It’s not often that you get a call that someone’s horse has died and they need some equipment so they can bury the animal. But that did happened at Axner Excavating, and because their goal is to provide solutions and personal service to every customer, they were able to send an operator and excavator out to complete the job.

Axner Excavating has been family-owned and operated since 1967. Ed and Sandy Axner started by doing small jobs for homeowners and contractors on a handshake. From humble beginnings where the landscape “yard” was quite literally the couple’s front yard with a pile of dirt, the company has grown to the point that they are now a full- ___..service excavating and ____landscape supply company.

In the early 1990s, Ed and Sandy incorporated the business with their children, Eddie Axner, Julie Barnes and Cyndee Loucks. At that point the company still operated out of the Axner’s home location, however within months, they built a building and opened their current yard and shop on Old Oregon Trail in Redding.

Axner Excavating offers the following services: material delivery, complete site work for subdivision and shopping malls, demolition, chip and seal, complete septic system installation and repairs, road and driveway prep, culvert installation, pond construction, erosion control, and distributing structured soils. Additionally, they rent out operator-manned equipment for a variety of uses. Available  equipment includes: excavators with thumb attachments, backhoes, scrapers/dozers, graders/grading tractors, rollers, dump trucks/rock boxes, and water trucks.

Cyndee Loucks oversees the company’s 11-acre material yard, which provides landscape supplies for contractors, as well as individual homeowners. The yard is stocked with a wealth of supplies, including: pond supplies, barks and mulches, soils, sands, concrete mix, cement, decorative rock, gravels, and boulders. The landscape yard is open seven days a week.

“We’ll load anything from a dump truck to an individual’s small pick-up truck,” Cyndee says. She also says that the company’s landscape supply inventory is shaped by demand.“We are extremely service-oriented.”

They’ve added chemicals—pesticides, herbicides and insecticides—fertilizers, Corona tools and concrete pavers to their store as a result of customer demand.

“Pavestone says that we’re their number two dealer in California,” she says.

In order to move the stock around the yard and load customers’ trucks, Axner Excavating uses two Komatsu WA30-5 wheel loaders that they purchased from Shanahan Equipment in Redding.

A division of Cummins West, Inc., Shanahan Equipment is the exclusive distributor for Komatsu products from Arcata to Bakersfield.

According to Komatsu’s website, Komatsu wheel loaders position the operator above the load, instead of behind it, which provides better visibility for easy load placement. The WA30-5 model has a .52 cubic yard bucket capacity.

The last 10 years have yielded a lot of growth for Axner Excavating. Cyndee attributes the growth to the building boom and “incredible real estate market” in northern California.

As teens, the three Axner children worked a variety of jobs, but because the family business was run out of their home, they all received lots of experience with the excavating and landscape supply company. As it became apparent that the company was outgrowing the house, Ed and Sandy felt it was time to ask the children if they were interested in becoming officially involved with the company.