we are looking for some feedback from people who have cleared land with livestock. We live w/o power and have only a chainsaw and atv to cut and pull stumps. We read somewhere that goats would be good for small brushy growthand then rotate pigs to root around to make stump pulling eaiser.......any thoughts. The trees were harvested pretty hard about 10-15 years ago and the area we are looking at is small growth.
Back when I was a kid people would run Goats then put Turkeys in afterwards,then go in cut wood off it,burn whats left. Me on my place I run Goats cut Wood,and burned every year.Kept it cleared. Now as far as Hogs I feel they just tear up too much,and around here if you use them all you have is a big pile of rocks. big rockpile
So your name implies that you are the result of an experiment involving pigs that went awry? :haha: (Joking by the way )
Depends on how much land you have. The way I did it was to get an old John Deere Model "D" (cost $250 CDN), with steel wheels and 4 inch spikes, called her "Spike", and borrowed a 24 inch single bottom manual trip breaking plow from the neighbour. I cut and rolled out big stumps, and turned under twenty foot high second growth - no problem. I broke about twenty acres this way - lots of physcial work - it seemed like it was done in no time That way, you can get it over with and pick the roots (we have NO rocks on our land) and plant this year. Spike, Alex and Breaking Plow (A Feeew Years Ago) Alex
The goats will clear much of the land for you but sheep will also. A lady we sold several of our Suffolks to had her patch of weeds cleared out in a week.
we used goats. We would buy a roll of wire, encircle the area, staple it to the trees and turn the goats in. THe secret to getting them to eat everything is to not feed them too much. They would eat it all to the ground, strip the bark off the bottom of the trees. We would leave them in two growing seasons, so that anything that came up the second season- that was eaten too. Then we'd go in there, move the goats and cut the trees at ground level, throw some pasture seed down and start again on an another area. We cleared about 5 acres in a few years like this. Looked nice too.
I put two pigs in a small enclosure to clear and plow for a garden..... I should have left them in two seasons. But while they were there.. they did the work! (Fencing then in was tricky... local farmer said put electric about 10 inches from bottom of fence.) I got rid of them instead! Now I"m sq. ft. gardening agina!! Good Luck!
Clearing land, even with animals, has a certain amount of risk to it. Figure up your medical insurance deductible and find out how much of that would rent a bulldozer. Around here I can have a guy for $50 per hour. Twenty hours will clear a lot of land and leave you whole and ready to move on to the next project.
