Where the Grass Is Greener : Sod Grows Into $300-Million Industry as New Farms Take Root

There are big changes in the Dodgers’ outfield this year.

The most obvious one is Kirk Gibson, the former Detroit Tigers star who signed with the Los Angeles baseball team in the off-season as a free agent. The least obvious change is Hybrid Bermuda 328. That’s the grass that grows under his spikes at Dodger Stadium.

The turf was installed during the off-season by Pacific Sod, a Camarillo farm that, according to owner Richard B. Rogers, had to provide a grass that would give the stadium’s field “a very uniform, billiard table-type of surface” yet could grow back easily when torn up by the spikes of a Gibson, or an outfielder prone to acrobatic catches like Eric Davis of the Cincinnati Reds.

The Bermuda was grown on a Pacific Sod ranch in Camarillo over about five months, trucked to the stadium in Chavez Ravine and installed in much the same way a carpet layer puts down wall-to-wall carpet. The Dodgers may boast a fair amount of home-grown baseball talent, but a field of new Bermuda is another matter.

For Pacific Sod, the Dodgers’ business represents yet another step in its efforts to become the leader in the nation’s turf battles. In the past five years, it has become the West Coast’s largest sod producer, with about $30 million in annual sales and some 3,000 acres of sod grown on nine farms in California and Nevada. The American Sod Producers Assn. in Rolling Meadows, Ill., which is the industry’s largest trade group, says Pacific Sod is one of the five largest sod growers in the world.

Pacific Sod is run by Rogers and his wife, Beth, who is his partner and also serves as director of marketing and sales while she finishes earning her doctorate in anthropology from UCLA. Rogers, 47, has an unlikely background for a sod farmer: He grew up in Los Angeles and is a 1963 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he studied electrical engineering.

Still, it is hard to tell now that he is not a natural-born farmer. He rarely wears a suit, nearly always wears boots and drives a pickup truck around the ranch.

“Where else are you able to walk for hundreds of yards of grass without having to worry about dodging a ball and someone yelling ‘Fore!’ at you. It’s a marvelous feeling,” he said.

Some sod executives speculate that Pacific Sod may even be the largest producer in the nation, although such claims are difficult to verify because the industry is still largely a collection of small, mom-and-pop businesses run by people who prefer to keep their sales figures in the family.

Although the deal with the Dodgers, which is believed to have cost the baseball team roughly $50,000, provided Pacific Sod with a high-profile job, it accounted for a very small chunk of the company’s sales.

About 70% of Pacific Sod’s business is selling to homeowners, usually through landscape contractors hired to make yards look pretty. The rest is sold for commercial projects such as office parks, golf courses, public parks or special jobs, such as providing sod for Dodger Stadium or the Rose Bowl.

Because the grass can turn brown and die if is not watered often and because it weighs so much--a 1,000-square-foot order that a homeowner might buy weighs about 2 tons--most sod sales are to places within 150 miles of a ranch.

Until a few weeks ago, before the nationwide drought began, the sod business in much of the country was enjoying one of its best years.

Home sales have been booming, which is good for the sod business because people buying new homes want to install sod, and those buying older homes often want to redo their yards when they move in. In addition, the growth of two-income families has boosted sod sales, industry executives say, because working couples have less time to spend in the garden and do not want to take the time to grow lawns from scratch.

“This is an instant gratification product. You can have a muddy mess one morning and a beautiful lawn that afternoon,” said Douglas H. Fender, executive director of the American Sod Producers Assn.

During the past five years, industry experts estimate, the U.S. sod business has grown to more than $300 million a year in sales from about $200 million.

And as the overall sod business has grown, so has Pacific Sod. The company’s success is tied primarily to the health of the housing and real estate business. As the housing industry came out of its severe recession in the early 1980s, sod sales picked up. In addition, the company’s marketing push began to show results.

“Since 1983, we’ve been fundamentally sold out of all of the sod we could produce,” Rogers said. The private, family-owned company is profitable, he said, but it does not disclose profit figures.

In 1978, Rogers took over operations at the Camarillo farm as an unexperienced farmer. He had previously served three tours in Vietnam, earned a master’s degree in business administration from USC, worked in data processing for International Business Machines and monitored the performance of pension funds for an investment banker.

His wife’s family had owned the Camarillo land since 1951. At the time, it was quietly run by a farm manager and was largely planted in lima beans, lettuce and broccoli, with less than a third of it devoted to sod.

“It was quiet and simple (in) . . . its approach to sod growing. It wasn’t technologically advanced,” Rogers said.

Rogers expanded the sod operation to today’s 900 acres from 258 acres, bought other, smaller sod companies and added a computer system to keep track of everything. In addition, he pushed Pacific Sod into sports turf and beefed up the company’s research department, which works on such things as grass that needs less water to survive.

Water a Worry

Although sales have been strong the past five years, Rogers and the heads of other sod companies nationwide face major uncertainty caused by the nation’s drought.

For the most part, the drought has had little impact on farms themselves, which are irrigated. What it has done, however, is make homeowners reluctant to buy the sod. Why buy a yard full of grass when it might die for lack of rain or because of water rationing adopted in some drought-stricken areas?

People want to buy sod, said sod-grower Robert Sharpe, but are worried about water restrictions. “If you get new sod, you might not be able to make it grow. Everything is straw yellow,” he added. Sharpe manages a 400-acre sod ranch in Anderson, Ind., for Warren Turf Nurseries, one of the nation’s largest sod growers.

In Southern California, the drought has not yet presented much of a problem for Pacific Sod. But in Northern California, where the company has three farms, the drought, if it continues, could hurt sales.

“The problem with the drought is very real,” Rogers said. “The business in Northern California is reeling.”

But the drought also makes him think that drought-resistant grass is something with a ready market. “If you have the right product that doesn’t gulp water down, then you can be successful,” Rogers said.