{"id":15815,"date":"2021-04-07T00:05:47","date_gmt":"2021-04-07T00:05:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=15815"},"modified":"2021-04-06T19:14:51","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T19:14:51","slug":"mowing-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/07\/mowing-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Mowing Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><strong><span class=\"s1\"><i>East Fork Landscape goes robotic<\/i><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><em><span class=\"s1\">By Mike McKenna <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-15816\" src=\"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-300x160.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"160\" srcset=\"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-300x160.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-1024x546.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-768x409.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-1536x819.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-2048x1091.jpeg 2048w, https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-150x80.jpeg 150w, https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-696x371.jpeg 696w, https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-1068x569.jpeg 1068w, https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-1920x1023.jpeg 1920w, https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/IMG_3273-788x420.jpeg 788w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>The future of lawn care has arrived in the Wood River Valley.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s2\">East Fork Landscape is now offering robotic lawn mowing services that are not only better for the environment, but are much quieter and less intrusive than traditional lawn mowers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s2\">\u201cWe have the technology to do this, to take care of lawns in a better way,\u201d said Derek Hagberg, owner of East Fork Landscape Management. \u201cRobotic lawn care is big in Europe and we\u2019re just starting to come around to it in America. We may be the only place in Idaho doing this commercially right now, but we have a lot of confidence in this product. It\u2019s the future of lawn care.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s2\">Derek has a horticultural degree from Iowa State and has been running East Fork Landscape for 12 years. His wife and business partner, Stephanie Cook, is an arborist and also has a degree in landscape construction from Ohio State. In 2017, they decided to step into the future of lawn care and invested in their first robotic lawn mower. They were quickly hooked on the benefits and have been adding to their fleet of robots ever since.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s2\">\u201cThere are lots of benefits to using robotic mowers and we found that they really meet the needs of our clients,\u201d Derek explained. \u201cThey offer more privacy. They\u2019re quiet. They\u2019re consistent. They\u2019re safer. They\u2019re as cost effective, if not cheaper, than regular mowing and they\u2019re more environmentally friendly. They allow us to transition from fuel consumption to battery usage.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s2\">East Fork Landscape has gone primarily to battery usage in everything they do, which cuts down on their fossil fuel needs, emissions and noise pollution. Battery-operated equipment also tends to be quieter\u2014except for leaf blowers, of course. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s2\">While robotic lawn care does cut down on the amount of time people need to be working on the property, it doesn\u2019t completely eliminate human-powered help. It just changes the roles. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s2\">The process for robotic lawn care follows this format: A robotic lawn mower and its housing are assigned to a property. The lawn is then mapped using GPS and the mower is left there for the season. A schedule is created that works best with the client\u2019s wishes. Robotic mowers cut less off the grass, but mow more often. The smaller, regular cuts from the robotic mower create better mulching for the lawn and help battle weeds from getting established. Since they are so quiet, they can run anytime, including the middle of the night. A crew then comes by on a regular schedule to do other work, like weed whacking and mower maintenance. The robotic mowers only weigh a fraction of regular mowers as well, so there\u2019s less compaction. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s2\">\u201cThe upside of this is huge,\u201d Derek said about the robotic mowing movement. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot less intrusive and impactful. It fights weeds better. It causes less compaction, which means the grass is softer and healthier. The end result is a better overall lawn.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s2\"><i>For more information, go to EastForkLM.com or call (208) 450-9649.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p5\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>East Fork Landscape goes robotic By Mike McKenna The future of lawn care has arrived in the Wood River Valley. East Fork Landscape is now offering robotic lawn mowing services that are not only better for the environment, but are much quieter and less intrusive than traditional lawn mowers. \u201cWe have the technology to do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-chamber-corner","category-sponsored"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15815"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15821,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15815\/revisions\/15821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}