Greg Parden

In my area (Alabama) a clear cut like that can cost as much as $1000/acre to pull all the stumps and clean & prep a seed bed to convert to pasture. If you have several years to wait, you could leave the stumps and debris to rot down to a soft enough state to pull a disk through. But by then you will have a lot of new growth to contend with that will need to be mulched. Skidder-mounted mulching can also run $1000/acre so you're back in the same predicament. You can always clean it up by hand if you're really young and energetic - or with an ox or mule like great grandpa did. People often clear-cut a property to cash in on the timber money right before they sell it, and the buyers don't always realize how expensive it is to fix the mess that's left behind.

Stacy Witscher wrote:I think the idea is to feed the branches of trees that are being trimmed or taken down. This is a great idea for me as I have 80 acres of mostly forest that needs fuel reduction work.

Stacey. That is a great idea. I feed my goats tree trimmings daily too, and it's pretty funny to watch - when I pull up with a truckload of limbs they will run across an entire field of grass pushing and shoving each other to get to those limbs. Nathan asked if goats could live on nothing but tree leaves. I believe they would thrive on such a diet. It would just be a lot of work to sustain in a contained environment because they will eventually strip the area clean of all the leaves they can reach and then would need to have limbs cut down or brought to them. They can really clean up a brushy area astonishingly fast.

Nathan,

I can tell you from many years of experience raising goats, that goats would rather eat tree leaves than anything else on planet Earth. Goats are in the Caprinae family - like deer. They are browsers and would rather eat standing up on their rear legs reaching up for leaves than grazing on grass. In fact grazing grass is not actually healthy for goats, and is the primary reason that people have so many problems with their goats getting intestinal parasites. Goats benefit from the tannins in certain tree leaves like oaks. I was never able to get my goats off of worm medicines until I started feeding tree leaves. So in my opinion a diet of tree leaves in the most species appropriate diet you could replicate in captivity. The real problem I see is where you could find such an endless supply of tree leaves in fenced-in area?