Where what is standing is brush, briar and saplings, a mulcher puts it down and leaves it as a layer. You get back ground you can see across and get a rough-cut mower over. You do not get a finished field: the roots stay.

Usually, where the layer is thin and there is still sod underneath. Heavy woody cover leaves a thicker mat that shades what is beneath it, so recovery is slower and patchier.

Often. The machine works alongside the line rather than on it, slower than open ground but the wire stays put. The limit is what has grown into the fence itself: stems that swallowed wire, or a post a tree closed around.

That edge is a decision, not a default: pushed back to a line you pick, thinned so the canopy stays, or left alone. The new edge gets named on the ground first, because a treeline is easy to move out and impossible to put back.

Yes, and linear work suits the method. Settle width and height first: not open it up, but wide enough for a particular vehicle and tall enough for a particular load.

Not dry, but firm enough to carry a machine without cutting into it. Soft ground leaves ruts you then live with in a field you mow.

Yes, and on working land it is often the sensible way. Splitting by area gives you points to stand back and change your mind, and lets the wet end wait for conditions.

Then it gets settled before anything runs. A fence is not proof of a line, and neither is a row of trees or the edge of the mowing. Where the line is genuinely in question, that is a surveyor's job.

Stock has to be off the working area and secured elsewhere while a machine runs, and arranging that is your call. A standing crop sets the edge of the working area rather than stopping the job.

It depends how low they were cut and what you run over them. At or near grade they suit a rough-cut mower and weather down. If the field has to be ploughable, stumps have to be dug.