Guys, sell your backyard woodchippers - they are useless and expensive. Watch the video before reading. Here's Pedro the man cutting through the branches like a knife through hot butter ! About a year ago, my colleague and I hit a wall. We needed mulch for new syntropic plantings, but first we had to deal with 1.5 km of agroforestry lines planted with carob and bridal broom - Retama monosperma - our main service species. We prune these lines every couple of years. Until then, we’d just leave the biomass on the ground — but in this climate it decomposes painfully slowly. On top of that, we have to strim the lines once a year, and strimming around woody branches is a nightmare. So last year we thought: let’s woodchip it. Spanish broom is insanely fibrous. After one hour of chipping, the machine had already clogged five times. We’d advanced maybe 20 metres. At that pace, finishing the job would’ve taken 100+ hours. Let’s do the math: - ~120 litres of petrol - ~150 € in fuel - 2 people × 100 hours × 10 €/h = 2000 € in labour That’s ~2200 €…👉 just to make mulch. And that’s only the beginning. Then you need to gather it up and mulch the lines. So we went with the obvious solution instead: we called a guy with a hammer flail mower. We lined all the branches along the row, and in about one hour the job was done. Cost? 40 € per hour, plus a bit of fuel and his commute - let’s say 60-80 € tops. That alone would have justified half a day of woodchipping, easily. So yes - there’s no point in backyard woodchippers. Ours cost 3,500 €, and in hindsight it’s just money thrown away. Even on small systems, the economics don’t work: - constant repairs - bolts loosening from vibrations - frequent clogging - painfully slow - awkward, impractical designs when they jam - gulps up fuel For agroforestry and syntropic systems, they’re simply the wrong tool. We're selling it now. Here’s how we do it this year to maximize efficiency and save money: We prune everything we need - olive trees, bridal brooms, pines, carobs - and line up all the prunings. Then we chainsaw out the bigger trunks that won’t fit through the flail mower. Once all the pruning is ready, we call in the flail mower guy.