paddock

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Really appreciate the responses. I should have mentioned we do use the field as recreational "lawn", such as it is. A run area for our dogs and a few raised beds etc. so that's why I'm trying to keep it tidy so we don't drag clippings into the house. It did look pretty much exactly like @doobin's photos before it was cut. The only difference being that the clippings are left behind instead of neatly piled up, so you can imagine it's not healthy for the grass. I don't have a mulching deck for the mower but to be honest I really would prefer to lift the clippings completely. I don't mind the effort of emptying a sweeper as long as it'll actually pick the vast majority of clippings up which I'm not convinced it will if it's just an unpowered brush sweeper. I'll take a look at the lawn vac and the ride-on recommendations from @pleasant.

A couple of years ago we moved into a house with an old paddock/field in the back. About 1.5 acres. Cutting the grass with our cheap ride-on took literally hours and 30 trips to the compost heap to empty the collector (no exaggeration). Then the ride-on broke down and the grass was getting very long (25+cm high in places), so we bought a (used) commercial zero-turn mower - an Iseki SZ330. The thing is an absolute beast and blows through the grass in about 15 minutes... however it doesn't have a collector and the grass clippings are just insane. Literally tons and tons of them, impossible to rake up and would take hours of leaf blowing to get into a pile, then hours more to collect by hand. I did clear up one small area, but within a few days the grass is grown again and another round of clippings is left lying. A few people have told me to keep mowing over the clippings and they'll disappear but I simply don't believe that's possible. There's so many of them and they are so dense that they're not going anywhere. Plus leaving them on the grass is an eyesore and I bet it's just going to kill the grass underneath. So what on earth do I do? Do I try getting a tow-behind sweeper and hope it picks stuff up? Do I abandon the zero-turn and get another ride-on with a larger collector?