The other day I posted on this forum about buying a 2000 Caterpillar 315BL excavator (with mechanical thumb) that was being sold locally here in Northern Michigan. The owner's price was $35,000 and had 9,400 hours on it. Many responded to my post indicating the unit was considered too small for clearing 50 acres of land and the mechanical thumb would not be ideal for such an operation. In addition, a unit with 9,400 hours could potentially be a money pit due to the high operation hours. Thought I post some specific info about the land I would like to clear and hopefully the guru's would be able to provide some recommendations/opinions as to what type, size of heavy equipment would be the ideal tool for my land clearing endeavor. My objective is to turn approximately 50 acres of woodland into a silvopasture for a small herd of Scottish Highlands (15 head). A silvopasture is a forested area where enough trees are thinned out (stumps removed) so an adequate amount of sunlight can reach the forest floor and support plant growth the cows could use as forage. Plants could include any natural shrubs, weeds, small poplar/aspen trees, maple shoots, or perhaps planted grass. The total acreage of the property is 75 acres and most of the soil is a silt loam (can be bouldery too). Within this acreage, there's about 50 acres of forested and select logged land that I'd like to utilize for grazing my 15 head of Scottish Highland cattle. In the future, the herd size will grow as well. The first picture is an aerial view that shows the 75 acres and several outlined sections I would like to use heavy equipment to clear and make into silvopasture. The 30 Acre section was select logged about around 2017. Most of the mature Red Oak were left and anything else that wasn't worth harvesting is still standing. Ideally, I'd like to remove all the scrap trees (small pine/spruce/balsam fir) and anything else not deemed a long term potential quality saw log. I probably wouldn't use the pine/balsam wood for anything but if it was hardwood, I could cut it up for firewood. Left over stumps could be removed too. I'd need to clear the perimeter of all stumps/slash and install a high tensile electric fence. I'll attach some pictures what this 30 acres looked like last fall. Once my cattle are in this area, they would forage most of the small poplar/aspen trees as well as maple shoots growing from the left over maple stumps. In effect, my cattle would help me in clearing this land. The next section of land consists of 8 acres that consists mostly of dead/dying White Spruce and Balsam Fir with some maple or red oak hardwoods scattered within. I estimate that over 80% of the spruce/balsam fir is either dead or dying. Many of the trees have fallen over and lay on the ground. The objective is to remove all the dead trees/stumps and leave anything that has the potential to be a good saw log. After thinning this out, I'd use the area for my cattle grazing. Another section is 8 acres that is primarily maple/red oak hardwoods. I'd clear all the small non-quality hardwood trees (used for firewood) and only leave the best trees standing. The idea is to open up the canopy to get enough sunlight to reach the forest floor. Finally, on this property is a 2 acre Red Pine plantation that was thinned out about 7 years ago. All the leftover stumps would need to be removed. In the future, I'd harvest the larger pines and saw them into lumber with my sawmill.
Pics of 8 acres with mostly dead/dying spruce/balsam fir:
Pics of 8 acres of mostly hardwoods (maple/red oak).
2 Acre Red Pine Plantation
Not much changes. Still a 20 ton with progressive thumb. How to clear the brush, I leave that to the pros like @mowingman and @treemuncher . I'd march through there and lay the trees down, close cut the stumps and limb them off and stack logs. Pop out all the stumps from the previous harvests. Truck the logs out and get a burn permit and burn the brush and stumps and junk trees if that is an option.
Guarding around the cab for your safety you're dealing with trees doesn't take much for a branch come through a window. Larger machine better reach and power and theory better fuel economy vs working smaller machine hard
Get a big mulcher. No mess, no fuss, no erosion. Take what you want to keep and let the mulcher do the rest. The grass will set in just fine and the stumps will slowly decompose without leaving soft spots or big holes. Most of my farming customers can set out their animals 2-3 months after I finish and the grasses have resprouted. The way I cut is to leave any grass root base in the groung and it regenerates faster. You can drive over anything I've processed and keep it cut with a bush hog rotary type mower. The cheapest way out for individuals is to hire it done unless you plan on this as a business endeavor. The bigger the machine, the cheaper per acre it will be. Size is just a factor of time - there are no limit with the right machine. Makes me think of the tornado clean up job I did a while back. I need to go over and get some pics of it as it should be in full grass after a year plus. I had a lot of upturned stumps on that job, many of the trees being over 30" at the stump cut. You can always chemically treat the chips to burn them down faster. This will also provide grasses that are thicker and come up faster for forage.
