Increase crew productivity with the right zero-turn mower attachments

Labor is the biggest expense for a lawn maintenance company. It’s also one of the biggest obstacles to profitable growth.

First of all, it’s getting harder to find reliable workers. In fact, according to data from Lawn & Landscape’s Fall 2025 State of the Industry Report, the labor shortage is a landscape contractor’s top concern right now. Secondly, labor is getting more expensive. In fact, according to data from that same Lawn & Landscape report, a company owner’s next biggest concerns are tied to rising insurance costs.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. A landscape contractor’s next biggest concern is the inability to raise prices to offset these rising costs.

What if a lawn maintenance company could reduce its reliance on labor and still drive profitable growth? By investing in the right equipment, it could—and we’re not talking about having to spend tons of money on complex autonomous equipment.

There are zero-turn mower attachments that help crews complete some of the most laborious maintenance tasks a lot faster. This allows a company to increase output with the people they already have, at a fraction of the cost of hiring more employees to operate less efficient equipment. The best part is, existing employees will be happier because their jobs will get a lot easier.

What attachment mix helps a commercial mowing crew do more work with less labor?

The right mix of commercial mower attachments helps commercial mowing crews efficiently perform some of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks on a jobsite, including edging, dethatching and spring cleanup, and leaf removal. By using the right attachments in each of those areas, crews can reduce their labor needs while also reducing their equipment costs in most cases.

Grasshopper mower attachments help in all of the key areas.

Edging

Edging can be a time-consuming process, especially on large commercial properties, resorts, municipal sites, HOAs, etc. that have extremely long stretches of sidewalks and curbs.

An effective edger attachment for a zero-turn mower can help reduce labor hours by enabling three key productivity improvements:

• edge faster than traditional methods
• blow off sidewalks while edging them
• edge and mow at the same time

Grasshopper’s Edge-EZE™ Edger attachment can help reduce labor hours for some operators by an average of 75% compared to traditional stick edging. 

As an example, a golf course groundskeeping crew had been dedicating two employees a couple days a week to stick-edge both sides of a two-mile stretch of sidewalk. It was taking them a combined 32 hours. Then the crew tried the Grasshopper edger attachment. The edging was completed in just four hours by a single operator. According to the head groundskeeper, that labor-hour reduction ended up saving his department more than $10,000 over the course of the year.

The big advantage of an edger attachment is speed. Grasshopper field data suggests a working speed of 500 feet per minute. An employee on foot with a stick edger won’t come close to that. Even if the employee were using a walk-behind wheeled edger, 90 feet per minute is about the best that employee could achieve, according to data published by a prominent manufacturer of professional-grade wheeled edgers.

Crews can also save time with an edger attachment by mowing and blowing while they edge.

Grasshopper’s edger attachment, for example, can attach to either side of the mower deck. By attaching to the right side, operators can drive the mower on the sidewalk, allowing them to edge and blow off the sidewalk simultaneously. On the other hand, operators could drive on the grass, allowing them to mow their first pass while edging.

Grasshopper’s edger attachment can also be raised up to 12 inches in a matter of seconds. This allows operators to quickly transition from edging sidewalks at ground level to edging curbs at street level.

Dethatching and spring cleanup

The window to complete spring cleanups is never as wide as a lawn maintenance company would like. To service as many properties as possible, crews need to be as productive as possible.

Lawn dethatching is one area where a couple different zero-turn mower attachments can reduce labor hours. It starts with a dethatching attachment itself. The typical walk-behind dethatcher is around 20 inches wide. Grasshopper’s Tine-Rake™ Dethatcher attachment is available in both a 46- and 60-inch width, which drastically reduces the number of passes an operator has to make. Additionally, a mower-driven dethatcher will allow the operator to work at a faster pace. All in all, productivity could be tripled by using a mower-driven dethatcher.

And that’s just the task of dethatching. Cleaning up the mess is the most labor-intensive part of a dethatching job. There’s a mower attachment for that too.

A Grasshopper PowerVac™ Collection System will suck up all of that dislodged thatch as the mower is driven across the lawn. The best part is that the dethatching and cleanup steps can be handled at the same time by a single operator. Compare that to multiple crew members running around with rakes, leaf blowers, trash cans, and tarps.

Leaf removal

The productivity advantage of a PowerVac Collection System is just as appealing in the fall. PowerVac is engineered to create suction that allows a mower operator to vacuum up leaves in a single pass without clogging. The leaves are also chopped up by a steel impeller so more fit in the collection hopper, reducing the frequency of having to stop and empty the hopper.

Cleaning up leaves with the PowerVac attachment is ideal on properties where a truck and trailer can be parked nearby, making it faster and more convenient for an operator to empty their hopper into that truck or trailer. That said, a PowerVac can also increase productivity on larger sites. An operator can empty their hopper at the edge of the lawn, staging their leaves in windrows for a debris-loader operator to clean up later.

Another mower attachment, the Buffalo Turbine Blower, can also be a labor-saving solution on large sites. The power of the blower and maneuverability of the Grasshopper mower can help reduce the time spent moving large volumes of leaves by 75%, on average, as compared to using backpack and walk-behind blowers.

One lawn maintenance contractor in Louisiana said it had been taking his crew 22 man-hours to clean up leaves and debris along a 26-mile stretch of curb. After switching to the blower attachment, that project was cut down to four man-hours.

Will the money saved on labor help pay for the attachments?

In most cases, the labor savings associated with using a more productive zero-turn mower attachment will more than cover the attachment’s total cost of ownership. Plus, if a lawn maintenance company is having a hard time finding enough employees, the attachment will serve as a productivity multiplier and growth facilitator. Finally, in many instances, an attachment will replace another piece of equipment that is oftentimes more expensive to purchase and maintain, because dedicated equipment has an engine which adds a lot of cost.

For example, in the case of a dethatcher, a dedicated commercial-grade walk-behind unit will often be double the purchase price of an attachment—even though a walk-behind unit is considerably smaller and less productive.

In the case of an edger, an attachment will cost roughly the same as a commercial-grade walk-behind edger, but will be five times more productive. And while an attachment will cost much more than a stick edger, an attachment will be 10 times more productive, enabling a very quick ROI on that investment.

In the case of a high-volume debris blower, the cost of an attachment will likely be on par with a comparably sized, professional-grade walk-behind blower. But an attachment will be three times as productive, and far less fatiguing for the operator.

That’s really the biggest benefit of using attachments. When you’re looking to stretch every labor hour as far as it will go, you have to find ways to perform laborious tasks faster, easier, and better. That’s what you’ll accomplish when adding the right attachment mix to your lawn maintenance equipment fleet.