Issues That Matter: Industry Roundtable

How often are you using fungicides?

Keith Burrell, The Lawn Co. - "There’s a huge opportunity in fungicides."

Ken Wentland, Lied’s Landscape Design & Development - "We don’t do a lot with fungicide in turf because there isn’t a huge need, but 2000 had a wet spring, summer and fall and drove our turf fungicide applications up 10 times. We sell this as an add-on service, and that has worked well for us with a granular product."

Gary Chamberlin, TruGreen-ChemLawn - "We get more interest commercially than residentially with sports turf and large turf areas. Residential customers will just buy more seed."

Burrell - "Necrotic ring spot and red thread are so bad for us in New England. Leaf spots were bad this past summer, and rust and dollar spot was on every lawn. We do hundreds of fungicide applications and they work fairly well if you can educate the homeowners."

Gary Clayton, All-Green - "It’s similar to the tree and shrub market because you have to educate the homeowner about the value. We only program fungicides in certain markets."

Gary LaScalea, GroGreen - "But a problem for us is why fungicides cost so much more than any insecticides or herbicides."

Clayton - "Sometimes you have to suck it up and not make as much because you can’t get the same margins with fungicides. Otherwise you’re giving customers something less than the best lawn possible. Fungicides are a loss leader for us."

Wentland - "We have few fungus problems on turf up in Wisconsin. When we had wet weather, the clients give us the leeway to make the decision. Even though the fungicides are more expensive, we can knock that problem out in one application if we’re there to fertilize. Then we avoid the return visit."

Tom Tolkacz, Swingle Tree & Lawn Care - "It used to be that necrotic ring spot would just show up on sod lawns that were two to four years old, but now I’ve got necrotic all over the place - under trees, on 80-year-old lawns with 4-inch thatch and everywhere else. I don’t know what the signs are now. We just can’t figure out what causes it."

Chamberlin - "Anything a fungicide could do for conifers or pines would be great. We like flowables of everything because they’re easy to measure as water-based products. Water-soluble packets are also user friendly."

How much fire ant control do you do?

Buechner - "With fire ants, you just chase them to the neighbors’ property."

Lang - "The whole southern end of Georgia has fire ants, and nothing has worked consistently. Now they’re moving up the coast and they’ve gone through the Carolinas in the last few years."

Clayton - "Now they’ve found fire ants in every county in Georgia, and the ants have adapted to the cooler climates so they’re not as susceptible to winter kill and they can keep migrating inland."

Tolkacz - "I’ve heard of some populations of fire ants in southern Colorado."

Chamberlin - "I’m wondering about the distribution along the coast if they don’t follow the St. Augustinegrass adaptation and if that grass doesn’t serve as an indicator of the presence of fire ants."

LaScalea - "Fire ant control is very hit-and-miss. We have our own cans we’ve made. We service all residential fire ants as part of our programs at no extra charge and bait in spring and fall for commercial properties. But we’re currently charging less than $100 an acre so any product for $250 an acre would be a problem. How well we control depends on the season. We got good control last summer, but if we get rain in the fall we’ll really be chasing them around."

Buechner - "A real concern of mine is how fire ants are handled by companies. So many companies include it in the program so customers expect it. Then, trying to sell fire ant control to them as an extra will be difficult unless some problem comes along that is really difficult."

LaScalea - "Our average lawn care program is seven applications a year, so I have a problem trying to tell them everything is extra. We’re doing a good job and keeping our customers, so that works for us. We also guarantees we’ll come back and treat any problems, which has really enhanced our growth."

Lang - "We don’t give anything away, and we’re charging for anything we offer."

Clayton - "Customer education is the issue with any pest because they have been oversold or don’t understand what we can do with the products we have. We can do a good job, but we can’t do a great job. You just can’t offer a guarantee on mole crickets. That’s where lawn care operators have gone awry. In our program, we try to educate and get communication going and meet the expectations that can be met."

How could product packaging improve?

