Sorry, this will be a bit long. Before I started doing firewood, there was a farmer nearby who had a pecan orchard of mature trees on his cotton farm. It was at least 20 acres, maybe 40. Hard to say how many mature pecan trees but it was hundreds. Even at just 20 trees/acre, if it was 20 acres, that's 400 trees! Sheesh. These trees were all 24 to 32 inch DBH. And what does he do? Pushes them over with a bulldozer into piles and burns them! He turned it into more cotton acreage. Every time I drive by there, I think of such waste. Now, time is money and it's a struggle to make it as a farmer but gosh, it would not be hard to "use" some of that wood. He was thinking "get it done asap" and figured a dozer and burning was the most efficient and perhaps it was but he could have timed it in the off season and you could easily have time to get all or a bunch of it. (It took months to get it all pushed, piled and burned.) If that were now and I saw that happening, I would look him up and ask if I could take the wood. Or at least some of it. Even if the agreement was to forego felling and push them over with the dozer, you could still get a lot of wood quickly with the right setup. And if felling was decided upon, you could leave the stumps tall and the dozer could still push up the stump/roots. It's possible there might even be room to pay something for the wood. But if you got all the big wood out of the way, it would certainly be far faster to push all the stumps, tops into big piles for burning. I actually like to process and burn pecan. It is not uber heavy, it splits readily and burns just fine in our climate. We don't have it super cold here. Now, with that much wood, you might could even make a profit if you were setup to process and store a LOT of wood, because you could sell it for cooking fuel. A lot of people use it barbeque pits. On a side note, I have pondered lately a new score. And that is... there are some cattle ranches around here in the river valley that have a lot of native pecan trees. These ranches are hundreds and some, thousands of acres. Pecan trees lose huge limbs often; it's a steady task to clean up under them. They also just fall over in heavy winds. There are other species of trees, too, but the pecans are especially fragile. But there are countless trees like hackberry and bois d'arc (hedge or osage orange to you guys) that often are "in the way" of the rancher. I might could get permission to keep the acreage cleaned up and I'd get wood. Another plus for me is I just like being out there in the fall and winter, this land type is where I was raised. My dad raised cotton and cattle. We'd gather pecans in the fall from the numerous trees. In addition to native pecans, way back when, a bazillion hybrid pecans were planted; they make larger pecans. I have thought that I could take family, including youngsters, on an "outing" and get them out of the house and off their cellphones! Of course, you'd need a spotter to make sure everyone stays safe when you're cutting. I just remember all the times me and my cousins would run around in the countryside as our fathers did this and that. Kids need outdoors! Would also be a bit of bonding time. November air is awesome! As for potential scores, I know of another parcel of similar size where they planted live oaks. This was done about 20 years ago. This was done with the goal to sell saplings, so, the trees were planted densely. I dunno how close but they're probably ten feet apart in close rows. Problem now is that the tree operation went broke. They had one of these huge tree machines (hydraulic scoop setup) that dug up an entire tree and transported it to the buyer. And now they have thousands of 20-year-old live oaks that are a nuisance. They are too close together to ever grow to normal height and even if they did, what good does that do you? The trees are too close to grow any grass for cows. They are too big to dig up and transport. That land is just dead! Problem for a hoarder is that if you whack them down, you wouldn't get much wood. Only the trunk would be worth getting and it would not be very much. I need to go by there and figure up if it would be worthwhile. Ever seen a big amount of waste like these pecan or oak stories that now you have to shake your head in disbelief? Wow, sorry for length of post but I have insomnia tonight, lol.
The pecan orchard is now a cotton field and it has yielded real good crops because it was rather "virgin" land for many decades (except growing pecans). The live oak fiasco, I will try to get a pic of that, it's still there.
I dunno how many cords 400 large trees would be but it would be a lot! Plus, if you were allowed to fell them all, you could be an expert feller by end of that project by testing out various ways to fell. Wouldn't hurt a thing if it fell wrong, lol.
