Gene Horning’s 50-year-old Lawnpro Lawn and Tree Care business had a modest start.
He and a partner bought a Ford pickup, put a tank with a hose in the back and began fertilizing lawns.
When the business started in May 1973, it was the first lawn service between Iowa and the Twin Cities.
“A friend of mine was working at the elevator in Pemberton and he’d gone to Chicago for a fertilizer meeting. He said, ‘There’s a company out there putting fertilizer down on people’s lawns for them.’ He said we should do that.”
That Chicago company was ChemLawn, which had started the lawn care industry in the mid 1960s.
The two men got the pickup and tank and mixed fertilizer at the elevator. Horning bought out his partner a few years later.
Horning had some acreage in rural Mapleton and used it as his base as he grew the business. In 2002 he built a large office and shop building and storage buildings on the site. They also have a branch office in Rochester.
“We cover southern Minnesota, a hundred-mile radius from here.”
Horning is semi-retired and his son Dustin now runs the business. Gene’s wife Laurie, a nurse, helps out one day a week in the office.
“Our best advertising is word of mouth. People tell their family and friends about us. We’re a service business, not a marketing business.”
Joel Eckberg, who has a public accounting firm in Mankato, has used LawnPro for about six years.
“I use them at my business and at my home in upper North Mankato. We’ve been very happy with them; they do a good job,” he said.
“My lawn seems to green up faster in the spring than other yards and stays that darker green throughout the summer.”
He said LawnPro goes the extra mile.
“Dustin is often the one that comes and does the applications. He’s really good. When he came to my house this spring, there were some dead spots along the driveway and he texted me and said he’d sprinkled some grass seed on those dead spots. They pay attention to detail.”
LawnPro has 13 employees, with some working through the winter and most of the others coming back each summer.
“In the winter we repair and paint equipment and sign up thousands of customers for the next year, so we keep a lot of the employees busy.”
About 90% of their business is residential with the rest being schools and businesses.
While lawn fertilizing and weed spraying remain the core of the business, LawnPro also does a lot of tree care.
They have a certified arborist on staff and treat tree diseases including spruce needle cast, a fungus disease, Japanese beetles and increasingly emerald ash borer.
“Foreign insects and diseases are imported here and every few years some new problem comes that takes out species of our trees.”
He said trees can be saved if action is preventive. “If you wait until you see a lot of damage, it’s usually too late.”
They treat ash trees that people want to save in their yards. “It’s still cheaper to treat them than to pay to have them cut down and then you don’t have a tree.”
He said emerald ash borer treatments cost $100 to $200 per tree and can be done annually or every two years, depending on the type of treatment.
They charge $50 and up for lawn care depending on the size of the yard and the fertilizer and weed control needed. They do four or five applications a year for lawns.
Horning said the chemicals today are much safer than in the past and the equipment much more efficient.
“The EPA has done a real good job over the years. They have strict rules and have banned products found to be harmful to humans and pets.” He cited the banning of DDT and Chlordane, a pesticide that killed worms, aquatic bugs and birds who ate the worms.
“Insecticides need to be treated with more care, and the bad ones have been taken off the market. The products now are very safe. People and pets can go out on the lawns after we treat them.”
He said technology and better equipment means they can work faster and be more precise.
“Our price per thousand square feet treated has changed very little over 50 years because of the technology and our volume purchasing. We have equipment that applies faster and better than when I did it by hand.
“With that first pickup and tank, you can imagine how long it took to do a football field or cemetery that way.”