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?