What's the best way without having to roll up barbed wire to just tear out barbed wire fence with steel post with a skid steer or tractor and loader?
I have done it with a hoe with a thumb, just rip it out and ball it up until you get a big ball, cut it if necessary, and drop it in the truck. You usually have to smear and bang it on the truck to get it off the bucket, so I use a demo trailer.
No good way but the best I have found is take a 4-in-1 on a skiddy and run through and lay it all on the ground and then cut it every so often and wad it up, we've done it a lot with dozers and loaders but for gods sake whatever you do keep it in front of the tracks lol
The fastest way is a rear mount mower, it will wrap around the blade and spindle in no time. Why not take it off and roll it up? I have rolled lots of barb wire up, making and fixing fence. Good chance of having lots of little pieces of wire laying around if you don't roll it up. I have pulled all the staples I could then hooked onto fencing and pulled it backwards when buried in the dirt. If you have a tracked machine be careful not only will it get in the tracks it will come up to get you in the seat. Same with a tractor it will follow the rear wheel and climb over the fender in a hurry.
I suspect the fence is covered in growth and this is a mess to work with. The last one I did I cut the ends at the pull/corner posts then I pulled the metal t-posts up with the hoe. If you are lucky the fence will come up out of the undergrowth. Rolling the fence up is way easier than working with the posts still attached and trying to wad the mess up.
I'm with Mitch, use a trackhoe and thumb. If it's full of vegetation it will actually be easier taking it all up this way. Start at one end wadding it up, if it doesn't break easily cut it in larger sections. Just demo'd 200' of 6' chain link with razor wire. Used the hoe with a thumb started and one end and wadded it up. It did have a gate that split the fence in 1/2. Loaded straight into a 40 and to the scrap yard.
I have taken a lot of fence like this out by rolling the wire and then just pulling the post with the skid steer, the reason I am looking for a faster way is 1) has some growth in spots and 2) I have about 600 acres with this fence around it I want out and it is 10 degrees right now. Thanks for all the replies. Keep them coming if you have any more ideas. Sounds like maybe my best bet besides doing it the old fashioned way is using my excavator.
In general: Pull it out, then roll it up. Discard, How? By loosening posts first if necessary and cutting off where you think you have enough to work with. To roll it up for discard....use an old log or something as a 'starter and stabilizer' for the roll up the rug process.
Maybe I am just lucky, I use an older track loader with a 4/1 to grab posts and pull with fence attached, pull staples after I roll the mess up and pull the wood post out of the ends. T posts I remove the ties then same as wood pull with bucket. Takes me 1/4 the time as by hand, old wire just gets wadded up and dropped in old dump truck taken to scrapper with junk metal posts.
Yair . . . Here on the coast fence seems to be four/five barb through split timber posts. I find I can doze it up into piles with a little care . . . back up after each post and keep a clean floor and then dig a hole with the dozer and bury the lot. Cheers.
I've done thousands of miles of fence over the years, and excavator and thumb is by far the fastest and easiest on your patience, I can pull and do mitch's technique a rate where we need someone in the truck to keep up so I can pull it out, bundle it up and shove it in the demo trailer as we both drive along. The truck driver gets out every so many feet to cut the fence off and then gets back in to move the truck along to where I need it put, I seldom ever back track when I'm tearing out fence. We usually have another dozer leveling off the old fence row as we go as well, that way he can scout out broken off posts as he shoves dirt, so those can be tossed into the trailer as well. So basically the truck driver does all the leg work and has the hassles of cutting the fence and picking up broken off posts. As for saving the stuff, even an almost new fence its cheaper and faster to demo it and put in new later, unless the owner wants to do it himself, the salvage of the fence into the scrap yard pays enough and saves enough time and money in labor to make it cheaper to demo and install new later on. As for rolling it up, I've done hundreds of miles that way too, never again, too time consuming, and hard on the patience, most times nobody wants to unroll the wire again anyhow and the posts are rusted at ground level and end up going to the scrap yard. But for those that absolutely won't listen and require it rolled up, we use a wire winder on the front of a skid steer, a couple people cutting fence ties with cutters and tossing the barbs aside as I roll them up, sometimes it takes even three or four guys cutting wires to keep up with the skid steer and wire winder and then we use a skid steer to go along and pull the posts, but when its done, the owners saved materials cost them far more than new to replace them, seldom do we end up saving any fence for someone twice, as they say once they figure out their costs, they want to use new materials the next time anyhow. Whatever you use to roll the old wire up with, you need to use to unroll it the next time, one roll at a time, with new wire you can unroll four or five barbs at a time saving time and money to unroll for the next fence