THE
GRAYING
OF SPRAYING
An aging workforce and an increased
focus on turf quality have inspired
manufacturers to make application
equipment lighter and more nimble.
BY CURT HARLER
AS THE LABOR force changes and fuel costs rise, sprayer
and spreader weight becomes important. No longer will a
company’s full-time workers put up with wrestling heavy,
awkward equipment around a customer’s lawn.
That is especially true with application equipment. Fifteen
Turfco sees
years ago, workers were expected to tame a 600- or 700-lb.
ergonomics as an
spreader loaded with 100 lbs., of material — and be happy
important factor in
to push it up and down day after day. When they finished
machine design.
that chore, they had to drag a 1.25-in. hose around to the
customer’s back yard and finish up with spraying. Is it any ing,” notes Bill Kenney, vice president of SmithCo, Philadel-wonder that even the kids quit the job? phia. “The demand for sharper appearance is increasing. To
“This business is out of its teenage years and into senior do that, you’ve got to take the big, heavy stuff off the ground.”
workers,” says Bob Brophy, director of lawn products for
Minneapolis-based Turfco. “You can’t expect to give workers
heavy, cumbersome equipment and have them stick with the
job day after day.”
He says his company’s goal is to produce equipment that
is easy on workers’ bodies but still provides precise, profitable
application of material: “You have to remove the hard labor
part of the job.”
In addition to older workers, more women
“YOU’VE GOT TO
are in the lawn care workforce — and they typically are not anxious to wrestle with machines TAKE THE BIG,
that weigh several times what they do. HEAVY STUFF OFF
“It used to be machinery could be heavy and
THE GROUND.”
hard to handle and it didn’t matter,” Brophy says.
– BILL KENNEY, SMITHCO
“Young guys would work with it all day. Now,
you’ve got to build machinery that full-time
workers can handle.”
On the other hand, a landscaper can’t compromise with
either equipment ruggedness or the end results.
“The level of maintenance required of professional turf
care at office complexes and high-end apartments keeps ris-
A gentler generation
That means landscapers should be concerned about getting
machinery that is light on its feet. A golf course, for example,
has the luxury of waiting to make its applications for a couple
of days after a heavy rain. By contrast, lawn care profession-
als (LCPs) have schedules, and it is important a service be
performed on schedule so the truck can be in
another neighborhood the next day. Yet that
sprayer can’t leave behind rows of tire tracks in
an otherwise nice lawn.
That is the reason why many manufacturers today build machines with large pneumatic
tires. “Our edict to our engineers was to design
a machine that would be under 20 psi — fully
loaded,” Brophy says. That is barely tiptoeing,
when one considers that a 200-lb. worker will have a heel-imprint impact on a lawn of about 100 psi.
A machine that might have tipped the scales at 600 lbs.
two decades ago today weighs under 500 lbs. “But the important thing is not how much a machine weighs; it’s what its
