Service · Cokato, Minnesota
Land and Lot Clearing in Central Minnesota
Land clearing across Wright, Meeker and McLeod counties covers everything from opening a building pad on a wooded lot to pulling twenty years of buckthorn out of a woodlot that used to be walkable. Most of this work is rural, most of it is easier in winter, and the part that matters most is deciding what stays.
Clearing a building site
On a new build, the pad and the driveway run have to be open before the excavator arrives, and the temptation is to clear everything to make life simple. That is usually a mistake you cannot undo. Mature oak and maple around a house site are worth real money in the finished property and take fifty years to replace. We walk the site with you and the builder, mark what is coming out and what is staying, and put protective fencing at the drip line of the keepers so machinery does not compact the soil over their roots. Root damage from construction traffic kills more trees on building sites than saws do, and it kills them slowly enough that nobody connects the two.
Buckthorn and the understory
Common buckthorn is the reason a lot of woodlots around here have become impassable. It leafs out earlier and holds its leaves later than everything native, so it shades out the understory and nothing else regenerates underneath it. Cutting it alone does not work: it resprouts from the stump with more stems than it had before. It has to be cut and the stump treated, or pulled where the ground allows. Late autumn is the best time to work on it, because it is still green when everything else has dropped and you can see exactly what you are dealing with.
Fence lines, field edges and shelterbelts
Farm work is steady for us: fence lines grown in to the point that you cannot maintain the fence, field edges creeping in and costing you passes, and shelterbelts with dead rows that need clearing before replanting. The grapple truck handles this efficiently because there is nothing underneath to protect. Winter is the right time for most of it, since frozen ground carries the equipment and there is no crop in the way.
Where the material goes
Most of what comes off a clearing job gets chipped, and on a big lot that is a lot of chips. Options are hauling it off, leaving it in a pile for you to use, or spreading it on trails and paths if that suits the property. Trunk wood worth burning gets bucked and stacked. Where a burn permit is practical and the site suits it, burning the slash is sometimes the cheapest route, and that is a conversation with your local fire warden.
What you get
- Selective clearing that keeps the mature trees worth keeping
- Protective fencing at the drip line so construction traffic does not kill the keepers
- Buckthorn cut and treated so it does not resprout thicker
- Fence lines, field edges and shelterbelts with the grapple truck
- Winter scheduling on frozen ground where access is soft
- Chips hauled, piled or spread on trails, your choice
How the job runs
Where we do this work
Land & Lot Clearing is something we do right across our area, out of the shop in Cokato. The towns we are in most often:
- Land & Lot Clearing in Cokato
- Land & Lot Clearing in Dassel (5 miles from the shop)
- Land & Lot Clearing in Litchfield (17 miles from the shop)
- Land & Lot Clearing in Hutchinson (22 miles from the shop)
- Land & Lot Clearing in Annandale (14 miles from the shop)
- Land & Lot Clearing in Maple Lake (18 miles from the shop)
- Land & Lot Clearing in Howard Lake (7 miles from the shop)
- Land & Lot Clearing in Waverly (12 miles from the shop)
Jobs like this
Hillside clearing above the lake
Selective clearing on a steep wooded slope above the water, where nothing could be driven and everything had to be lifted out over the top.
Clearing a building site
Trees off a pad being graded for a new build, worked from the lift while the machines kept moving dirt alongside.