Land Clearing With Your Tractor

[Industrial Toys]

It wasn't the lack of TV. They didn't have cell phones!

But, I can see the motivation for clearing. You start with a little plot that maybe feeds your family. And then a little more and a little more. It must have been most satisfying and there was probably some sense of competition as well.

Often the government stipulated that you had to have so much land cleared in a given time frame, and a house built to keep your land claim.

 

[4570Man]

As treemuncher posted not a flail at all. Fecon, FAE, DENIS Cimaf all make very nice mulching heads.

Here are the three options that Fecon has for heads. It is clear they are not a flail.

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What they can do is so much more.

I know they’re not a flail mower. They’re not really a mower at all. It’s the closest designed machine that I could think of to compare it to.

 

[BrokenTrack]

I never really gave that much thought. How did the pioneers remove those stumps? I always thought of stones and stone boats, and pulling trees away by horse, but what of the stumps?

I had a Vermeer that could easily do a six foot stump without repositioning. But even that gets tiring if you have a lot of stumps. Plus, in rocky ground, you know every stump is ringed with stones. Hard and expensive on teeth.

I have a book written by my Great Uncle, and he states "in 1838 me and my chum Brother cleared 10 acres of land and burned the brush in one summer." Consider they used an axe, and ox and a match, that was pretty productive.

My understanding is, for the most part they just farmed around the stumps because back then, a tree was huge, so there were fewer of them per acre. They did however have means to remove stumps. One method was a tripod made out of wood with a big threaded rod. That was attached to the stump and a team of horses walked around and around until stump was ripped from the ground.

Another method was a lever. That was hooked to the stump, then another tree and slowly by leverage a team of horses ripped the stump from the ground. Both took a long time to remove.

 

[BrokenTrack]

Rocks were another story. I have found many, many rocks in my fields with a hole drilled in the center ready for dynamite, but for whatever reason were never blasted. Many on the stone walls show that they split the granite ones in half by star drill and wedges called "feathers". But where I live we have lots of slate. Once slate is split (by machine or glaciers) it is easy to split into layers, but splitting a round boulder is a bear, so these were the ones left behind.

The most interesting one I ran across was one shaped like Africa and about the size of a car. We could just feel it when we went over it with the chopper and had to pick the head up just a bit. So we opted to move it. After seeing the size of the rocks on the rock walls we knew it had to be big. It was. It took an excavator and a bulldozer working together to get it to the edge of the field.

But the interesting part was, at the bottom was the most beautiful loam you ever saw. That indicated what happened. My ancestors had dug out a hole, then rolled the rock into the hole. Over the years frost action had pushed it upwards.

 

[Industrial Toys]

It always amazes me, how clever man was way back when. Even with the stump gone, those roots would have been a royal pain for cultivation. They also may well have burned the brush atop the worst stumps.

I wondered if maybe they levered over the tree and stump, while still standing using a team.

 

[BrokenTrack]

Rock walls will really tell the history of the land. here in Maine anyway, most rock walls were build between 1830 and 1850. If the rocks are mostly big, then the land was probably used for just grazing, but as the rocks get smaller, you can be assured the land was once tilled.

They claim there is enough rock walls in Maine alone to be a rock wall 3 feet high, 3 feet wide would stretching from Calias to San Diego. In New England, it would be long enough to circle the equator.

A few years ago the USDA was here and we were building a road across my farm and we got into some woods that had grown up beside the fields. The USDA inspector told me to just build the road through the field to make it easier. I refused on the grounds that my forefathers had worked really hard to clear those fields of stumps and rocks and I was putting my road along the rock wall (to use as a sub-base as well) and NOT get out into the field. We had equipment, we could easy move stumps and rocks!

I have a lot of respect for what my ancestors did to make this a farm some 218 years ago!

 

[Industrial Toys]

A stone we dug out in the middle of a field that must have eluded the pioneers. Just the surface was exposed.

 

[BrokenTrack]

It always amazes me, how clever man was way back when. Even with the stump gone, those roots would have been a royal pain for cultivation. They also may well have burned the brush atop the worst stumps.

I wondered if maybe they levered over the tree and stump, while still standing using a team.

This always fascinated me too. There is a video online of how they used the lever, but I have never been able to find anything about the circling tri-pod. I saw it in a book at the library when I was a kid!

 

[BrokenTrack]

I found this one sitting on top of the ground with a star-drill hole in it. They did not even try to push it out. I got it moved after 100 years, but it took 185 horses treading around an 850 John Deere bulldozer to do it.

The interesting thing about the old rock walls is; the biggest rocks are always on the lowest part of the hill. They could not haul them rocks uphill with ox and a stone boat that is for sure!!

 

[Industrial Toys]

Interesting video. I was questioning why they were so low on that stump initially?

