I’ve spent the last two months on my days off and weekends clearing one of our pastures. Let it go for too long. We’ve had a couple guys over the years get the larger ones but this year I made it a mission to get the small ones cleared. 80 acres doesn’t seem like much till there’s a tree every step. Local fire department was finally able to help out (wind had to be out of the north for it to work not an easy feat in the spring). Today was my last day of chain saws and blade on a weed eater. Good solid work and it’ll be an ongoing battle to keep them contained. Now I just have to decide what to do with the locust popping up.

Makes a pretty good deer location. Hadn’t shot but one since 2009 but took two out of this pasture this year. Interestingly I found 16 deer skeletons after the burn (some had been there quite a while) I can only assume they were hit on the highway as most weren’t far from it. Never would have seen them until the burn. Too bad this fresher one would have grown up to have been nice.

Two bucks I took this year from the pasture (cows were still in it while I hunted).



Dead head from two springs ago, another highway victim.





Last years shed.




The tree boss my wife. Once she got the chainsaw I couldn’t keep it away from her. Named her Agatha.

Good work, reminds me to go chop mine while the trees are small.

I think fire is the best way to control small cedars. I keep nippers and a spray bottle of Tordon with me. It takes a long time but you can eventually get ahead of locust. They are truly a pain and the worst tree we deal with in our area.

Love killing cedars! Nice work.

We don't like cedars either. Two summers ago I spent any where from 2 hours to 6 hours every Saturday morning for about 3 months cutting cutting big ones out of a pasture that had been neglected.

Nice deer

You on Hwy 75 WadeRyan?

We’re having trouble here in corn and bean fields, we notill and the chemicals don’t do much to the trees.

This is kind of interesting. I’ve been following guys on YouTube who say fox and coon head towards cedar trees for overhead cover. But you’re taking them out!

Coons are worth $6 and a steer is worth $3,000, easy choice there.

Any water close by? That many dead deer in a area sounds like EHD.

Nice job Wade.
My wife bought a new Echo 20” 4920 to take down dead ash on our place.
I’m not sure if she will let me touch it other than to sharpen saw teeth for her and maybe go get her more mix gas.
She is not a flowers gal, but buy her a chainsaw or put her in seat of heavy equipment and she is so happy.
That’s what makes life fun, right?
Jim

Gary highway 8 down on the Kansas line.

Jbyrd we’ve had the pasture for 10 or so years. There’s water there found all the skeletons just off the highway away from water. First time the winds worked for a burn. Some of them had been there for some time. Still a healthy population there.

Teacher there’s still more raccoons there then I’d want to deal with. There’s a few large cottonwoods I’m sure packed full of them. Hadn’t seen any fox there too far from town coyotes have their way. Hard to explain but that many cedars it just chokes out the grass. No grass no point in a pasture.

Jim you know as well as me happy wife happy life.

I'm envious of your making those big burns. All I've got to do was little ditch burns.

We burn quite a few acres. Dry years can be pretty hairy. We deal with more obstacles than guys like Yessir further west.

I think they are dealing with Red Cedar as a pest tree in pastures. Quite different than White cedar we have in MN.

No kidding. I was going to burn a few acres on my farm. I mowed a 15 foot section around the square, started a fire that was fighting the wind so I could control it and mak a nice 25 foot bury out fire break with the plan of lighting it on the other end and letting the wind push it to the burnt spot and die out.

Everything was going smoothly tell the wind changed. I was lucky to get it put out. I didnt have arm hair or eyelashes by the time it was out. I have not had a good size fire since im gun shy now. Would love to burn off several of my fields.

Yep, we're out in the grasslands, and without fire our pastures turn into woodlots. Without burning, a clean native grass pasture can become a closed-canopy forest in a few short decades. If there is a good seed source nearby or a few woody plants in the pasture already, it'll disappear even faster. Eastern Redcedar is easy to kill with periodic fire, but the broadleaf resprouting shrubs and deciduous trees are harder to deal with. Best to never let them get established in the first place, and for that it takes burning nearly every year (and making sure your cattle leave enough grass behind, so that your pasture can actually burn). I'm a bit north of Yessir but in the same region. We've got a good 3500 acres burned thus far this year. Probably have another 5000 to go. It is a lot of fun to make big fire, and it's great to see those cedars go up. Good on you, Wade!

Unfortunately, annual burns are deleterious to the prairie chicken and other ground nesting birds. We burn on a rotation and our ground nesting birds do pretty well unless the rains come wrong during nesting season. I do applaud you for leaving enough grass to burn. Overgrazing native is an open invitation for invasives and an eventual death sentence for native pastures.

