About Us
JPV Mulching Contractor was started in Middle Georgia in June of 2001 by Jean-Paul and Louise Van Landeghem (Jean is pronounced John with a soft J).
Jean-Paul has over fifty years of experience in the mowing/mulching trade. He started a successful mulching business with his father, Paul, and brother, Emile, in France in 1973. Though Jean-Paul’s father and brother are now deceased, the mulching business in France is successful to this day, and remains in the family, owned and operated by Jean-Paul’s nephew (Emile’s son), Sebastien.
When the Van Landeghems started their mowing/mulching business, SEMDEM, in France in 1973, there simply wasn’t any “off-the-shelf” mowing or mulching equipment available, so they developed it and had it built. Their designs were very successful. After Jean-Paul moved to the states, his brother renamed the business Cimaf and later sold it to a French Canadian, Denis (pronounced Denny), who manufactured and sold mowers world-wide under the name Denis Cimaf.
Jean-Paul Van Landeghem, the founder of JPV Mulching in Georgia, USA, not only maintains his contact with mulching professionals and equipment manufacturers around the world, but he also continues to innovate. When JPV Mulching purchased a 300 horsepowerd Tigercat Trackhoe in 2005, Jean-Paul took the opportunity to design a new feature that enables the mower to be angled to the side. It sounds simple enough, but watch the video of the Tigercat Trackhoe at work, and you will realize just how impressive this simple feature is. Now, instead of just cutting down a tree and mulching it on the ground, this one-of-a-kind Tigercat Trackhoe can angle its mower to cut the tree, catch it as it falls, and mulch it before it lays down on the ground! This equates to faster service, lower operating costs, and a better deal for the customer.
(click on any of the images for a larger version)
Our History
Jean-Paul Van Landeghem talks about the history of the company he and his father and brother started in France in 1973:
This picture here is… probably the oldest picture that we have. When I was in France… we had work on the railroad track and we had developed a saw that we see here that cut the woods, and we picked it up with this machine… to burn it. But all this equipment has been developed by us only everything has been built from scratch. We took a loader, and we adapted [it] on that Mercedes.
I was here; I was probably about twenty-three, twenty-four years old.
This is the way we moved our equipment; that tractor was a 1972 model.
There was our shop that we built. I built that door, I remember; and when I went back in June, 2007 it was still existing *chuckle*
This is a machine to build ditches; that was back in ’77, ’78, something like that.
This is a machine that my brother and I built, we had the idea but we had a machine shop building it; and at this time was a well advanced piece of equipment.
This machine, we built it from scratch… we had a machine already, called the Hydro-Ax, and we built a similar machine that we never sold, it was just for our own use.
Then there was our Hydro-Ax; we had two in 1979.
That was in the south of France, when we used to fight the forest fire. And we cleared the underbrush, that was back in 1979.
I [Jean-Paul Van Landeghem] was on the machine here.
So, this one here could go [on] the railroad track and that was our loader that I showed earlier. Working off the railroad track. At that time we did not have big equipment, that was in 1973, ’74.
And after that all these machines are basically the same as we had earlier but a little bit more perfected. This is a newer Mercedes, this one was in 1985 I think.
Then we went to this type of machinery here that would reach seven meters which is… 21 foot from the rail.
[The mower] goes one way and turned around and went backward to save time we just went forward cutting; when we get to a certain distance we just turned the mower around and came back. That was a trick we tried to use to do more production.
That was my brother. That was a machine out of Germany, and that was just to cut grass, but that thing could cut grass on the side of the road.
We started with this machine… back in 1974. We got started because of the need of that type of clearing on the railroad track, along the road. And these things were new, nobody knew about that; we have always been ahead of… the pack, if you will, because if everybody does it it’s not fun any more. Of course we had to go through the trouble with the hydraulics at that time, in 1975 we did not have the sophistication in hydraulics like we have now. We were a pioneer [in] everything.
Another thing that we developed.
This one was thirty feet, we went thirty feet from the track; we had one wheel one way and the other one the other way, so we were grabbing the rail so he would not move; you’ve got one tire on the track and the other one is off the track…
…and see, this one here is not even on the track, so we had only two wheels that were driving.
This machine is one that we developed for reusing biomass in 1985; we had already started thinking about biomass at that time.
Another machine that my brother built.
