Defending Their Turf : Drought: Two Ventura County families see changes for the sod business. Along with more talk about cactus gardens, landscaping loans seem to be drying up faster than the state’s reservoirs.

Turf is their trade, uncertainty their lot.

The Rogers and Gramckow families of Ventura County, Southern California’s leading sod wholesalers, are competitors, neighbors and former colleagues on the Oxnard Plain. In the past year, they have seen green yards go brown, heard landscapers lament a statewide slump in new housing starts and sensed a rising environmentalist sentiment against the traditional American lawn.

“It’s a set of circumstances that we’ve never faced before,” Jurgen Gramckow said recently, speaking from his family’s 1,000-acre Southland Sod Farm on East Hueneme Road.

“I think we just have to wait and see,” said Beth Rogers, who with her husband runs Pacific Sod, a farm of comparable acreage that lies five miles west down the road.

The American lawn, by the estimate of The Lawn Institute in Pleasant Hill, Tenn., is a $25-billion industry in the United States, covering more than 25 million acres. California’s Department of Food and Agriculture estimated that in 1988, the state’s sod wholesalers took in revenues of $16.3 million.

But the industry’s roots are relatively shallow. Turf grasses are not native to this continent, and historians say the proliferation of the lawn didn’t begin here until Frederick Law Olmsted wrote rows of them into his 1868 plans for the Chicago suburb of Riverside.

Now, 122 years later, the Gramckows and the Rogerses watch and wait.

They plant grasses that take less water. They remind customers that grass reduces fire hazards, cuts down soil erosion, purifies the air and amounts to a small fraction of the state’s overall water usage. And they assure themselves and others that by now, most Californians must be wed to the idea of the lawn.

Two of the industry’s biggest years, after all, were those immediately after the Northern California drought of 1976 and 1977, when homeowners were replenishing their yards.

But this time, there are a lot more people talking about cactus gardens and indigenous-plant xeri-scapes. And in the wake of the national savings and loan industry crisis, authorities say bank loans for construction and landscaping seem to be drying up even faster than the state’s reservoirs.

Denne Goldstein, publisher of Landscape & Irrigation, a trade journal based in Van Nuys, estimates that the sod business, like the landscaping business, has grown about 20% annually the past 10 years. But this year, Goldstein said recently, he expects businesses to slow down 17% to 23%--a reversion to 1988 sales figures.

Walt Whitman, who was writing poetry while Olmsted was at work on the greening of Illinois, concluded that a leaf of grass is “no less than the journey-work of the stars.” For the Gramckows and the Rogerses, it is both more and less: It’s a living.

Werner Gramckow, raised near Hamburg and trained in an import-export business, emigrated from West Germany in 1950. He studied accounting at UCLA and landed a job with Cal-Turf, a Camarillo farm that was among the pioneers of West Coast turf-growing in the 1960s.

He also sent a son to Stanford. And when Jurgen Gramckow returned with an engineering degree, father and son leased some land and went into business for themselves with a turf wholesaling operation they called Pacific Sod Farm.

“Because he understood the business side of it,” Jurgen Gramckow said, “he was willing to take a chance on the horticultural side.”

The business had its attractions. Once used only for large-scale, short-term projects such as exposition displays, sod came into demand as ready-made landscaping to accompany the California housing boom of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Eddie Zuckerman, a Stockton sod grower and president of the California Sod Producers Assn., estimates that there were 3,000 acres of sod farms in California 20 years ago, and that there are twice as many now. In Southern California, Gramckow said, his firm and its top competitor probably raise two-thirds of the available wholesale sod.

“Over the last 20 or 30 years it’s come from a non-existent commodity to something that everybody’s heard about,” Gramckow said. “The industry has matured.”

In the early 1970s, Werner Gramckow said, he was ready to expand, but his financial backers weren’t. He arranged for them to sell their interests to Tom Davis, their landlord and a rancher whose family had been in Ventura County for generations.

