Zone In to Safety

Take a commercial mower safety break, brought to you by Exmark and Toro.

Recognizing a need for zero-turn safety training material, the companies jointly produced Driving in the Safety Zone, hoping its snappy, upbeat message will strike a cord with the thousands of zero-turn users.

Simply put, “Safety is everybody’s business,” said Rick Curlett, director of market development, Exmark, Beatrice, Neb. “The zero-turn units have changed our industry, and because of all the good things about them, you also have to be aware that there are potential safety issues as well.”

That’s why Exmark and Toro partnered to produce a short training video reviewing safe zero-turn mower operation – a six-minute, 30-second tape that delivers common-sense messages in hip, short clips. Driving in the Safety Zone steps out of owner’s-manual speak and presents a visual safety image – one that probably will stick in operators’ minds better than pages of tiny print or long safety seminars, Curlett noted.

“If I told you we were going to have a safety seminar that would last about an hour and a half and to bring a notebook, how excited would you be about that?” he asked. “We try to do the video kind of hip and stay within the guidelines of common sense. It’s short, sweet and to the point.”

Half of the 3,000 copies produces for the Green Industry Expo were passed out at the show, and the companies will follow up with another production run. Distributors already have opies of the video and dealers can expect to receive them by the first of the new year. Curlett said printed support materials are underway – the more means of media the companies can utilize to spread the safety message, the better.

Consequently, dealers will play an integral role in disseminating the safety information, as they often serve as the training point of contact for landscape contractors, Curlett pointed out. “This material is also for them, to help them use in their own training attempts,” he said. “We will try to get them extra copies in a timely manner so they will have extras to hand out to users.

“Dealers take care of the customers day in and day out, and our hope is that they will have the tape on the showroom floor, running the loop all the time as a constant message,” he added.

Similarly, Curlett hopes the supervisors and foremen will consider the tape a first step toward ongoing training and developing a safety mentality. “It’s just a matter of keeping the mowers doing what they were designed to do,” he explained. “It is so easy to do it right.”

The author is a Contributing Editor to Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at khampshire@lawnandlandscape.com.