How does any of this possibly make sense for 15 highlands?
When it comes to hobby farming, it will never make sense. It makes people happy. My dad spent hours and hours building boats. Thousands of dollars. It was the doing that was the thing.
Yep, it's the enjoyment of the activity and not necessarily making big money; but there is a financial benefit to what I'm doing. I enjoy being around my cattle and I like taking poor land and turning it into productive land. My Highlands help me turn poor land into beautiful pasture. I have another 10 acres of land 2 miles away from the 75 acres. I keep my cattle on this 10 acres during the winter months and feed them hay. The soil on this land is all sand (no silt or clay) with a 1/2 to 1" layer of topsoil. The only thing that would grow is Jackpine trees, blueberries, Bracken Fern, moss, and lichen. During the winter months, I feed them round hay bales on this sandy land. Once a week I start up my tractor and plop a couple of round bales in their feeder. Check out the pics of the before and after. I started with 3 highlands and now have 15. They turned this sand dirt in nice soil that is a now a beautiful pasture. The value of this land has probably tripled if I were to sell today. What was once dry infertile ugly land is now really nice. It took some work to clear the land with my backhoe, but I enjoyed it and turned the trees into lumber and use the firewood to keep me warm. Although I consider myself a hobby farmer, the value of Highland cattle have skyrocketed in the last few years and there is money to be made. Seven years ago I bought 3 registered Highland females. I paid $500 for a 1 year old heifer, $800 for a 2 your old heifer and $900 for a 3 yr old pregnant cow. A year later I bought a registered highland bull for $2000. This bull was really good and had excellent genetics. I used the bull for 3 years and ended up selling him for $8,000. That bull gave me 6 additional heifers. My heifers/cows are now worth anywhere for $7,500 to $12,000 each. I have one heifer that I probably could sell for $18,000 as she's top notch and would be an excellent show animal.
This is what that land looks like now.
This hopefully enriches and extends your life. That's what it's about.
The beef animals do the work for free. No fertilizer needed. The trick is to breaking up pasture into small blocks and moving them more often. We move our animals everyday during the growing season giving them fresh grass on every move. The grass has improved substantially.
See what I mean? this is what I was talking about
I get the lifestyle aspect of the project, I'd be doing it too if I could. It sounds like you have the system figured out, add fertility in the hay, cut some firewood and push some brush out of the way. I'm not sure how removing stumps adds value to the process, or what you'd do with the brush besides pushing it out of the fence paths. On light land I'd want as much organic matter on the soil as possible. You're also fooling yourself on the values, in the span of decades, hunting/recreation/timber land has been as valuable or more than grazing land.
That kind of pasture with trees for the cattle to shelter under is dead sexy IMO. There is lots of it around here with the fir trees spaced out far enough that they grew big sweeper limbs down low, and they act as mangers in the snotty weather. Nothing like a tree that grew up in the open rather than in a thicket shooting up for light.
Today's little job: reclearing and thinning out a parcel that I invested in some years ago. I cleaned it out enough this time so that I can swing a 15' wide batwing bush hog through the woods so I can maintain the back when I do the road frontage. I took out just about everything under 12"-14" dbh and a few that were about 16"-24" dbh just to make enough room or if the tree was unhealthy. I doubt that I will seed it down as there is grass uphill in the cemetary 50' through the woods. If I keep it mowed a couple times a year, it generally fills in on its own. Less than 6 hours worth of work for a bit over 2 acres completed.
I know a lot of people like mulching these days, I'm old school and just want a nice clean, smooth seed bed to start a fresh stand of grass. I actually do quite a bit of work like you are describing, both on my farms and for customers. My method is as follows: -First pass through is with the dozer, clear out everything 8-10" or less, unless its a desirable tree I want to keep. Push into piles either out of the way, or in a spot to burn. I just skim along right at the surface, some of the small springy stuff doesn't come out, but I deal with that later. Name of the game is to push out all I can without losing/disturbing the topsoil. -Once all the brush is out next I go through with either an excavator or backhoe and thin any of the larger trees. I try to push over all I can and keep digging to a minimum so as not to mix all the subsoil into the topsoil. Sometimes digging is unavoidable, especially if there are stumps. Stumps and tops get thrown on previously made brush piles to burn. Logs are kept for firewood or saw logs. -Go through with bush hog on tractor cutting close to the ground to clean up any of the small stuff. I also like to go around with a pole saw and trim up all the trees to 15' to make for easy future mowing. If it's rough I'll make a quick final pass with the dozer to slick everything up. Usually the soil is loose/smooth enough at this point I either just broadcast grass seed and drag it in with a chain harrow, or go over it with my Brillion cultipacker seeder. You could do all this with just an excavator with a thumb and a 4wd loader tractor (with bush hog, grapple, etc), but the dozer is a lot faster on the small brush trees. The way you are describing, and the way I often do, is not nearly as equipment intensive as completly clearing 75ac of mature forest. Pick an area and work on it as you have time, a 120-160 size excavator would be more than adequate.