LaScalea - "I like the squeeze bottles that automatically measure application doses. Most are in quarts and pints, and the device does the measuring for each squeeze."

Lang - "I don’t want to deal with triple rinsing. Plus, there needs to be greater variability in packaging because we’ve got 600-gallon main tanks and backpacks at the same time and we’re not always filling up these entire tanks. Figuring out the dosages gets real difficult then."

Wentland - "It would be nice to have water-soluble packets in 25-, 50- and 100-ounce sizes and dry packs for backpacks for insecticides or fungicides. They could be about the size of a salt packet in a restaurant for a 3- or 4-gallon tank. Measuring out one to two drops of a product is pretty difficult."

Tim Doppel, Atwood Lawn Care - "We’re using more hand-held and backpacks as we take more of an IPM approach, whether that’s for dry flowables or water-soluble products."

Jack Robertson, Robertson Lawn Care - "Granular applications fit best in our program because of the restrictions with the department of agriculture."

Chamberlin - "I’d love to see a granular product where we could apply 3 pounds of product per 1,000 square feet. The tendency is to over apply, and we won’t get uniform distribution at lower levels."

Wentland - "The problem there is that the applicators don’t know how to set the spreader calibration."

Buechner - "I’d like to see us get to 1 to 2 pounds but maintain some consistency in formulation in terms of particle sizes. Right now, we’re all over the board depending on whether we’re putting down 8 or 16 feet."

Bill Hoopes, Scotts Lawn Service - "I agree that we need lower levels of active ingredient and more pounds per thousand because technicians don’t understand the application and overlapping. Essentially, we need anything that will make it idiot proof. And anything for tree and shrub care or similar small quantities can’t require measuring.

"The days of mixing large quantities of pesticides and carrying them around are over. All we haul now is water and everything is site mixed."

Jim Campanella, The Lawn Dawg - "This might be real idealistic, but a granular product for a broadleaf herbicide control with some root uptake would be great."

Hoopes - "The more we spray, the more trouble we’ve got. I’m sorry, because I know this is a spray world, but that’s what gets us on the Channel 8 News."

Buechner - "We’re replacing Dursban based on the spectrum of control and cost other products offer. I agree that cost isn’t always a big issue, but our franchisees are looking at spending three times as much to replace Dursban, and that creates an emotional issue for them."

Lang - "I don’t worry about the product cost because it costs me $25 to pull the truck up to someone’s house. I want something that will work."

Burrell - "Hopefully you’ve got a choice of products to choose from in the same ballpark, and then cost comes into play when paying $5 vs. 65 cents per thousand square feet. You can save a lot of money with even $1 per 1,000 square feet, but we’ll never put product down that doesn’t work."

Tolkacz - "On our turf and ornamental side, we’ll blend three products to get the same broad spectrum of control. You can triple or quadruple your costs by adding these materials and the results aren’t necessarily that much better, but you’re trying to alternate products to avoid resistance."

LaScalea - "You really have to take a pencil to some of those things. You can’t just look at $245 per gallon because you may only be using 1 ounce of that product. You have to look at the actual application cost."

Hoopes - "What is the residual for synthetic pyrethroids vs. organophosphates? We’re all getting pressure to reduce the pounds of AI per year - doesn’t that have to be something we look at when we select products? So everything is going to have to be long residual, which flies in the face of ‘Isn’t this product great? It goes away.’

The consensus response was that the residual is virtually the same for both classes.

Buechner - "We also have to use two products instead of one like we did in the past because of the reduced spectrums of control on the newer products."

Wentland - "But AI levels are much lower so we’re actually applying less product."

Larry Norton, Chipco - "We can’t get products with long residuals approved by the EPA, so we have to reduce the residuals. What this means is being more efficient at timing the applications to get the control we need, and that’s a cost issue for lawn care operators. Some of the pyrethroids get longer residuals with greater rates, but that boosts the AI application. Granted, we’re lower in our applications than 10 years ago, but isn’t this the answer. There just isn’t that panacea out there now."