I was wondering the other day, if horses don't get dizzy?

 

[Aquamoose]

I recall seeing that video! It was every bit as fascinating to watch while having much respect for ingenuity. After all, these guys didn’t have Tractorbynet to get ideas back then!

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Rocks were another story. I have found many, many rocks in my fields with a hole drilled in the center ready for dynamite, but for whatever reason were never blasted. Many on the stone walls show that they split the granite ones in half by star drill and wedges called "feathers". But where I live we have lots of slate. Once slate is split (by machine or glaciers) it is easy to split into layers, but splitting a round boulder is a bear, so these were the ones left behind.

I have stones that were split using pins and feathers as you describe. But I can only think of a couple that are in stone walls. Most of the stones here were rounded by the glaciers and don't make for good building material. The split stones tend to be nice and straight and were used for the foundations of buildings.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

I found this one sitting on top of the ground with a star-drill hole in it. They did not even try to push it out. I got it moved after 100 years, but it took 185 horses treading around an 850 John Deere bulldozer to do it.

The interesting thing about the old rock walls is; the biggest rocks are always on the lowest part of the hill. They could not haul them rocks uphill with ox and a stone boat that is for sure!!

We would call that a "medium stone" here. A "large stone" is visible from space. A "very large stone" is actually an outcropping of the continental crust.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

It wasn't the lack of TV. They didn't have cell phones!

But, I can see the motivation for clearing. You start with a little plot that maybe feeds your family. And then a little more and a little more. It must have been most satisfying and there was probably some sense of competition as well.

Often the government stipulated that you had to have so much land cleared in a given time frame, and a house built to keep your land claim.

In New England they practiced primogeniture -- estates were not divided, all land passed to the first-born son (and only men owned land). If a man died without sons his land passed to his closest living male relative. I own a piece of land that was purchased in 1682, and then passed undivided to the male heirs of the family continuously until 1950.

If you were not the eldest son your options were either to leave town -- go to sea, join the clergy or the military, or go west -- or to create your own farmland. So a lot of those stone walls were built by guys who were essentially facing exile if they couldn't get the land cleared. For women, your option was to marry a first-born son or follow your husband into exile.

Apparently there was a lot of conflict between first-born sons and fathers as the sons got to the age where they thought they should be running the farm and the father still felt he had a lot of good years left in him.

 

[Industrial Toys]

And we think the Government (leaders) today have comfort, luxury and privilege well above the common working stiff.

 

[BrokenTrack]

And we think the Government (leaders) today have comfort, luxury and privilege well above the common working stiff.

Quicksandfarmer is absolutely right, that is why we have been on this farm officially starting in 1746, though we originally came over on the Mayflower. (It is not as impressive as a person thinks, 10% of the USA population can trace their roots back to the Mayflower). In my Great Uncle's book, he called my Great Grandfather "The Oracle" because being the first born son, he knew he would get everything, and was pretty arrogant.

After 9 generations, I broke tradition here in that I am NOT the first born son, and I was not granted the farm by inheritance; I bought it off my parents instead so they could have more money going into retirement.

From my Great Uncle's book however, I got a lot of information on which fields were cleared and when. Some information on our old potash factory. And just how life occurred back then. Some days I think about how far we have really come.

 

[Silvic]

I just put together this article on land clearing with your tractor with credit going to all the great tips and photos on TBN and specifically this forum. This article is intended to be a primer for people who want to tackle typical homeowner land clearing projects.

Land Clearing With Your Tractor | TractorByNet.com

Please take a moment to review and let me know if I need to make any factual corrections/edits. Also, if you guys have tips to add to the "tips" section at the bottom, please post them here in this thread and I'll summarize and add them.

Back to the original post.
I think you did a pretty good job of building a primer for the uninitiated to read on land clearing basics.
Nice work and thanks.

 

[BrokenTrack]

I looked it over and saw a few improvements that could be made. Nothing bad, just more discussion in certain areas like renting equipment. Many of us agree it takes big equipment, but there is little discussion on which equipment to rent. Why renting a 45,000 pound excavator is a lot cheaper in land clearing then renting a 20,000 pound excavator even calculating in fuel and rental. Then there is always the reasons to rent a machine with a cab, and reasons not too. And finally there is the age old question of putting renters insurance on them or not.

On land clearing itself, there is always the tough task of dealing with stumps. There are many, many ways to deal with them, but not one of them is good. Then there is the methods on how to remove them, what equipment works the best or is the fastest combination. Some methods work well in the south, and due to the deep freeze we get up North, some methods in this part of the United States work better.

So there is plenty of discussion left for sure on this topic.

 

[ovrszd]

Stump clearing requires one thing. Patience.

 

[Bill Stecik]

Depends what kind of tractor . Here is Caterpillar D6c cold start and V brush cutter demo - YouTube