In an echo of the 60's Back to the Land 'movement; this vlog caught my eye. "We bought a piece of land and are prototyping a more sustainable way of living. We hope. Lets see where this is going" These college graduates (Dutch) decided to head back to the land. - in rural Portugal. I found the content interesting if for no other reason that it shows what a huge difference there in in land use/rules/laws between the US and EU. One example - they dam up a creek to make a swimming hole. In the US this would result in (legal) summery execution - in fines.... Much of what they do and how they set things up is not how I would do things, still, it is interesting to see how they work thru issues. Clearly "Urban Dwellers" - and throw in a college degree and the fun ensues. One example - when clearing trash wood, they leave about a foot of stump.... The production quality isn't bad, so not painful to watch and the vlog offer (IMO) many insights to real differences in thinking between both generations and locations (US vs EU) Offered solely for your amusement and education...
Reminds me of my days spent clearing pine saplings and trees from a piece of land where I had hoped to create a doomstead. Oh, the chainsaw chains and chainsaws that I went through before I got smart and sold it to a neighboring land owner. I used the proceeds to purchase a smaller, but much more useful property next door to my home place. The new place needed a lot of work, but I got 3.5 acres of land, which adjoins me, two large metal buildings (tractor/equipment shed and a barn), and a house trailer that I rent (Section 8). That rent pays for ALL of my property tax and insurance, and I have NEVER missed a rent payment, Thank you!, Uncle Sam. Getting back to those folks in Portugal...they need to breakdown and hire a bulldozer. Even a small dozer could do more in a day that an army of their college buddies could accomplish in a month. Use their friends to pick-up after the dozer is through, mostly to do small stuff like working around the buildings, the lake and stream, feeding the wood chipper, etc..
Very few folks use bulldozers to clear land these days… What they need is a small to medium sized tracked excavator, with a bucket/thumb… and an good operator who knows how run it efficiently… The saying goes, “Hydraulics is your friend”…
Yep.....you can do it with a dozer, this is me in 1982 clearing pasture on our place with a JD 450. You have to spend a fair amount of time cutting roots around anything much above 15" diameter before trying to push them over, and the real disadvantage is you can't get the blade up but about 2' on the tree....whereas an excavator can reach 15-20' up the tree and get a WHOLE lot more mechanical advantage on the push. Dozer is long gone, and I have a small (8,000lb) excavator I use around the farm, or if I need a bunch cleared, I call on a neighbor in the business and he brings a HUGE Cat machine over that will easily push over anything I have without even bothering to cut roots.
Looking at the shell of the building he crawled thru the brush to show reminded me of time spent in Germany. They would build a house (walls thicker than in the video) out of cinder block and that clay brick like in the video, and the work looked ROUGH as heck.....like a bunch of drunks did it. But after a year or so, they would come in and stucco the whole thing and they turned out BEAUTIFUL !
