4 Common Land Clearing Methods

If you need land clearing services, it is essential to understand the methods professionals can use to clear land. Land clearing in Oviedo can be done in various ways, including burning vegetation, bulldozers, chainsaws, excavators, and mulchers. Each style of land clearing has its distinct advantages, and each produces a unique set of challenges. However, the most popular techniques for clearing land include burning, hand clearing, grubbing and dozing, and mulching. Our experts offer the following descriptions to help you understand these popular ways of land clearing better.

Grubbing and dozing

Grubbing and dozing allow workers to clear large expanses of land very quickly. The consequences of moving so fast can mean that the large holes left behind create a messy and rough-looking finished product. So, while this may be acceptable in some applications, others, like using the land for housing or pasturing animals, will likely mean a need for using dirt to fill in any holes that were left behind. With a second pass needed to ensure an acceptable finished product, workers quickly negated the speed they used to clear the land initially. As a result, you will likely have a massive pile of material left behind that must be burned or hauled away after completing the land clearing process. Doing away with these materials can be costly and time-consuming.

Hand clearing

Hand clearing is the most time-consuming and least invasive way of clearing your land. Unfortunately, handheld options for clearing land are minimal. Hand clearing is perfect for thinning small areas to create safe buffers for fire dangers, but hand clearing would be far too time-consuming and costly for more extensive tracts of land.

Burning

Controlled Burns grant workers the ability to clear land very quickly. Though burning is a highly effective process for clearing land, it does come with some significant considerations. Working with fire means there is always a risk of getting out of control and causing damages to property or the environment. Burning also takes away the ability to eliminate vegetation or trees selectively. In addition, the sheer temperature of fire causes the ground to heat up to the point of sterilizing the soil, making it very difficult to grow plants and other vegetation for long periods. Finally, because burning eliminates all ground cover, it can cause an increased potential for erosion.

Mulching

The use of mulching equipment to clear tracks of land can be a fantastic alternative to burning or grubbing, whether completed with a drum or a disc mulcher. Mulching allows you to selectively cut and process vegetation in the most efficient way. Mulching allows for putting organic matter back into the ground while removing underbrush and trees. Mulching also promotes the growth of natural vegetation. It helps prevent the development of invasive species by providing a natural barrier once it is put back where vegetation has been removed. Mulching also significantly reduces the need to fix up the land after the land clearing process is complete.

No matter the process you use for clearing your land. It's essential to consider that you are going to have to maintain the cleared land in the future. No land clearing option is a final solution to maintaining your land. Timely and consistent maintenance is imperative to keeping away invasive species that can be difficult to remove once they have control.