Site Prepping on the broad acre with Dense weediness

Hello,

I’m interested in developing about 10 hectares into a productive food forest in Northeastern Peru where I’m from. Most land available for sale is full of dense, weedy forest regrowth.

I’m thinking about renting one of these Forestry Mulchers or a bigger version of this to help prepare the site for planting:



I don’t want to use herbicide, but I assume there will be regrowth from some of the remaining tree roots. What else can I do to prevent resprouting? is there some sort of ripper that will damage the roots enough to kill the weedy trees?

I also don’t want to burn the land.

Afterwards I plan to simultaneously seed and disk plow the mulched land with weedy support species like Ricinus communis and Cajanus cajan. Perennial peanut as a groundcover. Then I will use some locally available compost to plant about 50 species of productive tree saplings directly into the mulch and topsoil.

In total I’m planning to plant 10,000 - 11,000 saplings.

Any other ideas besides perennial peanut for good non-climbing ground covers?

The forest garden will primarily be managed by hand, so it is important to make the correct initial disturbance to avoid excessive labor down the road.

I like the idea of using machinery to help out on a food forest.

I would focus on just the core 2.2 acres (1 hectare). and the other 20acres (9 hectare), I would focus on putting in swales and maybe ponds.
I would even go so far as to harvest all the biomass/carbon from the entire 22acres(10hectare) and just concentrate it on just the core area to enrich it.
After getting that 1st area fully established I would then, move outwards to create a silvo-pasture.

I’ve been viewing videos on YouTube about land clearing.

Some videos talk about the traditional method of pushing everything into piles with a big bulldozer. Mostly they say this is bad because it disturbs the topsoil, but couldn’t you spread out the topsoil afterwards? I like the idea of using a dozer, excavator and wood chipper, plus ordering a truckload of manure. The dozer would push everything into big piles, then the excavator would grab the plant matter and feed it through the chipper. The chips would be layered with manure, and the chipper would be moved a little periodically to prevent a pile From getting too large. The end result would be multiple compost piles. Then the only thing left behind by the dozer and excavator would be small mounds of moved topsoil, which could be spread back out evenly across the landscape with a Harley rake, and then the propert could be seeded and disc plowed.

A little bit more machinery and more steps involved, but a nice end result. My only concern would be heavy rain washing away soil before the cover crops have a chance to sprout. That’s the only advantage I see with a forestry mulcher