PIERCE
LAND
CLEARING
We take raw ground to a graded, drained pad with a road you can get a concrete truck down, then the slab crew and the utility crew take over. Clearing, grubbing, cut and fill, rough and finish grading, drainage and the driveway. Priced in machine days at the same published rates as every other machine we run.
Raw ground, or ground somebody else half cleared and walked away from. We bring mulchers, dozers and excavators and take it to a shaped, drained, graded pad with access you can get a loaded truck down. On most Texas builds that is the whole of what site preparation means, and it is the part that decides whether every trade behind you runs on schedule or stands around waiting.
We do not trench utilities and we do not do lime or cement soil stabilization. Those are separate trades with their own equipment and their own licences, and a contractor who claims to self perform all of it is usually subbing it out and marking it up. We hand you a finished pad and get out of the way of the crews who do that work.
The most expensive delay on a build is not a slow day, it is a trade arriving to ground that is not ready. If the pad is not shaped and the drive will not hold a truck, the slab crew turns around and you pay for the trip anyway. Our work ends at the point where the next crew can actually start, not at the point where the machines look busy.
Ground at grade, spoil dealt with on site rather than hauled off at your expense, water leaving where the plan says it should, and a drive that holds a loaded truck in February. We walk it with you before the machines go back on the trailers.
Trees, brush and root balls off the footprint. Mulched where the material can stay on site as cover, grubbed where the roots have to come out because a slab is going over them. Grubbing is a separate line from clearing because it is a different machine doing a different job.
Moving dirt from where it is to where the plan wants it. Balancing cut against fill on site keeps imported select fill and haul off out of your budget, and on most acreage it is achievable if somebody reads the contours before the first pass.
Shaping the ground so water goes where the plan says. Rough grading gets the elevations close, finish grading gets them right. On clay that drains too slowly we shape to shed, on sand that drains too fast we shape to hold. Both finish ready for a slab or for grass.
House pads, barn pads, shop pads and equipment pads, built up in lifts and shaped to the footprint you give us. Blackland clay and Carrizo sand want different pads, and the pad is the one thing on a site that is expensive to fix after the concrete is down.
The drive is the first thing built and the last thing anybody budgets for. Cut, crown, base rock and a surface that survives a wet February with concrete trucks on it. See ranch road construction for the long version.
Swales, ditches, culvert pipe set at the drive, and stone placed where the traffic is going to be. Getting water off the pad and around the structure is cheaper to do with a dozer now than with a plumber later.
Real jobs with full write-ups and photographs. Every card opens the project page with the acreage, the machines and the day count.
Site prep is priced the same way everything else we run is priced. A dozer or an excavator on dirt work is $3,000 per day plus transport. A skid steer mulcher is $3,000 per day with transport included. A high horsepower mulcher is $4,000 per day plus transport. What you are buying is days of a machine and an operator, because days are what the work actually consumes.
The smallest job we can run is one day, and that holds on every machine we own. A quarter acre pad still costs a day, because a day is what it takes to load, haul, work and haul back. Small jobs are cheapest when you stack them: pad, drive and drainage in the same mobilization rather than three separate trips.
How much has to come off before dirt can move, how far the dirt has to travel, whether cut and fill balance on site, how much rock is in the way, and how wet the ground is when we get there. Access matters more than people expect: a site a lowboy cannot reach costs days before a machine turns a track.
Transport on the dozer and excavator. Imported material, so select fill, base rock and culvert pipe are their own lines rather than buried in a day rate. Clearing, grubbing and excavation appear as three lines because they are three different machines. See what clearing costs for the full rate card.
Quote first, walk after you approve it. That order exists so you are not paying for a site visit before you know whether the number works.
Send the address, the acreage, what is standing on it, and what has to be there when we leave. Plans or a plat help. Photographs help more. Most site prep quotes come back the same day.
Machine days, machine type, and every line separated so you can see what clearing costs against what grading costs. Materials are their own lines. Nothing on it is an allowance we adjust later.
Once you have approved the estimate we walk the ground with you. Access, spoil placement, which trees stay, where the water is going, and where the pad corners actually sit. None of this happens until you have approved the estimate.
Clear, grub, cut, fill, shape, drain, then the drive. We work in that order because every step after grading depends on the one before it. You get told when we start and when we finish, and we walk the finished ground with you before the trailers load.
