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Advanced Member
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For those that have plenty of woodlot and would like to clear it for agricultural activities, but find the expense of bulldozers and excavators prohibitively expensive, there are ways to clear land that my forefathers used that was highly effective. It may or may not come as a surprise, but by putting livestock on the area you want to be cleared...in the right order...can clear the area in a rather short time depending on how long you consider "short time" and how many animals you can add.
First cut the trees down with a chainsaw. Remove the bigger stems and either burn them for firewood or sell the wood for pulp to a papermill. Then fence in the area and add then add sheep as quickly as you can. As long as there are no cherry trees in the area you want cleared, the sheep will eat those leaves and brush right down.
Next add goats. The longer they are in there, they will eat the remaining brush and browse right down to next to nothing. This will take a year or so though. You can pile up and burn anything they leave behind at this point.
After the brush is pretty much cleaned up, the area will have plenty of stumps. Fence the area in and then add pigs. The pigs will help root out the stumps. For particularly troublesome stumps, toss salt onto the stumps and the pigs will root and root after the salt until the stump is gone.
Now you should have an area that starts coming up in weeds. Sheep love weeds, and they will soon graze this out. By grazing the weeds out, and from all the manure the goats, sheep and pigs have added, the soil should start to take root in grasses and legumes. Now you can add cows as you see fit and they will graze the grass.
You will be surprised how well and how fast this system works. It does take a year or so, but in the meantime you are making progress, not spending money on diesel fuel, and have some nice animals that you can consume for your own nourishment as they improve your farm. Some may scoff, but adding the right kind of livestock, at the right time, can get a lot of hard work done for you. The only down side is, bulldozers and heavy equipment can remove the rocks which animals will leave behind, but even if you chose to remove these via heavy equipment, the hours they will spend on farm, will be vastly lower then what you would have paid them to do for the entire job.
Give it a try!
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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Advanced Member
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I was thinking about this today and there was two major benefits of using livestock over heavy equipment to remove stumps...
1. The root ball would be left in the ground which would slowly rot over time. This would add an incredible amount of nutrients into the ground, the most being nitrogen which is hard to deal with on an organic farm.
2. You would not have a piece of ground tied up for a year as you try to reestablish grass from the pulled up roots and disturbed soil. The livestock simply graze around the stumps until the pigs get pastured there.
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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Junior Member
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Last Login: 3/22/2011 10:45:00 AM
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thanks for that.
I've gotten permission to use my neighbours land for just about anything I want. He doesn't want to sell but will sell to me when he decides. In the meantime I would like to use the space. A lot of alders and willows have grown up and I was wondering how to get rid of them. They provide shelter for lots of birds however, simply cutting them means more just come up.
When I get to that point, I'll remember what you said.
Valerie
Know someone in Ontario? They can earn money with solar. You can earn money referring them. Email for details.
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Junior Member
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by the way - what's with sheep and cherry trees?
Valerie
Know someone in Ontario? They can earn money with solar. You can earn money referring them. Email for details.
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Advanced Member
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You can root out that stuff Valerie Jean by simply using pigs...no real need to even cut them or use goats or sheep...pigs alone will do it. Just fence them in really strongly because a pig is pretty smart and can get out of some pretty good pens.
As for the Cherry and sheep...its actually any a livestock but sheep really love eating leaves. Recently when I cut my apple trees down, I fenced in the area and let the sheep eat all the leaves so that the only thing left was the branches and trunks. Since this was apple wood, and worth 300 bucks a cord in firewood, just about every branch was worth money, but it was hard to see when the leaves are on the trees. The sheep ended up being happy, and so was I. I could see what I was cutting after a few days time.
The cherry however is a natural cyanide. Yep no joke. As the leaves wilt, the tannins in the cherry tree turn to cyanide and just a few leaves can kill a sheep. I won't say sheep are dumb, but they don't know what they are eating until its too late.
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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Advanced Member
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As for your land Valerie Jean, good for you. I got more land then I know what to do with, but every year the towns remind me of this when they send me their tax bills. It really is silly for people to think they need large acreages when so many people have land that they are not using and they are paying property taxes on it.
I always was impressed by people like yourself who go out and approach these people and get permission to use their land and expand their operation without costing you in increased taxes. That is truly a win-win situation.
Of course it is even better if you can apply sustainable small farm techniques and show them the potential for what their land can do. If nothing else it brings them on board with farming. At the same time, tenants that really take care of other peoples land, also often get a chance to buy it sooner then later once the landowners realize these people have a large stake in that land and that they are using it far more resourcefully then they did.
Take good care of it, and realize that it truly is a better gift then owning it out right...property taxes can really be problematic for me some years! :(
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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Average Member
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Last Login: 11/1/2009 6:18:12 AM
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so why is it that some understand this, and then others act like every last flower and mouse in the field is there PVT property? I've never understood the idea that a landowner needed to be
A. a worry wort
B. some kind of king over his every growing tract of land.
Sure I don't need people doing things on my land that harm the place, but please.. ya catch more flies with honey.
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Advanced Member
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WOS...I guess I have not had enough coffee this morning because I read your reply twice and have no idea what you are talking about. Can you explain your line of thinking a bit more?
For me, I pay taxes on every acre on the farm here so when I refer to my farm being "productive", it is not necessarily in regards to making the most money per acre. It simple means that the farm is productive overall and contributing to society...either via food, or via wood to feed the paper and saw mills.
In my case, I had a 12 acre tree plantation that got hit by a bark beetle infestation so the trees are dying. This means a vibrant tree farm is now dying off and unproductive. I'll harvest this wood and make room for sheep. This means the farm is far more productive on these acres now then before.
The same goes for other areas of the farm. I work in conjunction with the Maine Forest Service and the USDA and try to keep the rest of the farm productive. Parts of the woodlot have reached maturity without a lot of regrowth. Since I need more land for sheep, these are the areas I need to harvest and clear. I'm not going to go out and clear healthy parts of my forest just to increase farmland, but as my sheep farm grows, I have to decide what are my best areas to clear, and what are best used in farmland.
I am sure the majority of farmers/hobby farmers/homesteaders are in the same boat.
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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Starting Member
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| Turkeys are also great at clearing land and underbrush. They are very easy to keep and do not require the room that cattle or sheep require. We recenlty purchased 4 week old chicks and kept them in a very brushy wooded area and they cleaned it wonderfully. After all of the brush and grass are gone, they scratch the ground with their sharp nails and smooth up alot of the small rough humps. Best of all there is no expensive long term investment. One summer and they are big enough for market.
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Starting Member
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| I never thought of using pigs to root stumps. How big stump have you seen them tackle?
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