Greener World Landscape Maintenance in Cooperstown, NY, added a Toro® Sand Pro® 5040 infield groomer in the fall of 2011, and the labor time savings have been dramatic. Here’s what vice president Joseph Potrikus had to say about his company’s experience with the machine.

GFS: First, tell us about your business and your Toro equipment.

JP: We have two primary divisions: sports field maintenance and lawn and landscape maintenance. The sports field maintenance division does everything from soup to nuts — infield rehabilitation, lip management, lip removal and resodding. We also do a lot of deep tine aeration, topdressing and seeding of fields.

In terms of Toro equipment, we have a boom sprayer, topdresser and slit seeder. We also have a Toro® Dingo® with numerous attachments and a Sand Pro 5040 with basically every attachment Toro makes. Most of our mowers are Toro as well.

GFS: Why did you decide to purchase the Sand Pro?

JP: A couple of years ago, we had some very significant flooding in our area. A lot of infields got scoured and ruined, and schools started calling us. We had been doing a lot of infield work prior to that — mostly relying on the Dingo and a lot of handwork — and it just got to the point where we needed to automate. We had so many jobs coming our way, we knew it was time to invest in equipment instead of trying to do it all by hand.

The thing that really sold us on the Sand Pro was the availability of attachments as well as the interchangeability. With the QAS™ system, it’s so easy. Nothing out there compares to it. It takes us 30 seconds to drop an attachment off and put another one on, even with the broom and the edger requiring hydraulics. There’s nothing we don’t like about it.

GFS: What do you think of the Sand Pro so far?

JP: If you took it from me I’d be really upset. It’s one of those things where you think, “Why did we wait so long?” We can’t live without it — and I’m not exaggerating at all. The Sand Pro has been indispensible.

GFS: What features do you like most?

JP: The edger and the broom are the most beneficial for us. Nobody calls us because their field’s in great shape; they call us because they need help rehabilitating or renovating it. And one of the key things we have to do is edging the base paths and the infield arc.

Before the Sand Pro, that was very tedious. It was basically a walk-behind edger and a LOT of manual labor. The edger and broom on the Sand Pro alone cut our labor time easily by 75 percent. Instead of two or three guys for the whole job, it’s one guy with two cleaning up afterward.

 

GFS: Were there any other factors that made you choose the Sand Pro?

JP: From the distributor standpoint, I’ve got a great relationship with Grassland Equipment. Time and again when we’ve ordered parts, if they don’t have them in stock they’re there in a day or two. And when I first started talking to them about getting a machine in to demo it, they were very responsive. We were able to get something on the ground very quickly and demo it so we knew that was the direction we wanted to go.

I can’t say enough about Grassland Equipment from their parts right through their sales — both on the sports field and the commercial landscaping side. I know I can rely on them if I need something.

Learn more about the Toro Sand Pro.

For complete details on Sand Pro features, models and attachments available, contact your local Toro distributor or visit toro.com.