Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

“When people look at turf, their blood pressure drops and their heart rate decreases."

According to Victor Gibeault, an environmental horticulturist and turf researcher at the University of California, Riverside, it’s a common experience among turf researchers to have had an epiphany about turf at some point in their lives — to have experienced a moment when they understood the beauty of turf and the feelings that people have for

green expanses of grass. For Gibeault, it happened when he was a boy playing golf — the game with the greenest of aesthetics.

Victor Gibeault with turf samples. "California is the second most urbanized state after New Jersey, with 93 percent of the population of 32 million living in urbanized areas."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Here at the Turfgrass Field Station at UCR there’s lots to get excited about, for those who see something special in grass. At this place, grass is intellectual property, subject to patenting, licensing, and, in some cases, royalty payments. Vic Gibeault has been working with turf at UCR since 1969, breeding and developing strains of grasses best suited for Southern California, grasses that stand up to heat and need little water — an essential trait for a place such as San Diego County, which imports 90 percent of its water and uses from 40 to 60 percent of it to irrigate lawns and landscapes.

Randy Newhard was part of a group that during the long drought of the 1980s—when average rainfall dropped from 9 inches to 3 or 4 inches a year — were told to let the grass die.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Gibeault says that people have been growing grass for more than ten centuries, that in the United States we spend more than $50 billion a year maintaining lawns and turf. We have a need for grass, he says—cities without green turfgrass can become dismal places where people, lacking “visual encounters” with outdoor landscapes, suffer loss of productivity, increased anxiety, and greater susceptibility to mental disease. On the other hand, cities with generous views of green landscapes benefit from the therapeutic effects of grass, the sense of community and cohesion green landscapes create, and the increased economic results in the workplace.

J.R. Wirthlin (left) and Dave Shaw at Am-Sod in San Pasqual Valley. “The flood in 1979 took the South Bay farm out of production. Floods in 1982 and 1983 took half the farm. In 1986, a flood took a third of the farm, and in 1990 another flood wiped out a third."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Vic Gibeault says, “When people look at turf, their blood pressure drops and their heart rate decreases. You can pick it up physiologically. It’s been found that the rate of recovery from surgery is faster for people who have a view of the landscape.

“And the same is true for the mental health of a community. That can also be picked up. Plant materials are essential to quality of life in communities. It’s especially important in urbanized areas. California is the second most urbanized state after New Jersey, with 93 percent of the population of 32 million living in urbanized areas. For those people who live in the urbanized areas, interactions with plants are essential for overall life quality. As the population urbanizes, the issues surrounding turf are growing bigger.”

Turf plots at UC Riverside. "With El Toro as the mother and UCR #3 as the father we came up with De Anza and Victoria. With those strains, we’re right at the threshold of winter dormancy."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Like many academic entities, the UCR turfgrass program has undergone budget cuts, and, as a result, “soft money” has come in from the private sector. The National Golf Association has a presence here, as does the Coachella Water District (where there are more than 80 golf courses and where golf is the major economic activity). The new Bank One Ballpark in Arizona has also been recently associated with the Turfgrass Field Station — a new Major League Baseball park with a retractable roof and real grass, of a strain developed here.

Of the work at the lab, Gibeault says, “We deal with what are the problems facing the turfgrass industry in California. There are activities focused on water, its efficient use. In this state, water has tremendous environmental implications. We screen plant materials in terms of water requirements. We look at water quality, to know if the turf industry is doing anything to negatively or positively influence the environment. We want to know what fertilizers and pesticides are doing, what their fate is after application.”

Of course, someone who’s had an epiphany about turf, who has worked with it throughout his adult life, would certainly speak of the wonder of grass:

“We’re finding that turf is a dynamic system, that it’s extremely biologically active. Organic matter accumulates in the soil and root system. There’s an extreme amount of biology feeding off the organic base, which is rich because it’s well fed and well watered. We’ve found that when you add nitrogen to the surface, through fertilizer, it’s used very quickly. Less than 1 percent gets through, a very low percentage of pollution, probably as a result of the breakdown of the material.

“A few years ago we determined that the quality of water improved, going through turf, that a scrubbing action happened. The dynamic action of the turf profile makes it a positive element to the ground surface. Now we’re using reclaimed or recycled water to irrigate turf. The principle is that turfgrasses can tolerate a slightly higher salt content, and that it will release water of a better quality. It’s the principle of using the grasses as a biological filter.” Two-thirds of the turf in California is in home lawns, Gibeault says. The rest is the professionally maintained turf at golf courses, schools, parks, sports stadiums, cemeteries, and municipal or industrial complexes. In urbanized areas, he says, the turf gets stressed from usage. Soccer fields get worn down, and football fields get clumpy, and golf courses get hacked up. Grasses get beat into the ground and the soil turns as hard as concrete in some places. “The traffic tolerance of turf is a big issue in California,” Gibeault says. “When you have a mass of people confined to an area, one of the issues is use. The issue gets compounded in down times economically. Parks and recreation go first. The money for the maintenance gets lost.

