Prescribed Burn ?

[Moose]

Hi, I am looking to burn off some grassland on a 40 acre parcel. It has about 25-30 acres of grass and is our hunting property. Has anybody ever tackled a project like this or is it better to hire it out?

[Tom7227]

I did it 15 years ago with a fire chief and two volunteer firefighters. We had a guy with a bulldozer. Things got out of hand and we ended up burning half of a neighbors land. Since I have attended a day long class on doing it and assisted in two burns. It isn't at all simple, takes a lot of knowledge and probably more equipment than you realize.

[crawler harness]

Its not all that bad if you do your prep work right. The biggest thing is a firebreak, mow a firebreak about 6ft around the perimeter, or try to have black dirt as your break. Do the burn say 90% as a backburn. Once you get say 25-50 yds backburned, if things are going smoothly you could do little strip head fires, walk ahead 15-20ft and light across, this will suck the backing fire towards the headfire and you can move right along. A propane torch would work fine. or you could take road flares and use them as an igniting device. Do your burn on a day with humidity that is not dropping below 20%. Usually the norm that I was taught and it holds true for the most part is, whatever your humidity level is at 8 am you can cut that in half and that would be about as low as the humidity will go that day. I would recommend not doing it with winds over 20 mph too. Otherwise call the dnr see about there MCC crew coming and doin it, maybe praire land restorations does burns too