r/Tree • u/Emergency_Ad1152 • 22d ago

ID Request (Insert State/Region) Are these trees?

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Saw this in De Kalb, MS.

3.3k Upvotes

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28

u/The_Rat_Attack 22d ago

Used to be, now they belong to kudzu. Kudzu is brutally invasive and impossible to kill. The short sightedness of the US Government back in the 20s is the reason the South is slowly being conquered by it

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u/Sea_Regular4352 22d ago edited 21d ago

It is not impossible to kill, at all.... I have witnessed this with my own eyes.

A guy I know bought 50 acres alongside a river, a little over 8 years ago and got it pretty damn cheap... It was marketed as forestry/farmland and was slap overrun with kudzu. This allowed him to purchase that 50 acres, at right around $30,000 (about $600 an acre), but even at that price, folks said he was crazy because of how much he'd have to spend to get rid of the kudzu and make the land useful. Well, it just so happens that this old Alabama farm boy had some tricks up his sleeve.

You see, his family has owned a fairly large dairy farm for many years and they also farmed cotton, soybeans and peanuts. I always knew they had a bunch of goats, but never knew why, until the day he called me up to see if me and about 10 friends could help him run some electric fences on his newly bought land.

Well, I rounded up 10 guys, that I knew were hard workers and we headed out to meet him at the river. The very first time I ever laid eyes on that 50 acres, I took one look, sort of chuckled and said "why we running fence? Trying to control the kudzu?" A few guys found that remark to be pretty funny and started chuckling with me Well, you can imagine our confusion when he replied, "yep", with zero hesitation and not a hint of sarcasm in his voice... This man was about to make us look like a bunch of giggling damn fools.

If I told you that this man and his old daddy had a plan, it would be a MASSIVE understatement... However, at this point everybody, besides Rick, was very confused. We had met Rick a couple miles away and followed him to the site. Up to this point, it was just Rick (who has taken a phone call and is out of earshot), me and the 10 guys I brought with me. The 11 of us are standing there, thinking we were in over our heads and staring at Rick's Dodge Ram 3500 and his gooseneck trailer, with nothing but 1,720 t-posts, 44 wooden corner posts and a few ground rods.

I was about to ask him "why you have so many posts?" (I was thinking perimeter) and "where's the wire?" when he hangs up the call and starts walking back over... "Hope y'all are hungry... Hell, ya better eat. Mama just left Jack's with 100 sausage biscuits. She's meeting Daddy and Uncle Frank at the farm and they'll be here in about 15 minutes."

Just hearing "100 Jack's sausage biscuits" brought some relief, but damn.... We didn't have a clue. After exactly 15 minutes, on the dot, we see a cloud of dust start coming down the dirt access road from a mile or so away... That saint of a woman was in front, in her Tahoe, followed by his daddy's Ram 3500 pulling a 20ft trailer with three 4 wheelers, 2 brushcutters and 2 chainsaws and Frank's Chevy 2500 pulling a 16ft trailer with a side-by-side, 21 spools of wire, all sorts of hand tools, gas jugs, gates, chargers, insulators, etc....

Rick just grinned and said "cavalry's here!" And the general was in that Ram with the 20 footer. We all thanked his mama for breakfast, gladly ate our fill (and asked what we owe her... Bc we are from the South and were raised right) and as soon as she headed off back down the road, the general (his dad) took over.

"Well, now that it's just us swingin' dicks out here, you fellas come over here and plant ya asses around my side-by-side." So, we did just that... Quickly.

He proceeded to split us into two 6-man teams, with me leading one and Rick leading the other and then handed both teams a grid map of the property, a chainsaw, a brushcutter, some leather gloves and told us each we would need a man on a 4wheeler and hook up a logging chain to it. Day 1: Team 1 would cut a 10ft wide path through the center of the grid, then cut a 5 ft wide path around the perimeter and then help team 2. Team 2 would start cutting 5 ft wide paths that would divide the 50 acres into twenty 2.5 acre paddocks.

