How to Clear Land for New Farm | Couple Clears Land for New Farm and Homestead

welcome back in this video we're going to talk about our land clearing we didn't take a whole bunch of videos while that was going on but we did take a bunch of pictures and we do have some shots of uh the bulldozer working so deb spin with me i'll spin with you baby well she's not spinning the wrong way i'm i'm so we're going to talk about back there behind me and deb how we cleared that because everything back there i'm going to spin the other way now i'm not good at spinning everything back there used to look like what's behind us now okay so when we first bought the property it looks like what you see behind deb it was thick you got the typical underbrush here you got the planted pines you got some cedars you got some oaks feeder right there and it was thick you can see the planted pines over there i'm keeping the clearing to my back because i just want to show what we had to work with it was raw ground it was uh just thick had some hills and stuff in it but um we just couldn't see what we had the land clearing crew that um i hired they asked me how much do you want cleared and i was like i don't know i don't know how much i want cleared it's about six acres it's not it's not exactly six i honestly i can't tell you exactly what it is because google earth has not caught up to our land clearing yet but my best guesstimate is six and we cleared five because there was some stuff that was just um some low-lying areas that wasn't in planted pines but he said how much do you want cleared and i and i really didn't know it's really hard to put markers you know your four corners out when you just you know it's thick land you can't fly over and drop a marker so we literally told him start push uh start bulldozing in that direction and stop we will watch the trees move as you go and he will call you when the stop and that's literally how we cleared our land right i mean that was that precise that's how precise we were so it was this call him stop so when he he uh cleared a little bit we could see and we we weren't here when it happened um it took took place over many days he did did some of it we came out here and checked on him and we didn't think he had cleared enough so again he went into the woods a little bit deeper and i he said i'm going to aim for that tree over there and when i get there if you see that tree moving you know call me and that's what we did that's how we laid out the four corners of the property we're up on the hill and we're looking northeast right now and uh our house pad is in front of us and all this again planted pines everything that you see that's cleared here used to look just like that so they came in with two bulldozers and a root rake he started clearing knocking trees down and he piled him up and now it was it was 2018 that that happened july the summer of 2018 and it was a real wet july so he had to get a burn permit it rained so much that he could only burn some of it and he'd have to come back it was frustrating for him for him he lived over over an hour away and didn't want to tow his equipment back and forth but he did get it done he had to come out here with an excavator and move the piles the burn log so they would burn because they would leave pieces as it would rain that wouldn't burn he got those burn piles down the ashes he then buried them you'll see the clay areas and that's where he dug down and buried the ashes from the burn piles so and then also i'm sure some stumps or whatever that didn't burn off completely and then after that he completely root rate the whole five-ish acres got it as clean as he could but there's still some um small stumps and trees that a root rake on a bulldozer won't get so after that i had to go i had a 38 horsepower kubota at the time and a 5 foot box blade and i took that 5 foot box blade and i went over every square foot of this property and dug up all those little stumps and all those little sticks that went in between his root rake and um that took a while that was probably two three days worth of back and forth probably some of the most boring tractoring i've ever done in my life and i also filled in some low areas because the bulldozer is not perfect but where the pond is right now was a low area so you really didn't have to bulldoze too much there but everything to the right of the pond that's the biggest part of our pasture behind the pole barn up behind the shed path back there going to the back part of the property and then this will be our backyard of our house all of that was bulldozed box plated and lined planted in grass to get us to the point that we're at now so in addition to the front five or six acres we also had a one acre section cleared in the back it's a food plot it'll later become pasture or garden but just for right now while he was on site we went ahead and had him clear that and then when he was also on site we had to do a path all the way around the property and three quarters of a mile long all the way around the property the width of the bulldozer as close to the fence as he could but don't take out any big oaks one lets us access the fence and also um gives us a walking trail or atv or utv riding trail around the property and just kind of delineates the borders of the property and then we can cross fence based on that well at one point in time we hired somebody else that came in with i don't know my equipment it came in with like i looked like a little bobcat with a chewing mechanism on it that's exactly what it was but they're pretty expensive 200 an hour for eight hours but our front fence line was completely overgrown we had a lot of areas where we just couldn't even access the border of the property i wanted to get him in here first before