Clear it once. Clear it right.

The mesquite problem, honestly

If you own ground in Jack County you already know what mesquite does. What is worth understanding before you hire anybody is why so much cleared land does not stay clear.

Mesquite regrows from a bud zone on the root crown, a few inches below the soil surface. Shear it, mow it, mulch it or push it over and leave that crown in the ground, and the plant sends up several new stems from it. Two or three years later you have more stems than you started with, closer together and harder to work around. That is the cycle a lot of North Texas landowners have paid for twice. If mesquite is most of what you have, see our mesquite grubbing cost per acre.

The way out is to get below the crown. On scattered or mid-size trees we lift the root ball out whole with an excavator. On big blocks of acreage, a dozer pulling a root plow cuts the roots underground across the whole pasture, and a root rake gathers what comes up. Either way the crown is out of the ground, and that is what ends the problem instead of scheduling it for later.

The rule of thumb we use: root what you intend to keep clean, like homesites, working pastures and hay meadows. Mulch or mow what you just need opened up, and plan on coming back to it.

Cedar is a different animal

Ashe juniper and eastern redcedar do not resprout from the stump. Cut them below the lowest green limb and they are done, with no root work required. Redberry juniper, more common as you go west, is the exception and can sprout back from the base, so we check which one you have. That makes cedar cheaper per acre than mesquite of the same apparent thickness, and it is where forestry mulching earns its keep. It is worth clearing on its own merits too: a stand of mature cedar pulls water and shade your grass would otherwise get.

What moves the price

Two properties with the same acreage on paper can be very different jobs. These are the things that push a job up or down inside the range.

• Vegetation density. Twenty scattered mesquite per acre and a solid wall of them are the same acre on a map and completely different days on the ground.
• Trunk size and stem count. A single-trunk mesquite comes out cleaner than an old multi-stem one that has been shredded twice. Mature cedar takes longer than young cedar.
• Terrain. Slope, rock near the surface, creeks and draws all slow the machines down and can change the method.
• Access. Gate width, distance from the road, and soft ground after rain decide what we can bring in and how fast.
• Method. Grubbing, dozer clearing or root plowing, and forestry mulching each price differently and leave different results.
• Debris. Piling for you to burn is cheapest, mulching in place removes the pile altogether, and hauling off is the most expensive and the cleanest.

Larger acreage usually brings the per-acre number down, because getting machines loaded, hauled and unloaded costs about the same on two acres as on twenty.