“So we rank grasses, the most tolerant to the least, and we rank them with other characteristics, such as tolerance with nutritional needs, or tolerance with water needs. It gets tricky with water, because water conservation reduces growth in the grass. With less water, there’s less recuperative ability. During droughts, our recommendation has been not to cut off water to the heavily used athletic areas because of the safety issue. The field can become hazardous, with the result of more ankle and knee injuries. If you decrease the water you increase the hazards, and then it becomes a liability issue.”

I had gotten a cost breakdown for watering an athletic field from Dave Shaw, a farm advisor in turf management for the University of California Cooperative Extension Service — and those costs, Shaw said, are the reason why many of the athletic fields in San Diego County are often in rough shape. Over the course of a year, a field of grass needs about 30 to 40 inches of water, depending on the species. Per square foot, an inch of rain amounts to .623 gallons, or about two and a half quarts. Twelve inches of water per square foot amounts to 7.48 gallons, and 12 inches of water over an entire acre amounts to 325,829 gallons. A two-acre athletic field with turf needing, for example, 36 inches of water yearly would require what is known as three “acre-feet” of water per acre, six acre-feet altogether for the two-acre field. The cost per acre-foot in San Diego County, on average, is $600 — some of the most expensive water in the country. And so it costs about $3600 to keep a two-acre field green and growing for a year. Of course, for every inch of rain, that cost is reduced by $50 an acre (which is why you can say that an inch of rain is worth $50 an acre in San Diego County, in some cases).

“There are some grasses that can withstand traffic better than others,” Gibeault says. “We use traffic simulators to test them.”

He shows me one of them — a machine for simulating the traffic of a 270-pound football player. The simulator consists of two cylinders with shoe spikes that roll over the grass. Sprockets on the cylinders are of different sizes, so that they roll unevenly, pulling and tearing and crushing the tuft — just like a couple of big guys digging in at the 50-yard line. “We sometimes stage two games a week,” Gibeault says. Then the turf is observed for its qualities of response and regeneration. UCR also has a putting green traffic simulator for studying the effect of the wear and tear from golf cleats.

Behind the laboratory and offices at the field station is a 50-foot golf fairway, with drains that feed into collecting drums. It’s a study funded by the Coachella Valley Water District to examine overseeding situations, when new seed is added to existing turf. “We’re doing a nitrogen test program, set up for an overseeding situation, when fertilizer is added to plant material. We’ve created a worst-case scenario, but even then not a lot of nitrogen goes through. Only 7 percent got through in a heavy winter rain situation. This study provides a message to us about what to tell people to do in an overseeding situation.”

Next to the fairway is a putting green, the subject of a three-year, $300,000 study funded by the United States Golf Association. Researchers apply pesticides and herbicides and cover the green with “volatility chambers,” which they then test for pesticide residues. They also analyze the grass clippings to determine pesticide fate.

We walk by other experimental sites. There’s a bank of white plastic tubes the size of organ pipes, and within them are growing various strains of turf. “We study the root systems for water retention,” Gibeault says. “We slice the soils in the core area just like with geological samples.” There are two small greenhouses, one for raising varieties of warm-season grasses (those that go dormant in the winter, losing color, needing little water) and another for cold-season grasses (those that stay green year-round and are sometimes called “evergreen” varieties).

In the area facing the laboratories and offices at the field station is a collection of turf gardens, 20-foot by 20-foot squares, a gathering of common strains of grass along with some of the newer advanced breeds. There’s a square of St. Augustine grass, coarse with thick-stemmed runners, native to the southern United States, a grass that becomes dormant in the winter. There’s a checkerboard plot of more than a dozen varieties of buffalo grass, one of the grasses of the Plains states (“Buffaloes lived on it,” Gibeault says), another winter-dormant strain that uses water efficiently, a “low input” species being tested for use in Southern California (the buffalo grass varieties have romantic names such as “Cody,” “Tatanka,” “Stampede,” and “BAM-100”). There are plots of Tifgreen, a hybrid Bermuda grass used on athletic fields and golf courses, a dense, low-growing, and finely textured grass that spreads by runners and also goes dormant in the winter. There are plots of Sahara Bermuda, New Mexico Bermuda, seashore paspalum, and El Toro zoysia grass. There are turf plots undergoing irrigation studies, soil and management studies, and mowing studies. There are plots of Kentucky bluegrass, an evergreen or cold-weather variety, and several plots of tall fescue, the cold-weather variety that was developed in the 1970s and that is now the most popular grass type used in Southern California. At one plot here, UCR is participating in the National Turfgrass Evaluation Program, sponsored by the USDA, and looking at 128 varieties of tall fescue (among them such cultivars as “Aztec,” “Twilight,” “Arid,” “Micro DD,” and “Rebel, Jr.” — perhaps an offspring of the original “Rebel,” the first tall fescue grass, released from New Jersey in 1978).

