece rope or one in a bend. I hope that's clear as mud. I wouldn't want to take a very nice no till drill in there though. But if i did, I would be running it myself, I would hope I had GPS, If I didn't I still wouldn't put my markers down and getting over 12 acres would be a pretty big day IMO.
Watglen I have in my fleet of toys a brush mulcher. Think of it as an 8' stump grinder on tracks, it would have walked around the 8 acres in probably a day or two cut down and mulched tree and stump in to the ground leaving only wood chips and buried roots.
How to clear usable farm land quick and easy Watglen I have in my fleet of toys a brush mulcher. Think of it as an 8' stump grinder on tracks, it would have walked around the 8 acres in probably a day or two cut down and mulched tree and stump in to the ground leaving only wood chips and buried roots. BRON