Land Clearing in Lake County, Florida

I clear lots, pastures, fence lines and building sites across Lake County, from the Clermont end up to Astor, and into the counties around it when the job fits. Palmetto, scrub oak, sand pine, cabbage palm, greenbrier, grapevine, and forty years of nobody touching it. If you have bought a piece of ground and cannot walk to the back of it, that is the job.

I am the one who comes out and looks at it, and I am the one on the machine when the work starts. Estimates are free and I do them on site, because you cannot price standing palmetto off a phone call.

Free estimateCall (352) 932-3653

Three finishes, and you should pick one before you collect quotes

Most of the confusion in this trade comes from three different jobs being quoted against each other. When I walk your property the first thing I am going to ask is which of these you want, because the price gap between them is large.

Cut and cleaned. Everything above ground comes off. Brush, saplings, understory, dead falls. Stumps stay in the ground. You can walk it, see your lines and run a mower over most of it. Cheapest finish, and the right one for a hunting lease, a fence line, a view, or a lot you are holding onto.

Cleared and grubbed. Stumps and root balls come out with the root rake. Now you have ground you can grade, and you also have holes, root wads and settling to deal with. This is what has to happen before a pad, a driveway or a pasture.

Grubbed, raked and finished. Grubbed, then raked clean, then shaped to drain, and rolled if it is going under sod or a slab. This is a build-ready lot and it costs the most, because it is three jobs stacked up.

Tell me the end goal and I quote to the finish it actually needs. If you are putting a barn up in eighteen months and just want to stop the property from disappearing, you do not need finish grading and I will say so.

Who this is for

• Somebody who bought five acres outside town and has never been able to walk the back of it
• Homeowners on the forest edge in Altoona, Paisley or Astor who want space between the palmetto and the house
• Anybody putting up a house, barn, shop or pole barn who needs a building envelope opened up
• Pasture that has gone back to scrub and needs to be pasture again
• Fence lines you cannot get a post driver down
• Vacant lots the county has started writing letters about
• Selective clearing where the live oaks stay and everything under them goes

What is actually standing on your ground

The plan changes depending on where in this county you are, and the difference is bigger than people expect.

On the ridge, from Umatilla south through Eustis and Mount Dora, the sand runs deep and it drains almost the instant it rains. That ground carries sand pine, scrub oak, rosemary and a lot of saw palmetto. Clearing goes fast because the ground stays firm under a machine. The problem shows up afterward. That sand has almost nothing in it but sand, so it will not hold a crown on a driveway and it will not carry a slab on its own. It is why I end up hauling fill and limerock onto half the lots I clear up there.

East toward Astor and the river, and in the flatwoods pockets, the water table sits higher, the palmetto gets thicker, and there is organic ground and muck in places. Same acreage, different week. Wet ground is what turns a one day job into three, and it is the first thing I look for when I walk a property in June.

Saw palmetto is the one that costs money. The root mass runs sideways under the sand for yards at a time and it does not come out with a bush hog. It is also the number one wildfire fuel out here, which is the other reason to deal with it if your house is anywhere near the forest boundary. The Florida Forest Service wants thirty feet of clean space minimum around a home, and one hundred to two hundred feet where you are up against heavy wildland fuel, which describes most of Altoona, Paisley and Astor. There was a nine hundred and fifty acre fire six miles south of Astor in May.

Burn bans do not stop me

This is the part most people find out the hard way.

Florida's open burning rules set how far a fire has to sit from an occupied building. A yard trash pile up to eight feet has to be one hundred and fifty feet off. Land clearing on residential property has to be three hundred feet off. Non-residential land clearing has to be one thousand feet off. And a land clearing burn never qualifies as yard trash, no matter how tidy the pile is.

Run the geometry on that. A three hundred foot radius is about six and a half acres of clear space. A thousand foot radius is about seventy two acres. On a one to five acre homesite in Altoona, Umatilla or Paisley, a legal land clearing burn is usually impossible before the weather even gets a vote. There is a waiver, and it takes a signed statement from every affected resident inside that setback, filed forty eight hours ahead.

Then there is the ban itself. Lake County went to a countywide burn ban on April 1st this year, which shut down yard debris burning, land clearing burning and recreational fires. There was another countywide ban in March of 2025. The county has since given the county manager authority to ban burning without waiting on a drought index number at all.

So if your plan is "we will just burn it," the plan has a hole in it. I clear with a machine, and the material either gets ground, raked into a row on your own ground where you tell me to put it, or hauled off. None of those wait on a burn window and none of them wait on the county.

If you have cogongrass, do not let anybody mulch it

Cogongrass spreads from root fragments. It is not the seed head that gets you, it is the rhizomes, and an established stand holds several tons of root per acre. Running a mulcher or a disk through it chops those rhizomes into pieces and plants every one of them. Grinding it makes it worse. It also travels on equipment, and it travels in hauled fill dirt.

It burns hot enough to kill trees that would have walked away from a normal ground fire, which on the edge of the Ocala National Forest is not a small thing.

Here is what I will do about it. I will tell you if you have it. I will quote the clearing around it. And I will send you to a licensed applicator, because killing cogongrass takes roughly three years of herbicide at two applications a year to knock the root mass back ninety percent. There is no machine that fixes it.

