About
A land-clearing company
with a stake in the land.
Bison Earthworks is a locally-owned forestry mulching and land clearing operation serving the Capital District of New York, the Berkshires, and southern Vermont. We work with tracked equipment that leaves the soil intact, returns the brush to the ground as mulch, and treats every property as something that has to be lived with — not just cleared.
Based in
405 Farm to Market Rd
Troy, NY 12180
Hours
Mon–Sun · 9am – 6pm
Contact
§ 01 — What we do
Selective clearing,
not bulldozer demolition.
Forestry mulching is closer to woodland gardening than to traditional land clearing. We walk every property before we quote it, flag the trees you want to keep, and run a tracked machine that grinds the rest into mulch on the spot. No burn piles. No haul trucks. No bulldozer scars on the topsoil.
01
Forestry mulching
Selective brush and understory clearing with the brush turned into mulch on site.
02
Land clearing
Lot prep, fence line clearing, overgrown property reclamation, edge work.
03
Habitat work
Food plots, shooting lanes, trail networks, tick habitat reduction near homes.
04
Commercial / ROW
Small-scale solar site prep, distribution corridor maintenance, easement work.
The full breakdown — what we keep, what we take, how the ground recovers — is in the education section.
§ 02 — The 5% commitment
5% of every job
goes back to upstate conservation.
We make money clearing land. The same skills, the same machines, and the same time can also be put toward conservation work the region needs and rarely has budget for. That's the reason for the 5% commitment — every year, no exceptions, no upcharge to the customer.
PRISM
Capital Region PRISM
Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management, hosted at Cornell Cooperative Extension. Mulching capacity for the 11-county region's invasive-species priorities — barberry, multiflora rose, oriental bittersweet, glossy buckthorn.
DEC
NYSDEC habitat work
The Young Forest Initiative needs more early-successional habitat than NY can create on state land alone. Ruffed grouse, woodcock, golden-winged warbler, New England cottontail — selective mulching fits the playbook.
LAND TRUSTS
At-cost stewardship
Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy, Saratoga PLAN, Rensselaer Land Trust, Berkshire Natural Resources Council, The Nature Conservancy in NY. Conservation plans without implementation budgets get equipment time.
How it works in practice
- •5% of company profit, every year, into ecological and wildlife work in our service region.
- •No fee on the customer invoice. No opt-in checkbox. The 5% comes out of profit, not your payment.
- •Annual public report at the close of each fiscal year — which organizations, which projects, what acreage.
- •If you'd like the contribution from your job routed to a specific cause in our region, that's a conversation we'll have at the walkthrough.
Why it matters
The conservation community in our region sees a lot of land. They know which invasive techniques actually take, which habitat patterns recover, which mulching approaches leave the soil in the right shape. We get smarter by being in those conversations — and the work gets done that wouldn't get done otherwise.
Read the full giveback story§ 03 — Service area
Capital District, Berkshires,
southern Vermont.
Eight counties across three states. Most of our work happens within a ~60-mile radius of Troy, NY — far enough to cover the Hudson valley and the Taconic ridges, close enough to keep the same machine on the trailer instead of overnighting equipment.
Want us to walk your property?
The walkthrough is free, no-obligation, takes 20 to 30 minutes on site, and ends with a written number same business day or next morning.
Send the form