How to Safely Mow a Hill

Neil from Messick's here out today at my father-in-law's house. We're helping him out a little bit here today. The transmission belt tore on his mower in the middle of cutting his grass. He's got a big swath here left over that I'm over here helping him take care of today with my mower. You can see here that his yard is a challenge to mow. It's fantastic for sledding in the wintertime, but a bear to take care of here during the summer to get the grass taken care of. So we're going to do a little bit of talking while we're out here cutting his grass today, about mowing on a hillside. There are safe ways to try to keep yourself from riding down the hill and also a couple of techniques that you can use if your mower does break loose and slide, to help to recover a little bit from a dangerous situation. Come along here with me today, as we do a little bit of good this afternoon. 

Cutting grass on a hillside is no joke. You may think you're just out-cutting a lawn, but actually, this could be deceptively dangerous. This one's a little bit personal to me because about 10 years ago, I actually had a customer kill himself on a Zero Turn mower. A gentleman was out on a hillside, the machine, slid down the hill and went over the top of an embankment, which was ultimately his end, unfortunately. There are a couple of things that you could do out here to keep yourself a little bit safer. We're going to talk today a little bit about the ways to go up and down a hill safely maybe when you're traversing one across the sides and techniques to keep yourself stuck to the side of the hill, and if the machine does break loose and slide. A couple of the techniques that you can use to hopefully drive out of it safely. 

There are a lot of ways to approach a big hill like this from talking to my father-in-law out here. He uses a variety of approaches when he comes out here and cuts the grass. There are areas of this that he cuts across, some that he cuts up and down, and some that he kind of hooks at it in an angle and whips across the side. He's found the ways, after the years of cutting this property, in order to do it safely but even he will admit that his mower has broken loose and slid down this hill before.

The danger of breaking loose is greatly increased when the grass is wet. If you have a hillside like this that needs to be mowed, you have to be extra careful about coming out at a time that the grass is dry because wet grass is obviously a lot slipperier and your machine is going to break loose and slide a lot easier. I often am going to sit and have in the back of my head that says, "What am I going to do if this machine slides?" and that's where I come into thinking about cutting your hill up and down versus across. At a time out here that you have some choice, it's always going to be better to cut up and down the hill where you're driving in a way that your machine is in line with a direction that you would potentially slide, and it's going to help you maintain the best level of control. If you're going to go and cut sideways across the side of the hill and the machine slides down that hill, having your wheels in line side by side is not going to give you any sense of control.

Now that control is going to come from you ultimately having to drive the machine down the hill faster than what you are sliding, right? You don't have good control of your machine if those wheels are still and you are sliding down the hill, like a slip and slide. If you're able to get that machine pointed back downhill again, or if you're facing uphill, start driving in reverse, get those wheels moving in the direction of travel, and then you can start to vary your steering one way or the other to slow yourself down or ultimately steer out of the direction that you're going. For that reason, it's usually going to be better to cut up and down the hill because you can drive out of a slide than it is across.

Now, there are times when cutting up and down a hill is not practical. If you're maintaining a pond bank or retention basin, you need to be able to cut on that hillside in order to be able to do the job efficiently. You're not going to go up and down the pond bank in five-foot intervals as you work your way across. It's just not a great way to do it. In the case that you are mowing across this, it can be done with a Zero Turn mower. You're usually going to find yourself, favoring your downhill tire with a little bit more stick to keep that nose of your machine pushed up on the hill. The steeper that hillside gets the more downhill force you're going to need in order to keep the machine there. Now there's a runout concern there. If you break that tire loose or you run out of that downhill pressure that it takes to hold the machine up, the front end of that machine will come down, and away you will go down the hill. Cutting across that side, favor that downhill tire.

There are definitely things that we can do as salespeople when you're selling your equipment to go through and set the equipment up in order to be able to mow these hillsides better, things like dual wheel kits, wheel spacers, or low-down ballast weight can really enhance a machine's ability to cut a hillside. If you have an application that calls out extreme hillside mowing, talk to your salesperson to check and see what tools they've got in their toolbox, because there are definitely things that we have that can make it better. With my duties as son-in-law complete, we're going to move on. I hope my time out here has helped you a little bit in maybe picking a good piece of equipment in order to tackle challenging terrain like this or using the equipment that you have more safely because these are hairy situations out here, things happen, and when these things happen, they happen fast so it's good to have in the back of your mind, how you recover from a dangerous situation.