From Waxahachie down through Temple and out east of Austin, the dirt is a shrink swell clay that moves several inches between a wet spring and a dry August. Pads here get built up in compacted lifts rather than cut into the native, and drainage away from the slab is not optional. Grading that ignores the clay is the reason so many Blackland slabs crack in year three.
Bastrop, Elgin, Lexington, Giddings and Smithville sit on sand that drains almost too well. The problem here is not water sitting, it is the shoulder of a cut sloughing and a drive rutting under a loaded truck. Sand sites want flatter side slopes, a crowned drive, and base rock where the traffic is.
West of I-35 through Dripping Springs, Wimberley, Marble Falls and Boerne, the topsoil runs a few inches over rock. There is often nothing to cut into, so a pad gets built up rather than dug down, and the rock decides the day count. Where the ledge sits shallow across a whole footprint, rock milling with a FAE STC/SSL is usually faster and cheaper than a hammer.
Around Weatherford, Springtown and Decatur the ground alternates sandy loam and hard clay across a single tract, which means one part of a site behaves like Bastrop and the next behaves like Waxahachie. That is a grading problem more than a clearing problem, and it is the reason we look at contours before quoting rather than pricing off a satellite image alone.
I highly recommend Pierce Land Clearing! They were incredibly responsive and had a crew on site within a few days of our initial contact. They worked for two days clearing the better part of our 19 acre site, and they were very reasonably priced. As a home builder, I have worked with a lot of clearing companies. I will definitely work with them again.
Ralph Sharp, Google review
This company gets customer service. They promptly contacted me, scheduled service within the week and promptly showed up each day of the project. The operator listened and provided fabulous service. Our 2 acre grading was done to our specs.
Cindy Pullin, Google review
I cannot say enough good things about my experience working with Pierce Land Clearing. We have a large piece of very heavily wooded and overgrown property and their equipment was able to clear a clean, wide road and open several acres.
Jenna Kelly-Landes, Google review
I am a home builder in Baton Rouge Louisiana, but I am working on a pretty large project in Austin Texas. I have a lot of experience working alongside contractors in all trades. It is always most important to identify those that take pride in their work.
Alan Colby, Google review
On our jobs it is clearing and grubbing the footprint, excavation and cut and fill, rough and finish grading, building the pad, drainage, and the access road or driveway. That takes raw ground to the point where a slab crew can start. We do not trench utilities and we do not do lime or cement soil stabilization, so those stay with the trades that specialize in them.
It is priced in machine days rather than by the acre. A dozer or excavator on dirt work runs $3,000 per day plus transport. A skid steer mulcher is $3,000 per day with transport included, and a high horsepower mulcher is $4,000 per day plus transport. There is a one day minimum on every machine we own.
A single homesite pad with a short drive is usually one to two machine days. Ten to twenty acres of clearing plus grading is more often a week. The variables are how much has to come off before dirt can move, whether cut and fill balance on site, how much rock is in the way, and how wet the ground is. Your quote states the day count rather than leaving it open.
Yes. Send the plan with the quote request and we shape and build to the elevations and footprint on it. What we do not do is the lime or cement stabilization and the compaction testing that some engineered pads call for, so if your plan specifies those, budget for that trade separately.
Yes. Swales, ditches, shaping to move water away from the pad, and setting culvert pipe at the drive. Pipe and base rock are quoted as materials rather than folded into the day rate.
No. We do not trench or install water, electric, gas or septic lines. Those are licensed trades with their own equipment. What we do is leave you ground the utility crew can work in, and we are happy to coordinate the sequence so they are not waiting on us and we are not undoing their trench.
Almost always, and they are separate lines on the quote for that reason. Trees and brush come off first, then root balls get grubbed where a slab or a drive is going over them, and only then can a dozer make a real cut. Grading over ungrubbed roots is how you get soft spots under a pad that show up a year later.
Statewide. Central Texas and the Austin metro are the bulk of it, but we have run dirt work and clearing from Brownsville to Weatherford and out to Brady. Mobilization is a written line on the quote that reflects the distance rather than a surprise at the end.
Send the address, the acreage and what has to be standing there when we leave. You get machine days and a written quote, usually the same day, and nobody walks your site until you have approved the number.
