Mowing Down Competition

Richard Rogers spends his days watching the grass grow, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

That is because the lawn he is looking after stretches hundreds of acres across the Oxnard Plain, a carefully manicured meadow as flat as a carpet and green as a $100 bill.

Turf is his trade. And as co-owner of Pacific Earth Resources, one of the largest sod producers in a state known for its evergreen lawns, he is on a mission to make everyone’s grass just a little bit greener.

“What we’re after is dark green, green all year around with low water usage and low chemical needs,� said the 60-year-old rancher, rambling in a minivan down a rutted dirt road toward a trio of harvesters expertly slicing a sod carpet into 4-foot lengths.

“Those plants right there are as happy as they can be because we treated them properly,� he said. “Golf courses should have grass that looks this good.�

Thanks to him, some do.

The Camarillo-based company has supplied swaths of sod to golf courses across Southern California, including the prestigious Sherwood Country Club near Thousand Oaks. It has made greener the grounds of the Playboy Mansion, Oprah Winfrey’s Montecito home and the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit.

Pacific Earth has even received screen credit for its work with Hollywood, including a mention at the end of “Field of Dreams� for conjuring up a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.

And quietly over the years, along with neighbor and competitor Southland Sod Farms, it has helped establish Ventura County as a turf-grass Mecca--a place known as much for its fescue and bluegrass as for its citrus and strawberries.

Together, the two companies farm about a quarter of the land dedicated to sod production statewide. Their market hold is tightest in Southern California, where they have ridden the region’s housing boom.

“[Ventura County is] the sod capital of California,� said Jurgen Gramckow, 53, managing partner at Southland Sod, which farms about 1,200 acres. “Everywhere you see sod [in Southern California], there’s a good chance that either we or Pacific would have been the supplier.�

The companies’ sod stories are intertwined.

Pacific Green Sod, as it was initially known, was first to get off the ground. It was founded in 1968 by Gramckow’s father, Werner, a West German immigrant who studied accounting at UCLA and landed a job in 1960 with Cal-Turf in Camarillo, a West Coast pioneer in turf growing.

Years later, when the elder Gramckow decided to strike out on his own, he enlisted his son--by then a Stanford graduate with an engineering degree--and leased 100 acres from Tom Davis, a rancher whose family had been in Ventura County for generations and farmed thousands of acres on the Oxnard Plain.

Davis died in 1974, leaving the land to his family, including his daughter, Beth. Two years later, diverging grass-growing philosophies prompted the Gramckows to again set out on their own, this time to start Southland Sod.

That left Pacific Sod in the hands of Beth Davis, who in 1978 married Richard Rogers. The couple co-own the business, although Richard oversees most farm operations while Beth has been busy lately running for the seat held by Democratic Rep. Lois Capps, whose district includes portions of western Ventura County.

Farms Respected in Turf Industry

The two companies exist now as cordial competitors, separated by only a few miles on the flats that stretch between Oxnard and Camarillo.

Southland is the bigger of the two in Southern California in terms of acreage. But Pacific is bigger overall, farming about 2,000 acres at five farms from Patterson in Stanislaus County to Indio in Riverside County.

Turf-grass experts say both sod farms are well respected and have helped California become an industry leader.

The state’s sod producers farm an estimated 12,000 acres. In 1997, the most recent year for which statistics are available, California was second only to Florida in turf-grass sales, with the state’s sod companies generating more than $124 million in revenues that year.

“They [Southland and Pacific] have extremely good reputations,� said Doug Fender, executive director of the 1,200-member Turfgrass Producers International, a Chicago-based trade association. “They are definitely among the leaders in the industry. And they’ve done a wonderful job building a name for themselves and their products.�

It’s possible, some in the grass-growing business say, that the industry has hit its peak. A general slowdown in construction, a shift to smaller lot sizes and concerns about water availability have all taken a bite out of business.

“I think the rapid growth years are behind us,� Gramckow said. “I would characterize this as a mature industry. I don’t see any great boom, nor are we going to see any bust.�

On the rutted roads that crisscross Pacific Earth’s sod fields, a steadier pace is just fine with Richard Rogers. He said there was a time when he thought it important to be the biggest sod producer. Now he just wants to be one of the best.

That is why workers go through 16 steps--from laser-leveling the ground to turning on the water--to prepare seed beds for planting. It’s why he has hundreds of sod tests running at any one time, measuring everything from water intake to weed resistance.

And it’s why he has poured more than $1 million into a state-of-the-art computer system that catalogs orders and tracks deliveries in real time.

Putting Down Roots for Future Growth

The company has 12,000 active customers and last year completed more than 80,000 deliveries.

“We recognized early on that if you took modern business practices and applied them to what is essentially a farming operation, we could make this company grow,� Rogers said.

“When you are doing something like this, you have the opportunity to make your own market.�

He’s not finished yet.

As Rogers eases a company minivan along narrow dirt roads, the vehicle’s tires crunch to a stop at the edge of a tarp-covered field.

Under the plastic, a carpet of wildflowers is growing--a ground cover pioneered by Pacific Earth. Nearby, another Pacific invention is taking root in the form of grass grown hydroponically in a special planting mix, made up of recycled organic material infused with nutrients, laid out on sheets of plastic.

Because the roots are never cut, Rogers explains, this is the highest-quality grass the company grows and is a favorite of high-end hotels and Hollywood set designers. But he said he is just as satisfied when he is providing green space to parks, ball fields and backyards.

“I’d say the industry has a lot of future,� said Rogers, who left the money-management business to watch the grass grow.

“Our business here is improving people’s lives,� he said.

“It’s just a wonderful feeling when I know it’s going to go to a place that by definition will provide great comfort and joy.