Land and lot clearing in Weld County

What we clear

Weld County land clearing is mostly one of five jobs.

Building site prep. Clearing a footprint, driveway and staging area before construction, and deciding early which trees are worth protecting rather than discovering later that the excavator has already severed their roots.

Overgrown acreage. Volunteer Russian olive, Siberian elm and salt cedar take over unmanaged ground fast in this county. Reclaiming pasture or a horse property usually means dealing with all three.

Fence lines. Trees and brush growing into fencing, and the ongoing problem of a fence line that has effectively become a hedgerow.

Shelterbelt renovation. A lot of the windbreaks planted across Weld County decades ago are now overmature, gappy or dying. Selective removal and replanting works better than clearing the lot.

Ditch and canal corridors. Irrigation infrastructure that has grown in, with the access and easement considerations that come with it.

Clearing versus thinning

The default assumption is that clearing means taking everything. It usually should not.

On the plains, mature trees are slow and hard-won. A 40-year-old hackberry or bur oak that survived four decades of Weld County wind, drought and alkaline soil is not something you replace with a nursery stick. Before we clear anything we will walk it with you and separate what has to go from what is worth keeping and releasing from competition.

The exception is invasive species. Russian olive and salt cedar are aggressive, water-hungry, and there is no argument for keeping them.

What happens to the material

Options, in descending order of cost: chip everything on site and spread or haul the chips, haul whole material off, or grind larger wood into usable mulch for the property. On acreage, some clients want logs cut to firewood length and stacked instead.

What does not happen is leaving a slash pile. Cut brush left on site is a fire load and, in a county with the wind Weld gets, a genuinely bad idea.

Before you clear

Two checks worth making. Utility locates, always — and remember that private irrigation lines are usually not covered by public locate services. And any trees within the public right of way come under Greeley Forestry rather than your ownership, so their removal needs approval separately.

Questions we get about this

Do you do full lot clearing or selective clearing?

Both, and we will usually recommend selective. Mature trees are hard to replace on the Front Range, so we separate what genuinely has to go from what can be kept and released from competition.

What about Russian olive and salt cedar?

Those come out. Both are invasive, aggressive and water-hungry, and there is no good argument for retaining them on Weld County ground.

Can you clear around an existing house or barn?

Yes, and it overlaps heavily with defensible space work. See wildfire mitigation for how the zones around a structure should be handled.

How do you protect the trees I want to keep?

Fenced root protection zones established before equipment arrives, machinery routed outside the critical root area, and no grade changes over the roots. Most construction tree deaths come from compaction and trenching, not from anything obvious.

What do you do with the brush?

Chipped and spread, chipped and hauled, or ground into mulch for the property. On acreage we can also cut logs to firewood length. We do not leave slash piles.