DFW Land Clearing & Forestry Mulching

What DFW Ground Does to a Clearing Job

The Metroplex sits on three very different kinds of dirt, and the dirt decides the machine, the pace, and the price more than the acreage does. If you know which side of the metro your property is on, you already know most of what your clearing job will look like.

The blackland side: Dallas, Collin, Ellis, Navarro and Hunt counties

East and south of Dallas the ground is Blackland Prairie clay. It is deep, it is fertile, and it swells when it is wet and shrinks into cracks when it is dry. The brush that takes over an idle blackland lot is mesquite, hackberry, cedar elm, bois d’arc and honey locust, with greenbrier tying the whole mess together. The good news is that most of it is soft wood a mulcher eats quickly. The catch is timing. A skid steer mulcher on saturated blackland ruts the lot and leaves a mess that costs a grading day to fix, so on this side of the metro we watch the forecast, run tracked machines, and would rather push a start date a few days than tear up your clay. Mulching leaves the root mat in place, which is exactly what you want on expansive clay: the ground stays stable and the cut material becomes a moisture blanket that slows the wet and dry cycle. A building pad is the exception, where the engineer will usually want the pad footprint grubbed and the roots out. Our grubbing page covers that work.

The Cross Timbers side: west Tarrant, Parker, Johnson, Jack and Wise counties

West of Fort Worth the clay gives way to sandy loam and the post oak and blackjack oak belt Texans call the Cross Timbers. This is the one part of North Texas where a lot can be thick with real trees rather than brush, and it is where selective clearing earns its keep. The typical job west of the metro is opening up a homesite or a pasture while keeping the post oaks, taking out the cedar, yaupon, greenbrier and dead wood underneath them. Post oaks are sensitive to root damage and grade changes, so the right approach is to mulch the understory and stay off the root zone rather than dozing up to the trunks. The sandy ground also carries a machine in wet weather far better than blackland does. Our 22 acre cedar clearing at Jacksboro is a Cross Timbers job start to finish, and it links to the full write up with the numbers.

The Trinity bottoms

The Trinity River and its forks, Denton Creek, Mountain Creek, Ten Mile Creek and the rest, cut floodplain corridors through every part of the metro. Bottomland brush is cottonwood, willow, box elder, privet and cane, and it grows back fast. Creek bottoms clear well with a mulcher because the machine works from the top of the bank and never cuts the bank itself, so the channel stays stable. Two things matter here. First, a good part of that ground is mapped floodplain, and grading or fill in a mapped floodplain needs a floodplain development permit from the city or county, while mulching brush at grade generally does not. Second, bottomland stays wet longer than anything around it, so it goes at the back of the schedule after a rain.

The Jobs We Run Across the Metroplex

Metro work is a different mix than the ranch and solar work our crews do the rest of the week. Around Dallas Fort Worth the calls break down into a handful of job types, and each one has its own rules.

Estate lots and acreage homesites. One to ten acres on the edge of a growing town, with a house going in and the owner wanting the shade trees kept. This is selective forestry mulching: we flag what stays, grind everything else, and leave a finished lot that looks like it was always a park. Our Cleburne homesite is the template, three acres done in a day with the oaks standing.

Commercial pads and development tracts. Clearing to the survey line ahead of the dirt contractor. The site engineer sets the spec, usually full clearing with the pad footprint grubbed and the perimeter buffer left. On these jobs the erosion control plan usually calls for silt fence before the ground is opened, and we work to that sequence. Our Dallas page covers the commercial side of the metro in more detail.

Subdivision edge and infill lots. Small lots, close neighbors, no room for burn piles or a debris convoy. A mulcher is the only tool that makes sense inside city limits. No smoke, no haul off, and the neighbors hear a machine for a few hours instead of a week of chainsaws.

Fence lines, easements and creek bottoms. Reclaiming a fence line that has grown into a hedge, opening a utility easement, or cleaning out a creek so it drains. Priced by the day like everything else, and usually a one or two day job.

North Texas Receipts: Real Jobs With Real Numbers

Every number below comes from a documented project write up on this site, with the acreage, the machine days, and the price range the customer actually saw. Nobody else working the Metroplex publishes this. Use it to sanity check any quote you get, including ours.

Two things jump out of that table. Small selective jobs on the DFW edge land between $1,000 and $1,700 per acre when you divide the published range by the acreage, and the per acre number drops as the job gets bigger, down to roughly $650 to $850 per acre on the 18 acre Evant tract. That is not a discount, it is arithmetic: transport and setup are a fixed cost and they get spread thinner over more acres. The full per acre breakdown by tract size, built from 38 documented jobs, is on our cost to clear land page.

The Fort Worth side of the metro, from Tarrant County west into the Cross Timbers, is covered on our Fort Worth land clearing page, and the counties north and west of the loop roll up under North Texas land clearing. The machines that do this work, from the Weiler M860A forestry mulcher down to the skid steer units that fit an infill lot, are laid out on our equipment guide.