Clearing Cedar Trees in Southern Illinois

Drive the back roads around Salem, Patoka, or Kinmundy in January and the cedars stand out like green thumbtacks in a brown field. That green is the tell that a pasture is getting away from somebody. Eastern red cedar — the scrubby, prickly evergreen that grows wild all over Southern Illinois — is one of the quickest things to move into open ground once nobody’s keeping it back. A field that was clean hay ten years ago can be half cedar today. Here’s why it happens, why it’s worth dealing with, and what it takes to get the ground back.

Why cedars take over around here

Eastern red cedar is native, so it’s not an invasive from somewhere else the way bush honeysuckle is. It behaves like one anyway. For generations the thing that kept cedar out of pastures and prairies was fire — a grass fire kills cedar seedlings dead. Stop the fire, stop the mowing, ease off the grazing, and there’s nothing left to check them.

The other half is birds. The female trees carry those little blue berry-looking cones, robins and cedar waxwings eat them, and the seed gets dropped along every fence row and under every perch on the place. That’s why cedar always seems to start on the fence lines and work its way in. Give a quiet field three or four years and you’ll have knee-high cedars scattered across it; give it ten and it’s a thicket you can’t walk through.

What a cedar takeover actually costs you

A few cedars on a fence row aren’t hurting anything. A field full of them is a different story.

• You lose grass. Cedars shade out forage and drink a surprising amount of water. Every acre that goes to cedar is an acre that stops feeding cattle.
• They’re a fire risk. Cedar wood and foliage are full of oil. A mature cedar close to a barn or a house is a lot of fuel sitting in one spot.
• They swallow fences and sightlines. Cedar in a fence row buries the wire, and cedar across a field takes your open view with it.
• They carry cedar-apple rust. If you’ve got apple or crabapple trees, nearby cedars are a host for the disease that spots the leaves and fruit.

None of that shows up overnight, which is exactly why cedar gets ignored until a field is half gone. Reclaiming that ground is the same work as any pasture reclamation job — cedar just happens to be the most common thing we’re grinding out.

The good news: cut a cedar right and it stays dead

Here’s the part that makes cedar easier to deal with than most brush. Eastern red cedar won’t resprout from the stump. Cut it below the lowest green branch and the tree is finished — no regrowth off the base, no herbicide needed on the stump. Honeysuckle, autumn olive, and a lot of hardwoods come back twice as thick when you just cut them. Cedar doesn’t. That’s why grinding cedar with a mulcher works so cleanly: the machine takes the tree down past the green, and that’s the end of it.

What does come back is seedlings. The seed is already in the dirt and the birds keep hauling in more, so a year or two after a clearing you’ll see new cedars sprouting. Those are easy — a mowing pass, a brush hog, or grazing knocks small cedars right out. The hard part is the standing trees, and those you only have to kill once.

What clearing cedar costs in Southern Illinois

Cedar clearing prices the same as other land clearing — by how much ground and how thick the growth. What moves the number is how many cedars per acre and how big they are.

• Scattered cedars in an open field — the low end, closer to $1,000 to $1,500 an acre
• A field or pasture grown into a cedar thicket — $1,750 to $2,750 an acre, because it’s wall-to-wall trees
• One big yard cedar — priced per tree, usually a couple hundred dollars, not by the acre

Cedar has one thing going for it on price: the wood is soft and stringy, so a mulcher chews through it faster than it does hardwood brush of the same size. Ground that’s all cedar often clears quicker than you’d guess. The full rundown of what moves a clearing quote is in our cost guide.

The ways to clear cedar, and where each one fits

There’s more than one way to get cedar off a field. They’re not equal.

• Cut and burn. A chainsaw and a burn pile works, and for a handful of trees it’s fine. Across acres it’s slow, it leaves you piles to deal with, and burning oily cedar takes real care with our dry spells.
• Dozer. A dozer will push cedar over, but it tears up the sod, pulls dirt and rock into piles, and leaves you with holes and a grading bill. On a field you want back in grass, that’s a step backward.
• Hand cutting. For a few scattered cedars, dropping them with a saw below the green is cheap and permanent. It stops being practical the minute there’s more than a day’s worth.
• Forestry mulching. For a field or pasture, this is the one. The mulcher grinds standing cedars up to about 8 inches into mulch in a single pass, leaves the ground intact, and drops the material right where it can protect the soil. No piles, no burning, no holes.

For most of the cedar we’re called on across Southern Illinois, mulching is the answer — it kills the trees, keeps the dirt where it belongs, and leaves a field you can mow or seed the same season.

You don’t have to take every cedar

Cedar isn’t all bad, and mulching is selective by nature, so we work around what you want to keep. A tight row of cedars along a north or west line is a real windbreak, and cedars give deer and turkeys winter cover and the birds something to eat. Plenty of landowners want those left.

The call we usually make is simple: keep the deliberate windbreak or screen, clear the volunteers that have marched into the open ground. That way you get your pasture or field back without giving up the cover that was doing you some good. It’s the same thinking behind long-term land management — open where you want open, cover where you want cover.

When to clear cedars around here

Cedar can be cut any month of the year, but the dormant season has real advantages in Southern Illinois.

• Fall through early spring is the sweet spot. The cedars are the only green thing out there, so they’re easy to see and easy to work around, and the cooler months keep the crew and the machine comfortable.
• Watch the ground. Our clay ruts when it’s wet. Frozen or firm ground carries a mulcher clean; a soaked February field will leave tracks. We time the work to dry stretches.
• Then stay on the seedlings. Once the standing cedar is gone, a mowing or a brush hog pass every year or two keeps the new ones from ever getting a foothold again.

Get your field back

Cedar is one of the more satisfying things we clear, because when it’s done it’s done — the trees don’t come back, and a field that looked lost turns back into ground you can use. The longer it sits, the bigger the cedars get and the more it costs, so the best time to deal with it is the winter you first notice it.

We’re based in Patoka and we clear cedar and reclaim overgrown ground across Southern Illinois and the Metro East, including Centralia, Salem, Mt. Vernon, Vandalia, and Effingham. Tell us what your field looks like and we’ll get you a free estimate — and a straight answer on which cedars are worth keeping.