The neighbor rented a skid steer with a brush cutter to clear out some of his reprod. I put the drone in the air to check out how well it was working. I think in a few hours he was able to get more done than a month of work with the hand held brush cutters could get done. Especially with an old fart like me doing it. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
I would love to go through our woodlot and do that. We have about 4 acres of plantation planted red pine that has needs to be thinned out, but we are infested with honey suckle. The other 8 acres is hardwoods, with very little HS. Our forestry guy said not to thin the pines until we get the honey suckle under control as the increase in sunlight will cause the stuff to really take off. Wife and I have been working now two years to go and try to cut/poison the stuff out. We've been using just Husvarna 525 brush cutter (a week wacker with a saw blade) which works great. We cut the HS, paint the stump with glyphosate and run the brush through the chipper. A skid steer with a drum mulcher would be way faster, but as we are getting farther into the stand, we are finding all sorts of cool hardwoods trying to get started, lots of hickory and oak. Its pretty tight in the pine section and the skid steer wouldn't be able to maneuver very well in there and avoid all the new growth. It takes time, but even my wife says it doesn't feel like work. We go out, cut for 3-4 hours, dog gets to run around like a lunatic. When we see new HS coming up we pull it. Slow and steady, but man, if I had a skid steer, I'd be hard pressed not to use it in there...
I've been clearing by machete, handsaw, polesaw, hedge trimmers, chainsaw. But I did hire a forestry mulcher guy to do three hours so I could see what he could do and it was impressive for sure. Agreed, the only negative is I can control better what does NOT get whacked, plus, the cost is much more if he does it. But speed, he's got that part.
