Koch Turf & Ornamental Enhanced Efficiency Fertilizers keeps Eastern Land Management on task, opening up opportunities for additional service and growth.
There are a whole lot of things that can streamline your scheduling and routing: mapping out your properties, studying traffic patterns, taking more right turns than lefts, etc. But in lawn care, sometimes the product you use goes unnoticed as something that can have an impact on the efficiency of your operation.
Richard Bevilacqua, senior manager for Eastern Land Management in Stamford, Connecticut, says enhanced efficiency fertilizers from Koch Turf & Ornamental have a big impact on their scheduling and routing because they only have to do three applications versus five.
“It comes down to the fact that enhanced efficiency fertilizers allow you to do more with less,” says Bevilacqua. “You’re still getting the product you want, and the client is getting the quality they want, but you’re doing it with less staff so you’re able to be a lot leaner.”
Only doing three applications for the average client also allows Eastern, which is a 100-percent commercial firm with $10.2 million in annual sales and 85 employees, to be competitive. The technology exists now where you don’t have to do the traditional five applications, and Eastern takes full advantage of that.
“When you use products that break down and volatize rapidly, you need to do five applications just to keep the system going,” Bevilacqua says. “But when you use Koch products, it breaks down based on soil temperature and not water or the environment, so you don’t have high volatization and aren’t losing product.”
And that has environmental benefits, too, says Bevilacqua.
“If you’re doing five applications of a product that rapidly breaks down, a lot of that product is ending up in the atmosphere or soil and never reaches the grass plant. Whereas, if you’re using a slow release product, the plant is getting a lot more of the product and you’re not losing it to the environment or atmosphere.”
Bevilacqua expands on the three-application versus five-application debate: “If you’re doing five applications, that means you’re touching each property five times minimum. It could be more if you go back for callbacks or other services, which really tightens up your window and ability to get product down within the time it needs to go down. If you’re using enhanced efficiency fertilizers, you’re doing three applications, so it opens up your window, and your schedule is a lot more forgiving and this keeps your staff levels down.”
Planning makes perfect
Step one for Eastern in planning for the next year is reviewing their projected labor needs for the season. They estimate all jobs based on man-hours, so, for example, they might come up with 2,200 man-hours worth of treatments for a particular month. From there, they might be able to scale that back and figure out how many workers they’ll need to hit their marks.
“Every season is different and weather is different, so we try to map it out based on historical timeframes and put that into our routing and see where it all ends up,” says Bevilacqua.
Those man-hours play into mowing, too, which is also why Eastern prefers an enhanced efficiency fertilizer.
“No matter what, I generally look for slow-release or the slowest release possible, with the logic being we have to cut the grass as well as do these applications,” Bevilacqua says. “When we make our applications, we need to make money but also think about the crews that are going to go out and mow. Some older formulations like typical low-percentage sulfur-coated urea blends break down very rapidly and create a surge of growth, so when guys show up to mow week to week, the grass might have grown 3 to 4 inches, which is extra labor, a messier cut and not good for the turf.”
Bevilacqua says they also like to use blended products that include different formulations of preemergent weed control and insect controls or combination products that offer fertilization, insect control and preemergent weed control.
Other scheduling strategies Eastern employs is looking at market density and working from south to north, which may sound odd until you find out why.
“There’s a pretty big difference in what’s going on temperature-wise. Our properties in Westchester, New York, will warm up a lot faster than those in northern Connecticut, so when you work south to north, you’re buying a little time with those windows.”