That said, if you need a big cleared area for some actual purpose, find a guy with a really big bulldozer.
If I were you I’d be on the look out for snakes....of all varieties
Tell the Air Force that ISIS has a training camp there and that they should airdrop in a couple tons of napalm.
Keep all trees. Let goats go at it for a month. 10 should do the trick. It will be amazingly beautiful, clear, and with a canopy to keep your utilities down.
Don’t forget to test your soil. Pine trees tend to make the soil acidic. Burning may be an option but contact your county first regarding burn laws / permit process.
If you have the time ... go with the goats already mentioned by others.
There are actually some subtle and mildly sophisticated considerations about doing this, and I’m not going to suggest I know any of this from personal experience. I just happen to like stump clearing YouTube videos for no reason I can explain.
Some random thoughts:
One guy letsdig18 has some land clearing videos I have found somewhat instructive.
If you are going to bring in excavators or heavy machinery to take out stumps from wherever you’re gonna take out stumps, can the soil support the equipment without the machine sinking into the ground?
Are the trees you want to yank out of a species where they have great big taproots or can they be pushed over? If they can pushed over, you don’t want to cut them down so close to the ground and maybe not cut them down at all; an excavator can push over a shallow-root-ball tree and take out the whole root ball all in one shot. Then you chainsaw up the fallen tree once it has been pushed over.
You may want to plant some mustard or some other nitrogen-fixing ground cover to suppress the weeds and enhance the general fertility of the soil. Vineyard trick.
You *don’t* want to allow huge grass to grow because when you go to take it out via a means other than mowing, it take out lots of topsoil (which you might have a big shortage of anyway) and create huge masses of green waste that is not that easy to deal with.
The guys who operate this kind of heavy gear do not seem to like chippers that much, because you have to kind of handle every item one by one. They prefer to burn it in a giant pile. To make those burns work, you have to shake the dirt out the pulled-out stumps best you can, preserving as much topsoil as you can, then let those stumps dry out in the sun. They burn poorly if they are packed up with dirt in between the roots. To best do that, they get temporarily piled up in a line so they break the wind. WHILE they are drying out, this is when your weeds grow and potentially create an issue.
Hope this works out for you!
They burn it in Florida. Legal or illegal. Seen it every time I’ve been down there. Push it into a pile and set it alight.
bookmark
I have a 20 year old version of this:
https://www.stihlusa.com/products/trimmers-and-brushcutters/brushcutters-and-clearing-saws/fs460cem/
It works great for cutting brush and small saplings. Home Depot sells their own version of Roundup concentrate under their HDX brand that is much cheaper for the same chemical.
As other Freepers have stated goats will eat anything. People will rent goats to clear your property.
Lastly, if you really want to clear it quickly, get an experienced bull dozer or excavator operator. An experience heavy machine operator can do more in two days than you could in a year.
I feel your pain... similar situation here, but with some extras like many old tires, old fencing rolls, etc., and ... drum-roll ... an infestation of Japanese knot-weed.
Rent a Bobcat that has tracks instead of wheels. Pile up all the debris for future burning. Use roundup to spray the new sprouts that pop up later. Just cleared our grove this spring. Looks great.
Bring in some Haitians. They managed to deforest their half of the large island of Hispaniola.
They have little better industry than to take any wood they can find, render it into charcoal, which they sell for heating and cooking.
http://www.floridagoatrental.com
Get them in there before you do anything else like further trying to clear the land. Goats love Poison Ivy. As noted, don't ever burn any brush that might have any Poison Ivy mixed in with it. You'll regret it for weeks...
Rather than using regular herbicides that can contaminate your field, try using one cup of Epsom Salts, 1 cup of white vinegar to two gallons of water. It does a good job. By all means be aware of ticks and use something like Cutters.
Hi.
Napalm the area, you will be glad you did.
Sorry. I’ll go sit in the corner.
5.56mm
A lot the next street over from me in Florida was cleared using a $680,000 John Deere machine that has a spinning jet engine turbine like set of blades that cut through big trees in just about a minute.
In about two hours half an acre of Florida jungle was turned into mulch.
My next door neighbor had a guy come in with a Bobcat. In two hours all the small stuff on a 60-footx100-foot area in the back fourth of his lot was in a pile. It took another half-hour to put in in the back of a hauling truck.
As several have already pointed out, there are different types of livestock that will keep the understory cleared out by grazing on it. If the term “understory” is unfamiliar to you, that’s the low growth, the bushes, low tree branches and the like. Keeps the forested area shaded but open beneath. In subtropical and tropical climates, if left unattended such areas become impassable, like a green wall. If you want privacy, you can leave some of it strategically on property lines, but generally you want that understory cleaned out. It’s habitat for varmints that you don’t want such as snakes.
D-9
Roundup Poison Ivy Formula is my favorite for fast kill. It’s a mixture of glyphosate and trichlophyr. It’s expensive, but you can make your own by buying the components separately at Home Depot. They have their own generic glyphosate, and Ortho’s poison ivy killer is trichlophyr.
That said, herbicides with glyphosate in them will kill anything they touch, good or bad, and if there’s any good grass underneath or alongside the weeds, it will kill that, too. You will have big ugly burned spots.
For ongoing weed management and control of big nasty weeds or weed trees, I like a product called GrazeOn Next. It’s a serious agricultural toxin that’s formulated to be applied via a boom, but you can mix it up for a personal tank sprayer. It takes longer to work but it kills things dead dead dead, and spares any grass. I like it because animals won’t be injured by eating treated vegetation after it dries. In other words, goats are fine, but they may not tear up the root system of every weed, so you may have weeds reappearing after the goats have gone home to whoever you rented them from. The herbicides kill weeds all the way through their root system.
Good luck. I’ve been there and am still fighting the good fight against overgrown woods, invasive multiflora roses, poison ivy, and bamboo.