I check for gopher tortoise burrows before the machine moves

Gopher tortoises are state listed as threatened, and the burrow is protected along with the animal. Deep sandy upland is exactly their habitat, which means most of the high ground in this county.

The rule that matters to you: if potentially occupied burrows will be disturbed within twenty five feet of the work, a permit is required first. If every burrow is avoided by twenty five feet in all directions, no permit is required. Permits usually clear in under forty five days, but the state tells you to apply ninety days out, so this is something you want to know in week one and not the morning the machine shows up. Penalties apply if it gets done wrong.

Where property owners get hurt is a contractor who clears first and finds out after. I walk the ground before I quote it, I flag what I see, and if there are burrows sitting in the middle of your pad I will tell you before you have paid anybody a deposit.

Permits: what actually triggers what

I am not the permit office and I do not file applications for you. Confirm your own parcel with Lake County or your city before you commit, rather than taking anybody's word for it, mine included. That said, here is the order these things fire in, because most people have it backwards.

• Tree removal permit. Lake County requires one to remove a protected tree. The threshold is small: three inches of trunk diameter at breast height, two inches in sand pine or xeric oak scrub, and wetland trees at any size. There are real exemptions, including single family lots of two acres or less that already have a house on them, hazardous trees, silviculture under a management plan, and bona fide farm operations on agriculturally classified land.
• County grading and stormwater review, triggered by adding impervious area or by clearing that changes where water goes.
• The federal construction stormwater permit, at one acre disturbed.
• The state or water management district environmental resource permit, at five acres, or nine thousand square feet of impervious, or any wetland work.

The quirk worth knowing: the one acre stormwater trigger fires before the five acre state trigger. A two acre upland clearing job can need a construction stormwater permit and no environmental resource permit at all. Most landowners assume it runs the other way, and so do plenty of contractors.

Wetlands. If any part of your parcel is wetland, section 404 permits in Florida are issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District. Florida's own 404 program was vacated in court in 2024 and that was affirmed on appeal in March of 2026, and further review is still possible. Anybody telling you the state handles your wetland permit is working off old information. There is a second trap here worth knowing: Florida's state wetland line and the Corps' federal line use different methods and can land in different places on the same parcel, so you can be clean with the state and in violation federally.

Lake County sits almost entirely inside the St. Johns River Water Management District. A small area in the far southwest falls under the Southwest district.

Mulching or clearing

Straight answer, because the internet muddies this one badly.

Forestry mulching runs a drum over standing brush and grinds it into chip where it stands, in one pass. The ground stays covered, erosion stays under control, nothing gets hauled and nothing gets burned. It is excellent for understory, trails, fence lines, and keeping cover on loose sand. It does not take stumps out. It leaves a chip layer, and if you dig into it a year later the stumps are still down there.

Traditional clearing takes it off and takes it out. It is the right answer when you need bare, graded dirt for a pad, a driveway or a slab, and it is the only answer when the roots have to go.

So: mulching for access, visibility and habitat. Clearing for construction.

I own the mulcher head and I own the machine that carries it, so when a property is genuinely better mulched than cleared, I mulch it. Nothing gets rented, nothing gets subbed out, and your date does not move because somebody else's yard is short a machine.

When the ground needs the stumps and root balls out, mulching will not get you there and I will say so. The method should fit your ground and what you want to do with it, not whatever happens to be easiest to bring. Tell me the end goal on the walk-through and I will tell you which one your property actually needs, including when the answer is that you do not need me at all.

What it costs, and what moves the number

I price a job after I walk it, and the number I write down holds unless you change the scope.

I do not publish a per acre price, and here is the honest reason. The same acre can be a morning or it can be three days. Light scrub on dry sand off a good road, and thick palmetto with cabbage palm root balls on soft ground behind a locked gate, are not the same job. Anybody quoting them at one rate is padding the first one or losing money on the second. So I quote your property instead of an average.

What makes a day go further: dry season, open ground, a gate a truck and trailer actually fit through, clear boundaries, one big area instead of five little ones, and knowing up front what stays standing.

What eats a day: water in the ground, thick palmetto, old fence wire, buried junk and dumped trash, big cabbage palm root balls, trees you want saved that I have to work around, and access I have to build before I can start.

Small jobs carry a minimum, because the trailer, the fuel and the drive cost the same whether the machine runs one hour or eight.

Call me and I will give you a number the same day I walk it. If you send photographs first, one from the road, a couple from inside and something in frame for scale, I can usually tell you on the phone whether we are in the same ballpark before either of us spends an afternoon.

Good fit for me, and what to call somebody else about

What usually comes next

Most clearing jobs turn into a second job, and it is cheaper to do them together while the machine is already sitting on your property.

Questions I get

Tell me about the property

Call (352) 932-3653, or send the form. Photos help more than anything else: one from the road, a couple from inside, and something in frame for scale. Tell me roughly how many acres and what you want left standing.

Free estimate, on site, no pressure. Get other quotes too. I would rather you compare than wonder.

Free estimateCall (352) 932-3653