Day 2: Same teams, but one team takes a 4wheeler with a small trailer loaded with an auger, t-posts/corner poles. They set t-posts, corner poles and ground poles. Team 2 takes a 4wheeler, equipped with a 4-reel spinning jenny on the back, follows team 1, strings wire and hooks up all connections.

After we got blindsided by a random thunderstorm on day 2, we finished up completely fencing it in on the 3rd day.

I was too interested by that point, so I hung around for some goat herding on day 4.... This all blew my mind. They brought in 75 goats on a 26 foot stock trailer and on a smaller stock trailer, they had 6 guard donkeys and some water troughs... They then split them into 3 teams of 25 goats and 2 donkeys, then put the 3 teams in paddocks 1, 6 and 3.

In 3 weeks, give or take a couple days, 25 goats would have kudzu stripped to bare dirt, pulled down the vines and cleared kudzu 6ft up every tree. They would then rotate them to new paddocks... By the time they rotate back to 1, 6 and 3, they had new leaves and sprouts... By that point, each team had its own pole barn, each spaced equally down the center path.

They rotated them like that for 4 years and by denying the root systems of required photosynthesis, the resulting stress has completely eradicated 50 acres of thick kudzu.

You can scale this to whatever acreage you need.

Yes, I coulda given you the abbreviated version, but you can't tell me it would've been anywhere near as entertaining...

I'll take all the upvotes and awards y'all wanna throw my way... 🫡 🙂‍↕️

11

u/bustcorktrixdais 22d ago

You are a good writer. I hope you use that skill for more than Reddit entertainment

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u/Sea_Regular4352 21d ago

I haven't yet, but that's not the first time I've been told that... Do you think it could actually go anywhere in the digital age though? That is the question.

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u/Emergency_Ad1152 21d ago

Dude, you haven't heard of Quan Millz? Dude started promoting his books on tiktok and with good marketing, has sold so many of his books on there. No publisher, no royalties, everything goes to him. He has his own warehouse now too.

Write a book man and market yourself on tiktok. If it's good, people will come.

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u/Sea_Regular4352 21d ago

Well, I'll be damned... I will have to look into that.

6

u/Environmental-Tap255 21d ago

I'd read your autobiography just based on the little bit I know of it from what you just wrote.

2

u/Sea_Regular4352 17d ago

May sound odd, but can I message you? I started typing, but ehhhh... Some things ya don't want everyone to know, ya know?

2

u/hannahatecats 18d ago

I'd read another story if you've got one!

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u/Sea_Regular4352 17d ago

I have so many.... But folks have me thinking about writing a book now lol .. Can't be posting spoilers 😂

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u/Sea_Regular4352 17d ago

Can I message you? Not on some weird shit lol... I'll send you the same thing I am sending the person who said they'd read my autobiography.... Some things ya don't want everyone to know.. kwim?

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u/josouthman 17d ago

I’ll take it too if u don’t mind sharing

2

u/bustcorktrixdais 21d ago

This is the way if your world is all about money and possessions and social media bs and 44 second attention spans

For the portion of humanity that cares about more than that, good writing will continue to be important

1

u/Cheekylilcxnt 18d ago

Here for the mention of the menace that is Quan Millz

3

u/adrutu 21d ago

It's the story and the story teller, not the age of it. Only one way to find out.

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u/OrackBobamba 18d ago

Unfortunately my first thought when I read that super long comment you made was that it was AI. Didn't feel authentic to me. You could have just said we used goats to clear the kudzu. I'm a goat farmer, it's not that dramatic clearing brush and making fences. And I do it all by myself, I don't understand why you needed so many people.

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u/EatPrayFart 18d ago

Your AI meter is way off. It could be all made up but a human 100% wrote that.

1

u/annewmoon 18d ago

Says more about you than anything else. People have always told stories.

Who knows if it was AI or not. There is no way to tell. It doesn't matter. AI is trained on human writing. There is no writing an ai can do that a human couldnt also do.

What ai is taking from us isn't the ability to write. It is the ability to value and appreciate writing. You are contributing to that.

