Can a tractor do this?

Thorns will go through tires, sometimes it takes a while but they will keep working as the tire flexes with use and you will be forever having flat tires until you replace them. What I would do is get hold of some worn out tires, pull the good ones off the tractor and store them for later. then put on those cheap used tires, or weld some iron rims onto your wheels, weld a few cleats on them for traction. Then you can bushhog around all the larger trees, clearing out all the small brush and roses. Select those large trees you want to keep, cut the rest off at ground level OR about 4 feet above ground. This way you can mow the pasture easily without hitting the stumps for the next few years. Once they have rotted well, you can knock them over with your loader and remove them. In the meantime they arent hurting a thing. Once you have the pasture basically cleaned up, you can seed and fertilize it, put your rubber tires back on and proceed to enjoy your farm. This is the perfect time for bushhogging, the sap is all still up in the brush, cutting it off now prevents the brush from the chance to resprout and nearly all of it will die out. If you wait until the sap runs down into the roots this fall, then nearly everything will be right back come spring as the brush comes out of its dormant stage and you will have to mow it again several times to kill it out.

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"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

Howdy & welcome. I farm for a living, run 25-150 hp tractors for all my life.

A 30 hp tractor will not easily remove those trees, and it will not happen quickly. In inexperienced hands, that is a very dangerous thing to do.

All the rest of what you will likely want to do, that size tractor will do well.

For the trees, either hire it out; chainsaw them off & let the stumps rot out; or take several years to girdle & rot them out. I don't know how many, or howe quickly you want them gone, or how much they interfere with trying to grow grass on your pasture (how thick they are to shade the ground....).

Myself, I hate a hydro transmission on a tractor. (Love it on my combine where micro-speed changes are needed, so not inexperienced with them...) I lose all control & feel for what the tractor is doing. You lose a lot of hp as heat loss & internal slippage of the oil system. And so on.

If you've never driven a clutch car or anything, and you are coming straight from city life, then perhaps the good manual tranny will be difficult for you to master, and you won't have the 'touch & feel' one gets from a manual tranny.

What is right for you? I donno. Either will work. I would much much much prefer the manual tranny for me.

Removing thistles.

Ha! You will have an education. The loader is going to be used every day, you will really like it. It is not useful for removing weeds. Weed roots can be 3 feet deep on the types of weeds you talk about.

Spray the weeds with a cheap glysophate - Roundup. Spray them a few months apart, and let the weeds sit for a couple weeks, as it works slowly. Many types of thistle & the other weeds you mention have _huge_ root masses, they will come back again after a year of trying to kill them. The huge root mass stores nutrition, and they just keep sprouting over & over from that root system. Trying to kill them without spray will be a full-time job, over and over and over and over. Any time you fall behind and let them grow for 2 months, they will be re-feeding thier root mass and bingo - you have another 2-3 years of them resprouting. If you are opposed to sprays, understand what you are in for with those types of weeds.

What kind of thistle, anyhow? Bull, Canadian, Sow? Critters eat Sow, not much of a problem. Bull nothing will touch, typically a bi-annual so easier to kill. Canadian - oh boy, you are in for a battle.

Folks can help with steps to make a pasture from what you have; if you tell us what you are trying to get. Do you want a rough pasture and don't mind if it is a work in progress for several years, don't mind a few stumps & such in there; or are you looking for a pasture that looks more like a lawn in 6 months, not a weed, rock, or stump in sight, thich lush grass all of equal height....

Different ways to get there from here, it will depend what it is you want to end up with. Working livestock pasture, or pristine horse paddock.

--->Paul

We're clearing pasture right now. All this used to be pasture about 70 years ago and now had trees about 18" to 2' in diameter plus the occasional 5' diameter wolf trees. Lots of brush in some areas.

I marked out the boundaries and we brought in several loggers to bid on it. They cut the trees and brush for lumber, firewood, pulp and biomass chips (to make wood pellets). We got paid for that. The logging is just finishing up now and the grass is already growing from what is naturally in the soil.

We will now overseed with alfalfa, clover and other things as well as some grasses. Next spring we'll fence the perimeter and then divide it into paddocks to begin rotational grazing of the livestock through it. Eventually we'll hay the less steep parts - maybe in five years.

I am not going to bulldoze it to remove the stumps. Instead I'll just let them rot in the ground. They push up regen for a few years but the livestock eat that down. Good forage for the animals and the pigs chew them up.

This is the same way we did a smaller set of about 20 acres of field years ago. Worked great. Easy to do. Saves a lot of soil by not bulldozing. Keeps the nutrients in the soil.

For clearing out thistles and burdock I find pigs are the best. Years ago we had a lot of those. There are now none in our pig pastures. They love eating them and dig up the roots as well. Great pig food.

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in the mountains of Vermont
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/blog/
http://HollyGraphicArt.com/
http://NoNAIS.org

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Depends on where it is and what kind of trees. Nothing in the rules say you have to dig them out NOW for pasture. Those that rot fast can be cut as low as possable (LOW ENOUGH TO MOW OVER) and then just left ,IF they are not to big and to many!

As for the hydro static its a awsume thing on a chore tractor!

Sometimes paying someone to come in to do the job is worth it; considering time, cost, accident/injury potential. I have a guy I pay $20 per hour for him and his 30 HP tractor; but boy is it worht it.

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Iris
The Last Straw (aka Helinbak Farm)
Once a Marine; always a Marine

Hey.

If you leave 3-4 ft. stumps, a backhoe will pull/push them over better than anything mentioned above. Bushhog(brushhog) everything else.

RF

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It's not good enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required. - Winston Churchill

Apple is about the best firewood there is.

Thanks to all for the great advice.

From what I gathered from this thread, it sounds like brushogging/herbacide for the rose/thistle and a chainsaw for the trees is the way to go.