Clearing 154 acres of woods in west Tennessee

[Mart5130]

My wife and I just bought right at 300 acres in West Tennessee. Half is cleared with row crops planted and the other half is wooded areas.

I’d like to clear the remaining 150 acres of woods, including stumps and roots to eventually plant on it. What is the best way to go about this? I’ve runs tons of tractors and equipment before but I’ve never cleared woods/timber.

Thank you for taking the time to read and offer advice.

Welcome to W TN. I live near Trenton. You’ll need a trackhoe/excavator for sure. I had a local farmer that had a trackhoe clear around my pond. Then I cut/up and burned.

 

[redmt]

It’s all advice.

Advice that's totally off topic. Maybe someone should have added their favorite cookie recipe too.
Being on topic, I would get the largest dozer you can afford and a root rake. Others have said to hire it out. Both replies are good advice. We use this one mainly for brush clearing.

 

[GrumpyL5030]

Napalm would work. Properly applied of course.

That topic could begin a whole new thread

 

[1NHman]

Hope you are in your 20's, you have a big job ahead of you.

 

[redmt]

Napalm would work. Properly applied of course.

 

[redmt]

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning".

 

[strykerAKAmack]

Just my 2 cent's , But if clearing for profit to plant crops , Just looking a google maps , West Tennessee Has just two UTV parks Hell of a lot easier to run a bunch of trails thru the mix and get money rolling in thru day use .

 

[tradosaurus]

Just my 2 cent's , But if clearing for profit to plant crops , Just looking a google maps , West Tennessee Has just two UTV parks Hell of a lot easier to run a bunch of trails thru the mix and get money rolling in thru day use .

I wonder what the legal ramifications of that would be? Someone gets hurt and sues?

 

[steve2]

Before clearing woodland check into programs that pay out yearly to keep the forest for carbon sequestration. Family Forest Carbon Program is one such organization there are others. Carbon commodity market assets are only going to increase over time. Big picture you may be better served financially.

 

[tstorzuk]

It's much easier to get the stump out if you do it with the tree attached. You can push the tree over with the Ex and stack it with the thumb to either use later or burn. Always PUSH and always AWAY never pull toward the machine. You may have to dig around the close side to cut a few roots on the larger ones. Huge trees may be a problem this way, but most should be fine.

Then you would probably want to run over all that with a dozer to smooth it.

What LittleBittyBigJohn said.

It's much easier to push over a tree. You have to have a large enough of a machine to be able to do this properly. You have to push from a certain height and be far enough away from the base for when it falls over as the majority of the root ball will "pop" out of the ground. You don't want to have a heavy machine sitting on top of the root ball when you're trying to do this. It won't work....

After a few trees have been downed, pull out the chainsaw. Cut off the root ball, clean off all the branches and cut it up into manageable lengths (about 20'). Put the branches and roots into a burn stack and the rest sell to a mill or mill it yourself.

Here's a nice drone view of an excavator pushing over a bunch of trees;

At 17:38 is a nice huge one being pushed over, and the resulting root ball is massive. Gives you an idea of how high and far away from the tree you might need to be. It all depends on the size and type of trees you're clearing.