You're not wrong Kansas Cat! This conundrum has got me in a quandary, and I'm curious as to what you're experiencing where you are. What we're seeing here is that anything less than annual burning leads to serious woody plant invasion, but we also are told that annual burning leaves no cover for nesting grassland birds (including GPC, though anecdotally, I do chickens nesting in annually burned prairie. No idea what the success rate is...). However, there is also good research showing that the presence of trees in even loose proximity to grassland bird nesting locations is detrimental to them...so we need to keep the woodies out too. Not burning hurts the birds because it lets woody plants in, but burning to keep the woodies out kills the birds. In this situation most managers turn to the chemical companies. That's got a different suite of problems, and probably isn't a good long term solution. I've tossed around the idea of adding browsers to the system, they'd harm the woody plants and lessen the role that fire would need to play, but that's an unpopular idea with its own suite of problems...maybe staggering and rotating the seasonality of fire in your pastures, so that some are burned after nesting season is over and early-burned pastures have regrown?

Any thoughts or advice? What kind of burn rotation do you do? Have you seen plum, dogwood, pricklyash, honeylocust, etc. coming in? If so, how do you deal with it?

With enough deer those red cedars look like bonsai plants here....maybe running some goats would help...though anytime you get to burn something is a good time, lol

I would love if we could burn every year. We've been begging them to burn for a number of years but due to state laws the smoke can't cross a highway during a burn which causes it's challenges being on the south side of a highway. Kansas seems to be a lot more open regarding burning as well. We were lucky to get ours completed just prior to the onset of the fires out west and last I checked the whole state was back into a burn ban. That pasture was still hot in places for around four days after the burn, I could see how it could get back out of hand but it also made my life a million times easier being able to see what I was up against. The trees I had down prior to the burn were completely disintegrated and it did kill even medium trees in it's path that I hadn't got to yet. I've got every cedar down that's not in the deep banks of the property, now I am just going to try to keep them at bay. We've had people spray with four wheelers, one plane spray, and we've had combinations of skid-steer work done over the years. It's never looked as clean as it did the day after the burn.

Yep, fire or heavy grazing (well, heavy enough) will keep the "eastern red 'cedars'" (actually its a species of juniper) under control.

I can tell when the land use changes (cattle grazing is no longer going on) when the "cedars" start popping up. Because of various reasons, there are pasture parcels around here that are no longer grazed. There are other reasons, but mostly because more and more southeastern South Dakota farmers are now cash "grain" only guys (corn and soybeans) and don't bother with cattle.

Property tax of pasture land is (fairly) cheap and if these guys can't get someone to graze their patches, it just sits there. There's probably some tax angle in it that non-rented pasture land gets written off as a business "loss", with probably Cargill and the other big international dry ag commodity corporations championing it into the federal tax code .

Ive never seen heavy grazing hinder cedar at all

Once asked a friend who ranches 12,000 goats in Texas why they always had to do intensive brush (juniper/cedar) removal with heavy equipment if goats were supposed to be so good at eating brush. His response was that they wouldn't eat it until they had eaten everything else first. After years of guiding and trapping on the ranch I can verify his response was accurate.

We tried sheep for several years for control weeds and brush and id totally agree. Good grass is higher on their list than most weeds and brush.

It does around here, but perhaps our seed bed isn't as saturated as it is in your part of Kansas. We had (and have) fewer overall natural trees in this part of South Dakota and even the shelter belts planted during the 1930s and '40s are dying out.

I've wanted to take this photo for a number of months but the timing was right for me or the right angle. Finally took it the other day. The old cottonwood wasn't down in the township road ditch as most of the old planted cottonwoods in the late 1800s/early 1900s were but was up on the edge of a crop field. The farmers tolerated it for a long time but then it got split in two during a thunderstorm a couple of years back and the guy operating the land now finally cut the rest down except the stump. About 90% cropland in what can been seen in the photo.

Thats the Republican River in NE. Those are those cedars you are talking about I assume.

Yes Ohio they start off looking just like that innocent enough. Let them seed a few years and there were places I could spin in a circle with a weed eater and take out a row of trees in a 360 degree radius that were 5-6 deep. They can get thick and fast. You can kill them quite easily by just cutting them below the lowest branch, if you don't I can verify they become even more of a nuisance and turn into bushes that are a real pain to get out. Most of those that had been cut too high previously I had to use a chainsaw as the stump is obviously the same size (most of them were cut with a skid loader) and multiple bush like branches sprout off all directions. I've been doing a little work here and there on them over the years but finally decided I wasn't going to stop until I didn't see one standing. Mission accomplished.

I really wish I would have taken some before pictures. I'll see if I can dig any up. Previous owner left a barbwire fence splitting the 80 acres into 40. When they sold the pasture rather than roll up the barb wire they just laid the barb wire down and left the posts up. I hand pulled a 1/2 mile of 5 wire fence out from the ground. It made that area of cutting trees pretty tough as the undergrowth had grown all into it. Won't have to worry about where you drive along the pasture now and getting hung up, it was spread around all over the place.

