Old Fence Removal & Fence Line Clearing in Springfield, MO
Springfield Farm Fence clears fence lines and removes old fence for landowners across Springfield, Ash Grove, Halltown, Fair Grove, Rogersville, and Bolivar. We pull failed wire, dig and cut out rotted posts, take down grown-up cedar and brush, and stake a clean line before a new fence goes in, throughout Greene, Lawrence, Polk, Webster, Christian, and Dallas counties, Missouri.
Removal is its own job with its own tools. Wire comes off with a spinner rather than by hand, so a mile of barbed comes up in rolls instead of tangles. Posts come out with a post puller that lifts them straight, which matters here because a wood post set in rock breaks off at the ground line and leaves a stub the next auger has to fight. Steel T-posts pull clean and often get reused. Where an old post is buried in concrete, we take the collar out with the post so the new hole can go in the same spot. Brush and cedar come off with a skid loader and a cutter, then get piled or hauled. The shortcut most people have seen is a chain on a tractor drawbar, which snaps posts, buries wire in the sod, and leaves the next crew working around problems nobody can see.
Finding the Line Before You Build It
An old fence is not always on the boundary. Fence rows drift over decades as somebody patches around a tree or a wet spot. Before we clear, we walk the line with you and the survey pins if you have them. Where a boundary matters and the pins are gone, we will tell you plainly that the answer is a surveyor and not a fence crew. Building an expensive fence on a guessed line is how neighbors end up in a conversation nobody wanted.
Rock, Sinkholes, and What Shows Up
Clearing an Ozark fence line usually turns up things a map does not show. Ledge rock inches under the sod changes where a post can go. Sinkholes and old solution features open up where brush had covered them. Buried wire from a fence two generations back shows up in the first pass. We flag all of it during clearing, while it still costs nothing to move a post ten feet, instead of finding it the day the crew is standing there with an auger.
Getting a Number
Clearing happens most of the year, and dormant season is often the best time for it, since the brush is bare and you can see the ground. Call (417) 555-0195 and we will price the clearing and the new fence separately so you can see both.
Do you haul the old fence away?
Yes. Old wire, rotted posts, staples, and brush all leave the property. Rolled wire goes to a scrap yard where the load is worth something, and that offsets part of the removal cost. Wire left in a burn pile or pushed into a fence row comes back later in a tire, a hoof, or a bush hog. Anything worth keeping, like sound hedge posts or usable gates, we set aside for you instead of scrapping it.
How much does it cost to clear a fence line?
Clearing prices by the foot and by what is standing on the line. An open grass line with a few volunteer saplings is quick. A line grown up in cedar and blackberry for twenty years takes a machine, several passes, and a place to pile what comes off. On rocky Ozark ground the stumps often cannot be dug, so we cut low and treat rather than grind. We give a separate clearing number so you can see what the brush costs before the fence does.
Why do you clear before building the fence?
A clear line is the cheapest cost on the job and the one that saves the most. Crews build faster on open ground, posts land where the survey says instead of where a tree allows, and the wire runs straight. Brush left standing rubs wire, drops limbs on it, and shades the ground so the line stays wet and the posts rot early. On electric fence, weeds touching a hot wire drain the charge all summer.
Can you take out old cedar trees along the fence?
Cedar is most of what grows into an unmaintained Ozark fence line. We cut and remove it, and where the trunk has grown around old wire, we cut on both sides of it and pull the wire out rather than feed steel through a chipper. Cedar that comes off a line gets piled where you want it, hauled off, or left in lengths if you want posts out of it.