I am not advocating for anything but sharing how it’s used. The why would be a lot of people don’t have access to stump grinders and they can be awfully slow if you have a lot to take care of. They also are more expensive to rent and especially to buy. You don’t seem to have experience in the area but if you are taking care of multiple acres and need to knock out a number of stumps, machinery is pretty inefficient. It’s also difficult to move around if we are talking multi acre properties and not a residential less than acre lot.

Get out of here with your ridiculous 1823 hyperbole. These explosive can be very efficient and useful when managing multiple acres.

I have either full time or part time row cropped and livestock farmed for the last 40 years. The last time anyone anywhere even remotely close to me used explosives was to bust a levee.

If you're clearing multiple acres you use a track hoe and a large bulldozer. Source: the 60 acres of grown up crp we finished clearing last month.

I know the Internet wants you to think that rural life is all guns and explosions, but that's sometimes not the case. Why do you think every small town has multiple excavator companies?

>I have either full time or part time row cropped and livestock farmed for the last 40 years. The last time anyone anywhere even remotely close to me used explosives was to bust a levee.

Because the law is such an expensive PITA to comply with that nobody does it. People blew up rocks and stumps all the time before the mid 1970s.

I am sure you have but in the parts of the country I have lived in it’s been a fairly common tool used when clearing forested back country. Not talking so much farming. I don’t know where your snark comes from but it still has a place for some use cases. Sorry to disappoint your imagination. Certainly if you are whole clearing 60 acres machines are helpful. If you are cleaning up some spots here and there on a multi acre property it can be quite useful. So much snark from you for no reason.

Different experiences for different folks.

Machinery is a complete joke compared to explosives unless you're operating right up near stuff you care about.

About once a week I get pissed off that I'm on Craigslist looking for expensive tractors and expensive attachments instead of just a drill bit and explosives all because some leftists blew up some bathrooms in the 1970s and the 1970s equivalent of people like you wrung their hands over it.

Source: Clearing acreage the hard way in my spare time