Just wondering if any of yall has had experience with a pto driven forestry mulcher on a tractor ? I don't have a skid steer and found out they make forestry mulchers you can run off your tractor pto . So what brand and size have you tried ? With what kind reliability have you had ?

Never used a 3 pt one but I would not want to, unless I had an enclosed cab tractor. Picture using a bushhog without the deck on it. Also a word of caution, I know that on the skid steer mulching heads, they are just about worthless unless you have the "high flow" hydraulic package on your machine. I would imagine the 3 pt versions are the same.

Your tractor should include an enclosed cab with forestry guarding for operators safety, a creeper gear or hydrostatic transmission, and protection of the vital components of the tractor. Fecon PTO Bull Hog attachments come set up for a 3-point hitch; have a hydraulic top link, a trap door for sizing material, and a PTO shaft. It runs off the tractors PTO not high flow hydraulics .

Saw one the other day made by Bauma Light. Company out of Canada who makes nice generators and other stuff. It was a 3pt hitch model run off the PTO and had little things that looked like bolts with a mushroom head for teeth. The mushroom head thing was carbide. This was about 3-3.5' wide and on a Kubota L3200 as best I recall.

What spooked me about it was the safety aspect. On top of that it turned from the top back and down so the drum was throwing the debris under the tractor. The bottom of it was made to deflect the stuff down but I wondered about tires getting something thrown through them. Gave the guy my card and asked him to let me know how it worked. Saw him later at the store and he said it did a great job. I asked if he was backing into what he was cutting but he said no, he was driving over it.

I THINK the safety of the driver would be decent as the hitch wouldn't pick up the drum part high enough for it to throw things right at the operator but it still seemed sketchy to me.


Biggest downside? It was an $8k plus machine that covered only 36 or 42" at a time. Believe I'd just as soon have had a Brown Tree Cutter for that money, although one of those would take twice as big a tractor to run it.

This is what scares me about these Lane Shark cutters that mount to a front loader. They use a small hydraulic motor and will run off a tractor remote and therefor won't do anything like a mulching head on a high flow skid steer, BUT....

With them out front on the loader boom they can be turned in such a way as that the stuff coming off could be thrown directly at the driver. PCP and I discussed those once. He wanted to put a PTO hydraulic pump on the back of his tractor and run a forestry mulching head on his loader. If he had a cab tractor and could put some guarding over the glass it could have been ok. Not really safe but maybe doable. On an open tractor like he has (the Lane Shark people use open tractors in their sales demo videos) it would be Russian Roulette with multiple bullets in the cylinder. It wouldn't be IF you got hurt/killed, it would be when. I hope I'm wrong and they're in business 100 years from now and nobody ever gets hurt, but I wouldn't bet on it.

But it seemed like it would be so much fun.

I talked about that idea with a bunch of different folks over several years. Some we're crazy like me and thought it would work, but others said it was too dangerous. You finally convinced me it was a bad idea.

I wouldn't want one mounted on the 3 point hitch. Having to run over the stuff first would limit what it could do, and going backwards would be too hard on my back.

There would be no way with the stuff I would want to cut of pulling over it. Even pulling over it, it would be hard on the back, as the requirement of constant turning to look back to keep an eye on the equipment an the operation.

God Bless,
David B.

I agree its not for everyone but surely its better on your back then taking a chainsaw to it . Once I cut it I would have to drag it in between the timber where I then could rake it up with my tractor then haul it to a burn pit . Swamp Titi likes to come back hard if you just cut it also .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoJF-yauCQ4