For Lanracorp, a leader in pipeline and utility maintenance, taking care of the steep terrain that makes up the grounds of their refinery customers was an arduous job that required up to seven employees putting in hours of hard work to manually cut 30-degree slopes with weed trimmers.

So, when Lanracorp Operations Supervisor Brent Hoerig began searching for a solution, he was thrilled to find a mower that would allow him to cut the number of employees needed for one job from seven to two and a half.

“The manual labor involved in trying to get the job done on the acres of steep slope we were in charge of maintaining was intense,” Hoerig said. “The job was time consuming; it wasn’t safe and it was hard to find enough people to do the work. The labor market is already tight in northwest Ohio, so it was always a scramble to find enough employees.”

Lanracorp is headquartered in Brownstown, Illinois, but has offices in Toledo, Ohio, and Garyville, Louisiana. The company, which specializes in pipeline and utility maintenance, has clients all over the contiguous United States.

Lanracorp provides right-of-way services, industrial site vegetation management and pipeline clearing and restoration services. Because much of the company’s lawn maintenance work is performed on steep or rugged terrain, Hoerig and his team began to research unmanned mowers that could handle irregular topography.

Once Hoerig found the RC Mowers TK-52XP remote-operated robotic mower in an online search, he was intrigued and reached out to RC Mowers for more information. He found that the mower could not only provide a solution for his labor shortage issues and safety concerns, but it also cuts an aesthetically pleasing path and gives customers the professionally manicured landscape they deserve no matter the terrain.

Hoerig said that in addition to solving the issue of having enough periodic labor to meet their customer demands, it’s also saved them so much time, they’ve been able to schedule more work and pay their fulltime employees more.                                                         

“The labor shortage in this industry is a problem for everyone,” he said. “For example, I could use a staff of 15 employees but may only have three. This mower has allowed us to take employees out of the line of fire and pay our full-time employees more.”

Lanracorp’s TK-52XP is so popular, the Ohio location that houses the mower shares it with another refinery location in Oklahoma. Lanracorp is considering the purchase of another RC Mowers remote-operated robotic machine to handle the workload.

“For us, the assistance this mower has provided has been huge,” he said. “We believe in innovation and safety. They are our core values. Our remote-operated robotic mower has saved us time and labor cost while providing our staff with innovative new equipment that prioritizes our commitment to ensuring the safest work site possible.”