Yellow Dog Services was technically founded in 1994 when Jason Benedict was in college and filled the need for a small land clearing and property clean up company for his family's real estate brokerage.
After learning a lot about land, cattle, and good property stewardship on a small estate farm, the Benedict family purchased an overgrazed, cedar-choked ranch in the Texas Hill Country. Over the next few years our family grew and at one point 5 generations of our family lived and worked on the ranch. Today, over 26 years later, four generations of us live on the ranch and our family is still growing. Yellow Dog's founders agreed early on that we would not stop learning. We have spent decades in continuing education, seminars, and experimenting with techniques and equipment. In a way, owning a ranch is like having our own sandbox to play in, but it's more than that because we have wildlife that depend on good land stewardship and resource management.
Currently, our family is battling oak wilt which came from a neighboring property. The war on oak wilt isn't going well in the Hill Country overall, but we have had some success slowing its progression on our own ranch through mechanical and chemical intervention. Unfortunately, it's both expensive and time consuming to mitigate and every tree we lose could have been a food source for wildlife, shade for our soils, or a nesting spot for birds or small mammals. The point is, we understand many of the challenges our customers face and understand that you've worked hard for years and found your own piece of the Hill Country as far away from the city noise, traffic, and congestion that can wear out the most patient among us.
Our goal has always been conservation through good stewardship and while we occasionally have customers who mean well but attempt to go against the natural grain of the Hill Country and make more work for themselves, we find our best working relationships are with landowners who want to work with the natural processes so that their property is healthy, vibrant, and easier to maintain as we get older and want to spend more time enjoying our land. We don't hate cedar but see a need or responsible thinning and that's what makes us different than the other cedar clearing contractors. For healthy properties, we don't recommend clear cutting cedars nor do we use scare tactics such as "cedars soak up all the water" or "cedars are not native." We love our own managed cedar forests and when oak wilt hit us, we were glad that we left our mature cedars especially the ones we trimmed up. Each property owner has to make their own decisions for their property's goals and we are here to help or advise whether it's cutting in new roads, slowing or stopping oak wilt, cedar clearing, or our return to rock crushing.
Let us help you open your land to enjoyment!