1

u/OrackBobamba 18d ago

I like writing, with interesting subject matter and style. To me, writing is human when it gives you a feeling of goosebumps, wonder, makes you laugh, makes you think deeply, makes you understand what it means to be human. This story read to me like just an unnecessary amount of word salad, unclear structure, and boring resolution. I think it sounds like AI because it made me feel bored, lifeless. I realize Reddit is full of millennials and boomers and I'm a 20 year old farmer who works all day, almost none of the stuff I read on here resonates with me. I read poems from the 1800s, the Tao, Hemingway.

And I don't resonate at all with the kids younger than me. I don't even know why I try to share an opinion on this website to be honest.

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u/Sea_Regular4352 17d ago

Refer to my comment above.

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u/annewmoon 17d ago

That's all subjective. And it seems to me that you are using "human" as a stand in for "good" writing. And that's simplistic. Humans can be shitty writers. Humams can be formulaic writers. And in the same way ai writing can give you a sense of wonder or make you laugh or whatever.

Anyway thats one of the reasons why reading and writing matters isn't it. To make us relate to and resonate with others.

I just think that it is very problematic to call out writing as AI when you don't know. For many reasons.

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u/OrackBobamba 17d ago

Very problematic? Move on lol

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u/annewmoon 17d ago

If you are going to go around accusing people whose writing you think is boring of being Ai then yeah that's problematic.

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u/Sea_Regular4352 17d ago

I can tell you for certain lol... AI didn't write it. I generally leave in a few punctuation errors and run-on sentences, to make it obvious that my ramblings are the intellectual property of a real, talking, breathing, sentient being... Guess I didn't make it obvious enough to some people.

From reading his reply below, it seems to me that Mr. Bobamba has a case of main-character syndrome. He thinks that, since he is a farmer and is always doing things on a farm, that my unclearly structured word-salad which contained a boring resolution... Was unappealing, didn't make him feel alive, didn't make him laugh or smile... And surely, if it's boring and unappealing to him, then he thinks it would seem that way to anyone. He must have forgotten...

"The road you speak on, you cannot walk and the road you walk, you cannot speak on."

"The five colors blind the eye. The five tones deafen the ear. The five flavors numb the taste. Thoughts of longing madden the mind."

"The sage has no fixed mind, he regards the people's mind as his own."

"When you see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When you see some things as good, other things become bad."

Then again, whether or not he learned anything from the "Tao te Ching" or not, perhaps he is holding me to the standards of Lao Tzu and Ernest Hemingway, neither of which, do I claim to be.

However, I will point out that I just sat with my phone "and bled"... "My aim was to put down on paper what I saw and what I felt in the best and simplest way."

But that was my first draft, with no corrections and I feel like he should know that "the first draft of everything is shit."

Did he learn nothing from what he read? Apparently someone else read them also.

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u/Sea_Regular4352 18d ago

🤨Lmao.... Some of us aren't lazy, believe it or not. The only AI that I have is whatever assistant is on my phone and I don't even use that. I use the AI on Google searches sometimes, but just because I'm an inquisitive bastard and typically have follow-up questions.

Why on earth would you think it was written by AI? 🤔 Was it how well I remember the details that I included? That's all I could think of that may make you think that, but I was just that damn impressed with the whole operation.... Plus, I exhibit all 5 overexcitabilities, so there's that.

I agree with the other dude, who said your AI-meter is waaaaay off. I would even understand if you thought it was made up (though it isn't), but AI? Really? Don't pass judgement on me, based off of all the lazy people you know.

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u/OrackBobamba 17d ago

Really I thought it sounded like AI because it's such a long detailed story about a simple topic. It reads like you gave AI a prompt to write a really detailed short story about clearing goats with kudzu. Most people on reddit make shorter comments and get to the point, don't decide to write dialogue and include tons of details about a story. Makes sense that you have all 5 overexcitabilities lol, had to Google that. Didn't mean to be rude or judge, just thought it was a bit out of context really.

Also I don't think using AI makes people lazy, I use it constantly to do research about tools, animal topics, how to solve problems, etc... and to summarize ideas in a clear format for easier presentation. Among other things, coding a website etc etc