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!
I’m not looking to bring in any heavy equipment beyond my John Deere zero-turn and whatever implements it can tow. I’m renting most of the “heavy” equipment, as buying requires a high initial investment for something I could complete in a couple months of rentals and never need again. I have neighbors with Bobcats, but I’m not looking to clear cut the property.
I just want to selectively prune and clear the ground cover to make way for more presentable and preferable landscaping.