Land clearing questions, answered straight

Because the same acreage can be two completely different jobs, and our own record proves it. In one Florida county we cleared an acre and a quarter in two machine days, and two and a half acres in a single day, in the same year. Twice the days for half the acreage. A price per acre has to assume what is standing, and that assumption is wrong often enough that somebody always ends up absorbing it. We would rather work out a day count from photographs and tell you the number before anything moves.

They stay in the ground. This is the answer people are most often given wrongly, so it is worth being plain: forestry mulching grinds off what is standing and leaves the root plate where it is. It does not take stumps out. If you need the roots out, that is grubbing, it is done with the excavator mulcher, and it is a different machine at a different rate. If somebody tells you a mulching machine removes stumps, they are describing a different job from the one you are being quoted for.

It depends which machine comes. The skid steer mulcher takes stems to 8 inches, the dedicated mulcher to 24, and the excavator mulcher to 30 and can also pull roots. Those are the limits we quote against. Anything beyond them is not our work and we will tell you so rather than start and stop.

It matters because the rate follows the machine, so it is the single thing that most moves what you pay. What decides it is the size of the stems and whether the roots have to come out, not how many acres you have. This is not something you should have to guess at, which is why we work it out from photographs and tell you which machine we would bring before you commit to anything.

Because the rate follows the machine rather than the stem. The excavator takes 30 inch stems and pulls roots and still costs less per day than the dedicated mulcher, which stops at 24 and does not grub. It catches people out constantly, which is exactly why we publish all three rates instead of quoting you one number and hoping you do not ask.

Across everything we have finished, the median is one acre in one machine day, and ninety five percent of our jobs came in at three acres a day or less. Those are real numbers off real job sheets rather than what a machine can do in ideal conditions. What moves it is what is standing and how long it has been standing, which is why we want photographs before giving you a number.

It stays on your ground, sprayed out and spread as the machine moves. You do not have to do anything with it. On most sites the layer is the point rather than a side effect: it holds the surface together, keeps the dust down and breaks down into the ground over time. Nothing is piled, nothing is burned and nothing is trucked away.

Possibly, and it depends on the species, the size of the trunk and how your parcel is classified. Every county and city in Florida writes its own tree rules and they are not the same. If your parcel is inside a city limit the city is your authority rather than the county, and municipal rules tend to be the stricter of the two. We are a clearing contractor, not the permit office, and we do not file applications. Confirm it with whichever office covers your parcel rather than taking a contractor word for it, ours included.

Insured, and we send the certificate before the machine moves. Florida does not issue a contractor licence for forestry mulching, so nobody holds one. If a contractor tells you they are licensed for it, ask to see what they mean. Insurance is the document worth asking every contractor to produce.

We tell you. If the work needs something we do not run, or the ground is wet enough that a machine has no business on it, or the parcel cannot be reached, saying so costs us one job and saves you a wasted day. We would rather do that than send the wrong machine and charge you for the day it spends stuck.