Land & Lot Clearing in Bentonville, AR

The jobs we get called for

Building pads and driveways. A lot out toward Highfill, Gravette, or the edges of Centerton, with a house going on it. We clear the footprint, the drive, and enough working room around both for the concrete and framing crews.

Pasture reclamation. Land that was grazed twenty years ago and has since filled in with eastern red cedar, honeysuckle, and blackberry. Cedar is the main event here — it colonizes fast, it burns like a torch, and it takes over a field completely if nobody touches it for a decade.

Fence lines and boundaries. Opening up a line you can actually run wire along, and taking out the volunteers that have grown into the existing fence.

Defensible space around a house. Common up in Bella Vista, where houses sit down in the trees and the owner wants breathing room and light without clearing the whole slope.

Clear-cut versus selective

Most people who say "clear the lot" don't want it bare. A mature white oak or a stand of hickory is worth real money on a finished property and takes fifty years to replace.

So we walk it with you first and mark what stays. Usually that's the healthy hardwoods with good structure, well clear of the build footprint. Everything else goes.

One warning worth giving early: a tree that has grown up inside a stand is not built to stand alone. It grew tall and thin because its neighbors sheltered it. Clear everything around it and the first serious wind finds it undefended. When we mark keepers, we mark them in groups with some buffer, not as lonely specimens in the middle of a new lawn.

Where there's just one big oak near the house rather than a whole parcel, that's a straightforward removal and priced as one.

What happens to the material

Three ways to deal with it, and the choice moves the price more than the clearing itself does.

• Chip and haul. Cleanest result, highest cost, most truck traffic through your property.
• Mulch in place. Grind the small material and spread it. Cheap, good for erosion on our slopes, and it looks rough for a season.
• Burn pile. Cheapest where the acreage and the rules allow it. Check with your fire district before counting on it — county burn bans go up fast in a dry summer and city limits are a different matter entirely.

Stumps and grade

Clearing leaves stumps unless you pay to take them out, and what you need depends on what's going over the top. Pasture can live with stumps ground flush. A building pad cannot — those come out completely, and the holes get backfilled and compacted before anything is poured.

On most parcels we bring the grinder through behind the saws and chase the root balls out in one pass, because coming back later means paying to move equipment twice.

Before we start

Know where your lines are. Property pins, buried utilities, septic field, and the water line to the barn. We'll call for locates on public utilities, but private lines running across a property are invisible to that system and only the owner knows about them.

Steep ground matters too. Much of Benton County is more sloped than it looks on a map, and clearing a hillside without a plan for erosion means the first hard rain moves your topsoil onto the neighbor's place. Straw, seed, or mulch cover goes on quickly, not eventually.

Once the clearing is done, a lot of owners have us come back and shape the boundary trees you keep, which suddenly become the front row and take wind they never used to see.