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Sorry for the length, I hope this gives you some ideas for handling you property. We purchased 80 acres in central Florida and had the pine trees thinned. I hired the property roller chopped, a ditch down the center cleaned out and 16 around the property cleared and a few culverts put in. They used a modified skidder and 10 tall chopper, and track hoe and a loader for clearing. The east side had a LOT of oak, bay, and hickory trees to clear, and most of the rest of the way there were a lot of pine stumps. The roller chopping made it so the place was passable on the tractor or on foot. It was expensive but it took care of almost all the 4 10 tall palmettos we had. It took him two weeks to double chop the property and loop all of the small stands of trees that were left. I have completed bush hogging half of the property, in areas that the tractor could not even have driven through before, and we found it very difficult to walk. The roots on most of the stumps that we had removed challenged even the track hoe they were using. I had thought about trying to remove them with something the size of a Case 580 backhoe I would still be out there fighting them. They spent almost four weeks doing all of the work we needed. We can now drive around the property with a car or tractor, and it made the fencing easy! We are still left with several hundred stumps. The advice I have received is to wait till the stumps are good and dry. Take a 55 gallon drum with both ends removed and fill it with wood. Put some bricks under it for air and burn down the stump as far as possible. Cover the remaining stump with dirt and let the ants and termites take care of the rest of it. With it covered I dont have to worry about it on the tractor or while hogging. The work we had done was not cheep, but the results were priceless. We recently were able to do a controlled burn on half of the property and that cleaned up a lot of the fuels on the ground, so it will be even easer to keep up with that part of the land Hopefully we can do the same on the other half this year. Fire is a wonderful inexpensive tool. I have a MF 40B tractor with loader. I am able to make ditches with the back blade, bush hog the land, move dirt with the box blade and loader, pull the pasture choppers, etc. The tractor is very handy and easy and inexpensive to maintain. I have been looking for a nice used backhoe for few $$$ for some of the jobs. I have been looking for 2 years guess I am not willing to pay what they want for the worn out equipment that I have seen. The tool I have is adequate for most of the jobs that I have left. We will need to have an area root raked and the stumps pulled for the house and yard. We had not decided where we wanted the house(we changed our minds several times as the work was progressing) when we had the other work done, so we will need to have them come back out and do the yard area and a few other jobs to make our life easer.
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