From Two Weeks to Three Days: How the LGX Helped Regrade a College Baseball Field

When the Summer 2026 issue of CalLandscaper magazine landed, we spotted a familiar blade on the cover story. The feature follows McCormick Landscape Service of Bakersfield, California as they tackled a major turf conversion at Cal State Bakersfield, and the machine doing the grading was a John Deere compact track loader running our LGX Laser Grader up front.

We didn’t know the article was coming, which honestly makes it better. This is just a contractor putting the LGX to work on a real job, and the results speak for themselves.

The Job

McCormick Landscape Service is a family operation that started with a lawn mower in 1987 and now runs about 25 employees doing commercial landscape work across Kern County. For this project, they came on as a subcontractor for the Hardt Baseball Field Turf Project at California State University, Bakersfield: converting roughly 115,000 square feet of natural grass to synthetic turf.

Their scope covered nearly all the prep work. That meant stripping the existing turf, cutting six inches below final grade, installing drainage, compacting the subgrade, then placing four inches of base material topped with two inches of fine material. All told, about 2,000 cubic yards of material had to come out while holding tight tolerances across the entire playing surface.

Done the conventional way, with survey stakes and a crew constantly checking elevations with a grade rod, McCormick estimated the excavation and grading would take around two weeks.

The Setup

Instead, they rented a John Deere 335 P-Tier compact track loader from Coastline Equipment’s Bakersfield branch and paired it with an LGX Laser Grader and Trimble GNSS machine control. The Trimble system fed live design data, elevation, and cut-and-fill guidance to the operator while automatically controlling the LGX blade to match the field’s digital model.

They specifically wanted the 335 P-Tier’s extra horsepower to push the LGX through the existing turf and soil. Smart call. The LGX is a heavy piece of steel, and on a cutting job like this, power matters.

This is exactly what the LGX was built for. It turns a skid steer or compact track loader into a precision grading machine. The stabilizing skid plate isolates the blade from the pitch and bounce of the machine carrying it, so the cutting edge holds a consistent elevation even while the tracks are riding over rough ground. Add laser or GPS grade control, and the blade adjusts itself up, down, and side to side while the operator just steers.

Here’s what that looks like in the dirt:

The Results

The cutting portion of the job took three days. Not two weeks. Three days, plus another three spent loading out the excavated material.

Instead of stopping constantly to check elevations, the crew let the system hold grade while the operator focused on steering and travel speed. They found the sweet spot running at about 50 to 60 percent of the machine’s creep speed.

The learning curve surprised them too. McCormick’s operations manager had never run a GPS grading system before. After a quick setup with Coastline’s Trimble specialist, he was cutting the field within about 20 minutes and ended up grading half the field himself.

And the precision paid off in material costs. On a surface that big, even a small variation in cut depth means extra truckloads of exported soil or imported aggregate. Holding grade consistently kept material quantities in check.

The project went well enough that McCormick is now applying for a General Engineering license and planning to grow the grading and underground side of their business.

Why This Matters if You’re a Contractor

You don’t need a motor grader or a dozer to hit fine grade on a big surface. A compact track loader with an LGX and grade control handled a college athletic field, worked around curbs and tight edges a full-size machine couldn’t reach, and beat the conventional timeline by more than a week.

The LGX is built right here in Gilman, Iowa, and it’s designed to hold grade to within a quarter inch. It runs with laser control or GNSS systems like the Trimble setup McCormick used, so it fits whatever positioning tech your jobs call for.

Want the whole story straight from the source? Read the full article in CalLandscaper’s Summer 2026 issue. And if you want to see what the LGX could do on your next dirt job, check out the LGX Laser Grader or give us a call at 641-498-2063.