A few thoughts on the cattle operation- Be mindful that the Highland cattle are trendy right now, while maybe not the same boat as true 'exotics' the market can still be tumultuous. I've seen this same thing happen over and over, Llamas, Miniature Horses/Donkeys/Cows, Emus, Ostrich, etc and a lot of people really have lost their shirt over the years. Some of those markets came back, many never did. Don't base any of your future business decisions on current prices, at some point they may only be worth what you can get at the sale barn. When we have bad land, areas with thin topsoil, poor nutrients, etc we feed hay there much as you said you are doing. The difference is we use a bale unroller and roll the hay out exactly in the areas we want to work on. Bale rings are easy, especially with a small number of cows, but they make a mud mess around them, cause soil compaction and don't distribute the nutrients as well as when you unroll. With unrolling the cows do waste more, but that's part of the benefit too. I realize you are dealing with poor soil, but 15 head on 75ac is a very low stocking rate. We run about 1-2ac per head depending on the season. At some point too low of a stocking rate is self defeating to what you are trying to accomplish. You need to either increase your herd size proportionally or realize that you are going to be doing more bush hogging than grazing if you get all that cleared. Hope some of this helps, we have a small cow/calf operation and sell 90% as freezer beef. FWIW, I haven't bought any fertilizer, lime, herbicide, etc in the past 10yrs and our pastures are some of the best looking around. Just takes good management and some extra time and effort.
I've been watching youtube video's of forest mulchers for several months now. They do appear to be an excellent tool that would indeed do what I would want to do on my property. The 30 acres was logged 7 years ago and up here in the UP of Michigan, aspen/poplar trees take over the area and grow fast. My cows will feed off the leaves and break/kill the aspen trees as they push them over to eat the leaves. Unfortunately, I then have a large mess of bent over trees that need to be cleaned up. A forest mulcher would make quick work of cleaning up that mess. What about rocks and forest mulchers? I understand a carbon blade will tolerate rocks, but how much will they tolerate them. This soil is plenty of boulders so I have to take that into consideration as well.
Your info has been very helpful. Yes, I understand that the prices for Highland cattle can and probably will crash at some point. To tell you the truth, I didn't get into Highland cattle to make money off of. I thought if I could occasionally sell a calf or two and make enough money to pay for the winter hay I'd be happy. I bought my first three Highlands because I like having them around and they are very easy to take care of compared to a dog. I consider my Highlands pets. They are all very human socialized and well trained. They will come running when I whistle. I can walk up to any one of them and say, "come on lets go", and they will follow me. I trained them to get into a trailer. They older cows even know their names. I can stand by the gate, yell their name and say "come on" and they walk over to me. I have a 5 year old steer that I've been training to be a working ox. The total acreage of the property is 75 acres, but not all is suitable for grazing. I'd say only 50 acres of forest/select logged forest is suitable and there's a 6.5 acre field that I currently put the cows on during the grazing season . The rest of the land is swamp or too rocky (as in rock bluffs) to be used for grazing. Also, next year I'll have 7 females that will be breeding so I should be able to increase the herd numbers in the future.
Your area probably gets cold enough to deter it but when I had looked into silvo-culture the parasite and pest build up was a big problem as the shade didn't allow enough UV/heat to kill them off. Most ranchers recommended one and done for the year or cut it all down and use shade wagons. But like I said maybe the cold is effective in controlling it.
Rocks become smaller rocks and dust. They wear the teeth a bit faster but they are usually not a problem unless you demand sharp teeth. Steel is the worst thing for breaking teeth and carpet is a mulching nightmare - toughest thing to get out - you can't torch it out!
Being that this thread is regarding pasture, I thought I should post this pic. I went and started working on another investment parcel that I own while on the way home from a job completed in the AM. I did some clearing on it a year ago so it has but 1 season of growth on it. Nothing was seeded but the grasses are already filling in. It was just as thick in trees as what you see on the right side (shorter trees) when I cleared this patch last year. Mostly hardwood mulch. Lots of weeds but a very good, thick base of grass where I just cut it.