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Colored mulch stock piled
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A lineup of some of our trucks
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Pile of soft wood pulp
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Fellerbuncher
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Coloring mulch
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Coloring mulch
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Scooping mulch
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Loading colored mulch
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Stack of hardwood from a cut to length operation
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Truck loaded with mulch for delivery
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Screening top soil
Shalata's Land Clearing
Welcome
Shalata's Land Clearing, LLC, was founded in 2011. The family business provides a number of services and products, serving Northeast Pennsylvania and employs many local residents.
In addition of land clearing for commercial and residential sites, the byproducts of the clearing effort include top soil, wood chips, sawdust, firewood, palletized silt stock, colored mulch, and certified playground mulch.
We invite you to learn more about our services and products, and contact us to learn more how Shalata's Land Clearing can be of assistance.
About Us
Meet the Shalata Family
Justin and Lindsay Shalata are the proud parents of a 10-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son.
While Shalata’s Land Clearing was incorporated in 2011, Justin’s love of forestry started much earlier.
As a child, I loved the fall season. My family heated with wood and I came to appreciate the hard and rewarding work of preparing wood for winter consumption. When cutting wood, you always have a pile to measure, a result of your efforts. I remember chasing behind my dad, my short legs trying ever so hard to pick up the last piece he cut, and loading it into the truck.
These are the times I look back on and learned my earliest lessons: To keep up, you always had to be 10 steps ahead, and if you weren't thinking and moving fast enough, you were behind.
On my 13th birthday, a tornado struck our house and surrounding areas. When the sun came up, destruction was everywhere! I knew there was a lot of work to be done, so I cut the trees out of the neighbors’ yards and began to sell firewood with just a saw and a wood splitter.
At 15 years old, being young and ambitious, I wanted machines that could make my work easier so I saved and bought a skidder. From there I began doing logging jobs. I read and educated myself until I understood what results I needed to achieve. Being young, I missed out on many opportunities because I did not have the experience, but I set the groundwork with great enthusiasm: I learned from the experienced men who had done it long before me.
This was also an era when people wanted a forester rather than a logger, so I enrolled in Paul Smith's College to overcome that obstacle. Once I graduated, the economy took a turn and log prices weren't as lucrative and no one was hungry to buy logs. When the Marcellus Gas Shale boom started, I saw new opportunities, but they came with with expectations, unrealistic schedules and new challenges. I tried new equipment and methods to see what worked most efficiently. It took years to develop and purchase the equipment we run today.
We have been really fortunate; this line of work is not easy and can often be a struggle. It has its ups, which are short, and the downs, which drag on, but our equipment inventory and our employees sets us apart from the competition. Our success couldn’t have happened without a great team of highly motivated, dependable and driven people.
I can’t imagine doing anything else no matter how tough the day is. I'm always in the woods somewhere, doing what I enjoy, and at the end of the day, like in my childhood, I can always look back and measure what we accomplished.
Contact Us
Office: 570-499-0140
Cell: 570-237-5352
Mulch Orders: 570-396-1187
Mulch Yard:
15 Mannings Rd, Tunkhannock PA 18657