We usually have about 16 pair on this pasture and I will say it's grubbed down pretty well depending on how long they are in there, the cattle do not touch the cedars other than a few larger ones they rub on. When it comes to goats, we have cattle fence and I've seen enough goats when it comes to fences to know they'd be the next set of highway victims.

Herbicide the locus or you will regret in under 5 year.

I just got back to this thread. I am seeing quite a bit of good information on this thread. One thing I haven't seen mentioned is what prairie actually is. A healthy native landscape contains well over a hundred plant species. When I was younger, we had plenty of those in our area. We have only a few left. If you see a pasture with only two or three grass species and no forbs, it is not a healthy pasture. I personally like to burn early most years. Burning early encourages forb production. Unfortunately, early burning does nothing to control fescue. Once in awhile I will burn a piece as late as I can get it to light. If you have enough residual native, this practice will really discourage fescue. We typically rely on mechanical removal of woody species but we are only dealing with hundreds of acres. We also hay everything we can and don't run any livestock on our native pastures.

Fescue will be first thing to green up and 2QPA 41% will help. Fescue removal and cedar will bring back natives.

Our ground contains an extensive seed library. In areas that are 100% cedar. I have observed if you remove the cedars, and are patient, a good native landscape can be regenerated. It requires mowing for the first few years to control broadleaf weeds and expose the understory to sunshine. After a couple of years you will have good native grass and a fairly healthy forb population. If you are impatient and resort to chemicals, you create voids and encourage really nasty invasives.

I have used Plateau and Roundup with varying levels of success. If johnson grass is present, Plateau is a must and establishing natives is difficult. Plateau will kill immature native grasses.

Please PM me a copy of your Burn Plan required by law in most states. Don't know how a person gets a burn permit in March when the bans have been in place for over a month, I sure couldn't. Our church men's group formed a Burn Organization (called 5 Guys and a Shovel) and we did CRP burns in the 90's to 2010. All by volunteer members. Some of us did Prescribed Burns before that (long before Pheasants Forever did) with minimum tools and much manpower. We did burns at the same time and county where Game and Parks lost control of theirs and we did not. We did 6-8 burns of 160-400 acres /burn/ year. Experience and Failure are a good teachers and was learned by the first timers. Local Fire Depts and Chiefs came to watch us and the compliments on safety were very good - so much so that we had more customers than we could eventually handle. We charged a fee and it was a donation to our organization. Age crept up on most of us over almost 20 years and the younger guys didn't want to give of the time in our area of NE to continue so we had to stop. AFTER THE BURN - we would contact the owners/tenants and evaluate the resurgence of vegetation and could steer anyone on to further treatments of their CRP (mainly because some of us also worked for USDA). Herbicides and interseeding produced tremendous #'s of all kinds of wildlife in the CRP's and I was glad to be a small part of it. From 25,000 acres over 2 counties we are down to less than 2000 acres and if you saw all the cropland conversion now you would wonder if there was any grassland ever here. My experience. ...............the mike

Thanks for the concern, it was burned February 27, prior to any ban in the state. The burn was completed by the local volunteer fire department who typically provide the permits

Sounds like you hit the timing correct for trees but it (this eary) will enhance the cool season grasses over the warm season natives. Need to see pictures of the current regrowth of the grasses as you are 100+ miles south of us here. April in KS and May in NE seem to be the best months for rejuvenating the native prairie grasses. ..................the mike

Sounds like you hit the timing correct for trees but it (this eary) will enhance the cool season grasses over the warm season natives. Need to see pictures when you have time, of the current regrowth of the grasses as you are 100+ miles south of us here. April in KS and May in NE seem to be the best months for rejuvenating the native prairie grasses. ..................the mike

Getting rid of brush is more difficult than excess cool season grasses. Those can be grazed off heavily and allow the warm seasons to come in just through rotational grazing. I say GOOD JOB - you accomplished what you desired and likely provided more forage.

I have a small patch of natives I established and included eastern gamma in along with about 40+ forbs. Had some fescue encroachment in it so I moved my cows into it. They are pounding it down and I am watching the clumps of eastern gamma start to green up now. About another week of grazing, I will pull cows off it, burn off all excess hay fed, and watch it recover. Guessing my over grazing will take care of some of the fescue and allow the warm seasons better growth from reduced competition..
This patch - I did not mow at all last year for hay - had quite a few trees already growing at 6-7 ft tall in the field my son and I cut and tordonned. I stock piled tons of forage and have successfully grazed it all down and trampled the rest to the point I am now feeding hay on it. Having a warm season field and cool season fields definitely is advantageous.