Every April, parts of Jackson and Cass County turn white for a couple of weeks. It looks nice from the highway. It isn’t. Those white-flowered trees taking over fence rows, pastures, and highway edges are Callery pears — the feral offspring of the Bradford pear trees planted in front yards and subdivisions for decades — and they’re one of the most aggressive invasive trees in Missouri.
The state wants them gone badly enough that they’ll pay you to cut one down. Sort of.
The Callery Pear Buyback: A Free Tree for Cutting Yours Down
Each spring, the Missouri Invasive Plant Council, the Missouri Department of Conservation, and partner organizations run a Callery pear “buyback” program. The deal is simple: cut down a Callery pear on your property, register and submit a photo as proof, and you get a free native replacement tree — potted and ready to plant.
Registration typically opens in mid-March and runs about a month, with tree pickup in late April. It’s a genuinely good program and we’d encourage any homeowner with a Bradford pear in the yard to take advantage of it.
But notice the limit: one free tree per household.
The Buyback Handles One Tree. What About the Other Two Hundred?
Here’s the problem the buyback can’t solve. Callery pears don’t stay in the front yard. Birds spread the seeds, and the wild offspring come up thorny, dense, and fast — especially on former farm ground that isn’t being worked anymore. If you’ve got acreage in Lone Jack, Oak Grove, Grain Valley, or anywhere in Cass County, you’ve probably watched it happen: a few white blooms along the fence line one spring, and five years later a solid thicket you can’t walk through.
Wild Callery pear grows in thick stands, often mixed with the other usual suspects — Eastern red cedar and bush honeysuckle. The thorns are hard on tires and hides. And cutting them with a chainsaw one at a time is miserable, slow work that leaves you with stumps that resprout.
That’s a forestry mulching job. Our Takeuchi TL12-R2 with the FAE mulcher head grinds Callery pear, honeysuckle, and cedar down where they stand — trees, thorns, and all — and leaves a clean layer of mulch instead of burn piles or debris to haul. About an acre a day, no topsoil damage, and the ground is ready for whatever you want to do with it next.
Why Bother Clearing Them?
They spread every year you wait. A Callery pear thicket doesn’t hold steady — it expands. The seed source is the trees you already have, and every spring bloom is next year’s new growth on your ground and your neighbor’s.
They crowd out everything useful. Pasture, hay ground, native trees, wildlife habitat — a pear thicket takes it all over. If you’re managing land for grazing, hunting, or just to use it, feral pears are working against you.
They’re prime tick habitat. Like honeysuckle, the dense low growth is exactly where ticks thrive. Property owners consistently tell us the tick problem drops off dramatically after a clearing job.
They’re thorny and they’re brittle. Wild Callery pears grow real thorns, and the wood splits and drops limbs in ice and wind. They’re a nuisance tree in every sense.
The Smart Play for Spring
If you’ve got one Bradford pear in the yard: register for the buyback in March, cut it down, and enjoy your free native tree. That program exists for exactly that.
If you’ve got a field, fence row, or back acreage full of them: that’s what we do. Land clearing and forestry mulching across Jackson, Cass, and Lafayette County — including the properties where the pears, cedar, and honeysuckle have had a decade’s head start. Lighter infestations that haven’t turned woody yet may only need brush hogging, which covers more ground for less money. We’ll tell you straight which one your property actually needs.
Consultations are free, and we can often give you a ballpark by phone. Call or text Hap at 816-316-0261 or request a quote online.