But in 1974 Davis died and passed the operation to his family. “We couldn’t get along,” the elder Gramckow said, “and I decided that was that.”

Once again, the Gramckows struck off on their own.

And once again, they landed at a Hueneme Road address, this time under the name Southland Sod Farm. Industry observers say Pacific Sod remains a much larger firm, but over the past decade, Southland has sold increasing amounts of a turf labeled Marathon--a tall fescue with a deep root system and a reputation as a drought-resistant grass. (Pacific Sod down the road sells an essentially identical turf under the name Medallion. Both generally retail for 30 to 35 cents per square foot.) The elder Gramckow, now 70, remains a general partner in the business but often yields the public spotlight to his son.

Now 42, Jurgen Gramckow lives in Ventura with his wife and three children. On weekends, he tinkers on his sportfishing boat.

“Jurgen is very well-read” in industry literature, said Eddie Zuckerman, owner of Delta Blue Grass Co. in Stockton and president of the California Sod Producers Assn.

“He’s a very disciplined individual, and he’s all business.”

“I could probably be termed a lifer,” Gramckow said one recent morning. “This business in its growth has had a lot of challenges. And now there are new challenges, having to do not so much with business growth but managing the business to adjust to the ups and downs of the cycle.”

Gramckow’s principal competition, meanwhile, is the firm he and his father started more than 20 years ago. These days, that company is run by Tom Davis’s daughter, Beth, and her husband, Richard Rogers.

“If you want the quality of life we’ve all known,” Beth Rogers said recently, falling into a familiar speech, “you have to commit a certain percentage of your water supply to gardens. We never have had enough rain to sustain any of the plants you see. We are an irrigated society.”

Rogers, 45, grew up on the Westside of Los Angeles, spending summers in Ventura County among her father’s lima beans, tomatoes and row crops. She attended UCLA, earned a master’s degree in anthropology and had set her sights on a doctorate in anthropology.

But with the death of her father in 1974, and then the death of her first husband in 1977, she found herself pushed toward business. She went back to school for an MBA, and soon was in the sod business, which remains one of her favorite subjects.

The drought predicament of the turf industry, she often argues, is really “a political infrastructure issue.” Southern California has already built a society that requires more water than it naturally receives. So the most important question, Rogers said, is not whether but how to go about getting that water.

In any event, she said, the home-building slump has had a greater direct economic effect on business than the drought. She cites statistics: By the count of the state Construction Industry Research Board, new housing starts fell from an annualized rate of 165,200 in May, 1989, to 113,000 in May, 1990. For a turf grower that’s a lot of unlaid lawns.

In 1978, Beth Rogers married Richard Rogers, who now oversees most farm operations.

The two, who have five children ages 11 to 18, keep residences in southern Santa Barbara County and Los Angeles, as well as the farm near Camarillo. They are both urban and rural, attending concert series at the Hollywood Bowl, driving to the farm on mornings after.

They have about 2,000 acres of turf on five farms statewide, roughly half of that acreage in Ventura County, and do much of their business in Northern California and elsewhere. To economize on water use, Pacific Sod augments its well water with reclaimed water from the Thousand Oaks sewage treatment plant. (Southland Sod pumps its own water up from wells, paying fees to the United Water Conservation District and, like Pacific Sod, irrigating under guidelines set by the state Department of Water Resources.)

In 1986, the couple did diversify a bit, setting out to grow a variety of vegetation at Pacific Arbor Nurseries at Las Posas and Hueneme roads. That operation opened for sales this year. But that, Richard Rogers cautioned, doesn’t mean he has joined the “turf-bashers” or the “religious fringe” of xeri-scapists.

“Our reading,” he said, “is that logic will prevail.”

But in the logic of a drought-wary public, newly cautious in its housing purchases, just how much sod will be enough? Will the grass be greener, or leaner, on the other guy’s lawn?

“We ask ourselves those questions,” Beth Rogers said. “I wish I knew.”