the bulldozer we could just kind of assess the property a little bit better so yeah we did have that expense first then we had the bulldozer um the land clearing crew come in excavator was mainly to dig the holes for the ashes and then to re-pile the logs from for uh burning them i got some cool pictures some cool trail cam pictures of some deer with the logs smoldering in the background because it's all brand new to the deer you know it had been forever this had always been planted pines or some sort of thick secondary forest and now it was cleared and they were coming out to check it out so we had quite a few deer out here in the front pasture we have feeders and stuff out here we don't do that so much anymore we try to keep them to the back it's more secluded back there although we do like to see them we do want to have gardens out here in the front so we're trying not to attract deer to the front but deer do what deer do so um they will come to the front we've actually seen um footprints or tracks of deer in the pole barn up underneath the pole barn and you'll see them actually walk by the shed this is our neighbor dog lily and we love lilly we love lilly and her sister bella sometimes bella's behind lily and bella's a pitbull and she's a great pitbull definitely sweetest dog on earth but oh my goodness is she full of herself yeah so one thing that i i'd like to talk about while we're talking about land clearing is we probably talk to four or five different land clearing folks or companies or and they all do it a little bit differently they like to do it one of two ways obviously by the by the acre or by the hour but no one can tell you how many hours it is to do an acre so in our opinion it was best to hire somebody to do it by the acre um another thing was some people wanted to come in and clear your land and pile up your brush and all your trees right we mainly had planted pines so we had like six inch diameter pines that were 20 30 foot tall and that's what was in the piles that a little bit of brush that was in between the pines but some people just wanted to do that just the bulldozer work and they did not want to burn they didn't want to bury the ashes and their price would be equivalent to someone else that was 100 percent come in and they do everything there's people out there that are amateurs i would say with bulldozers they have a bulldozer because they like equipment and they're doing it as a side job and they're not professionals with it so they're not nearly as skilled with it so paying them an hour is not the same as paying someone else who's got 20 or 30 years experience running a bulldozer because yeah bulldozer is lowering down the blade and pushing over trees but there's a science to it and i watched them you know they got to hit them pines from a certain angle or else they leave too much of the taproot in so all land clearing companies and individuals are not created equal the cheapest guy is not always the best but don't discount the cheapest guy find out what they're going to do for you we had some dirt movement done as well and i expected laser leveled pads for my buildings that i that i have built and am going to build and um that wasn't part of the deal he didn't he wasn't going to laser level he was going to put some dirt in low places and make it look flat by the eye but it wasn't going to be contractor ready to pour concrete we have dealt with a lot of different people local people on different projects and they've all been above board we've not had any problems with anybody they've not had any problems with us and we don't like you said we don't have a bad experience no no i'm certainly not saying that our land clearing was a bad experience but it was a new experience for us we probably would ask some more questions i probably would have wanted a little bit more detailed route raking and a little bit more land leveling even if i had to pay a little bit more because a lot of the costs with land clearing is bringing the people on to your property and if you have additional work for them then is the time to do it when the equipment's on the property because then they won't charge you that 350 transportation fee but you don't know what you don't know so if you don't know that you need to box blade for two days and you don't have a tractor i mean i had a tractor and i had a box blade so it wasn't a big deal but it would have been a big deal if i had to go rent a tractor if i had to go run a mini excavator or something to get the property ready because the next step was putting down lime and planting bahaya grass seed because land would slope needs to have some sort of vegetation on it or else it's going to erode and we wanted to stop as much erosion as possible as quick as possible because it takes eons to build top soil and the last thing you want is all the top saw all the top soil from your hill to end up in your low areas so it was imperative that we get something some sort of green cover planted and uh we did iron clay peas for an acre or two after we cleared the land and it was beautiful it's beautiful green every time i've cleared some land whether it's been on a hunting lease or our own property that first year i don't know if the nutrients get unlocked immediately by that line but that first year things just grow so great and then that's kind of kind of wraps up what i wanted to say about land clearing you got anything i'm good you knocked it all out if you like this video please click subscribe please click the like button we hope to have more videos like this coming your way soon

Channel: Piney Grove Homestead

Views: 71,711

Keywords: #landclearing, #homestead, #smallfarm, #farm, #kubota, #countrylife, #country

Id: 5emrItGlsaw

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021