Forestry Mulching & Land Clearing in Fremont, Michigan

Where Agriculture Meets Wildlife Management

Fremont is the county seat of Newaygo County and a town built on the idea that what grows from the ground matters. This is the place where Daniel Gerber started making baby food in 1928, launching the company that would put Fremont on the map as the Baby Food Capital of the World. That agricultural DNA runs deep in the community — the flat, fertile bottomland along the Muskegon River and its tributaries has been producing crops, feeding livestock, and sustaining families for generations.

But the agricultural landscape around Fremont is shifting. Some families are selling off pieces of large farms. Retired cropland sits fallow and fills in with brush. Hobby farmers buy twenty-acre parcels and want to split the use between a small hay operation and a deer hunting setup. These transitions create the exact kind of land management work that Fast Forward Plots specializes in. We take overgrown former farmland and turn it into something productive again — whether that means food plots for whitetail, clean pasture for livestock, or cleared ground for a new building.

The terrain here is different from what we work in along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Fremont sits in flat-to-gently-rolling country with heavier clay-loam soils, remnant woodlots of red oak and sugar maple, and agricultural drainage ditches that define field boundaries. When this land goes unmanaged, the regrowth is fast and thick — box elder, aspen suckers, and multiflora rose can swallow a five-acre field in just a few seasons. Our forestry mulcher handles all of it, and the rich agricultural soil beneath the brush means food plots and replanted fields establish quickly after clearing.

Fremont also hosts the National Baby Food Festival every July, drawing over 50,000 visitors to a town of 4,500. That sense of community pride extends to the land — property owners here care about keeping their acreage looking good and producing results, whether the harvest is corn, venison, or simply a well-managed piece of ground.

Newaygo County Farmland and Hunting Ground

Newaygo County has over 500,000 acres of land, and Fremont sits near the center of it all as the county seat and commercial hub. The landscape around town is a patchwork of active farms, retired agricultural parcels, managed hunting properties, and woodlots that have been logged at various points over the last century. What ties it all together is the soil — the heavier clay-loam and sandy-loam soils east of US-31 are dramatically different from the sandy coastal soils in Oceana County to the west, and they grow different vegetation, respond differently to clearing, and support different food plot strategies.

For hunters, the Fremont area is productive ground. The mix of agriculture and forest edge creates ideal whitetail habitat, and many landowners manage their parcels specifically for deer. Food plot design on former Newaygo County farmland is one of our specialties — these plots benefit from decades of agricultural soil improvement, established drainage, and the open sun exposure that comes with cleared cropground. We design plots using clover, brassica, and cereal grain mixes that thrive in the local soil conditions and attract deer from surrounding cover.

The Nestlé-Gerber facility is still the largest employer in town, and the agricultural support industries that grew up around it — implement dealers, feed suppliers, seed companies — remain active. Fremont is a place where people understand land and take it seriously. When we show up with our CAT 299D3XE, property owners here appreciate that we know what we are doing and that we treat their land with the same respect they do.