Yaupon, Privet or Tallow Taking Over in Sour Lake, TX

Old fence wire and T-posts are the most common finds under closed-in ground anywhere, and they are bad enough: wire around a mulcher drum turns a working day into a shop day. On Sour Lake tracts the list is longer. Well heads, concrete from old pads, culvert ends on lease roads, tank battery remnants and pipeline markers all turn up under regrowth, and a machine at working speed does not distinguish any of them from a tallow trunk. So the first pass on every tract here is on foot. Anyone who knows where the lease road ran or where a well was plugged should say so. Failing that, we walk it and find what we can, and anything that looks like a line gets located before the trailer is unhooked. Finding a marker with the excavator is the expensive way to learn about it.

If stock or hay are going back on the ground, the yaupon and tallow roots have to come out. Mulching them leaves the root systems in the clay, and on this ground two or three seasons is all it takes for them to be back, and the money bought a delay. Grubbing costs more and disturbs the ground more, and it is the honest answer for pasture. The root balls get piled and burned when Hardin County and TCEQ allow it, which on a big reclaim is usually the cheapest ending, or hauled when the ban is on. The fence lines are the part that usually justifies grubbing even where the middle does not. Tallow sits thickest along the wire, because the line catches seed, never gets worked and often runs beside a ditch. We price the lines separately from the open ground for that reason, and on a long fence it is common to grub the worst sections and mulch the rest.

Not every Sour Lake tract is going back to cattle. A lot of them are recreational, and on those the better value is a mulching pass that opens sight lines, cuts senderos and plots, and leaves a mat that holds the clay. The roots stay, the yaupon comes back, and in a few seasons it is time for another pass, but each pass over ground that is still mostly open costs a fraction of opening a tract that has closed. The edges toward the Big Thicket and the bottomland along Pine Island Bayou are the part of these tracts to leave alone. That is often the best cover on the property, it may carry wetland jurisdiction, and it is where the clay stays wet long after the uplands will carry a machine.

Being rural cuts both ways. There are fewer neighbors to work around and more room to run, but the drives are long, the crossings are old, and a lease road that looks solid may have a culvert under it that has not carried a load in decades. Nobody books the lowboy until the approach has been looked at. On a decent number of jobs here the first day goes to making the drive passable, and the owner keeps that. The quote itself is written after the walk, for what is actually on the tract rather than an average across it, and the same person who writes it drives the mulcher. The visit is free.