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.