Two plots, undergoing mowing studies, contain what might be called the current prized children of die labs—two warm-season zoysia grass varieties developed over a period of 12 years and now about to be released into the marketplace. They are named “De Anza” and “Victoria.” Though they are winter-dormant grasses with tough, arid-region qualities, these strains also approach some of the qualities of the evergreens.

The story of the development of De Anza and Victoria goes back to Victor Gibeault’s mentor at UCR, Dr. Victor Youngner, who was the chief turf researcher at UCR when Gibeault arrived in 1969. When Youngner died in 1984 he was in the process of patenting an advanced strain of zoysia grass called El Toro, a warm-season grass that is pest-resistant, has a high traffic tolerance and high shade tolerance, a grass with a light green color, dense mat, and fine texture. El Toro became successful and widespread, especially in the southeastern United States, where it performed better in pine-shaded areas than the native St. Augustine grass. But El Toro’s drawback is that it easily triggers into a long winter dormancy, when it loses much of its green color. And though warm-season grasses are better suited to arid areas such as Southern California, there is resistance among consumers to grasses that lose color in the winter. It’s that quality-of-life issue.

“Most warm-season grasses go dormant between 50 and 55 degrees,” Gibeault says. “El Toro was way up in the scale. Vic Youngner was seeking to cross El Toro with other lines to come up with a strain with a low-temperature tolerance. When Youngner died, we took over the breeding project. We used El Toro as the mother parent, to keep its good characteristics — it’s easily established, has good traffic tolerance, salt tolerance, a high temperature tolerance, and good pest resistance. With crosses with several male parents we came up with 700 offspring. One male parent was called UCR #3, a strain that was in the top six of Youngner’s program but wasn’t released because of a major flaw, slow growth. With El Toro as the mother and UCR #3 as the father we came up with De Anza and Victoria. With those strains, we’re right at the threshold of winter dormancy. De Anza and Victoria are warm-season grasses that tend to keep their green color in the winter but which still have the low-input characteristics of El Toro.” The De Anza strain, because of its higher tolerance for shade, is being used at the new $320 million Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, where the Arizona Diamondbacks Major League Baseball team plays. The Bank One Ballpark has a retractable roof that remains open most of the time, but during home stands the roof closes and the air-conditioning is turned on. There is supplementary lighting from a source that moves on trolleys—a kind of artificial sun path. “It’s very exciting,” Gibeault says. “New concepts, new grass. The design of the ballpark is based around the grass.”

De Anza and Victoria are the intellectual property of the University of California. They have been patented and licensed, and the company West Coast Turf, based in Palm Desert, won the rights to produce and market the two varieties. They pay a royalty fee per square foot of turf sold. According to West Coast Turf spokesman Jeff Cole, De Anza is available to the general public in San Diego. He says, “De Anza grows well in shady conditions in higher-temperature areas. It can be used in Southern California and the desert Southwest. Its attribute is an ability to withstand considerable traffic in shaded situations and not require a whole lot of sunlight. It’s a warm-season grass and doesn’t use as much water as fescue or some of the others. Its downside is that it slows down and loses a little color during winter months, though we can tweak that a little with fertilizer and irrigation. But De Anza will hold its color longer than other warm-season varieties, down to four or five degrees colder.”

It could seem absurd, with all that expense and all that research at the university level, to come up with a grass to play baseball on. But it can also seem a productive effort for the public good in terms of water savings, if a grass such as De Anza or Victoria becomes popular and replaces more needy evergreen varieties.

“Budget cuts have been heavy here,” Vic Gibeault says. “This is a good example of a private-public sector collaboration project.”

There’s another important site at the UCR turfgrass station. Front and center at the welcome area, just ahead of the buffalo grass trial plot, is a weather station in the system called CIMIS— for California Irrigation Management Information System. There are 80CIMIS weather stations in California, all connected to a central computer in Sacramento that determines the rate of evapotranspiration — the amount of water given off by a standard plant system, its soil and leaves. By using the evapotranspiration rate in conjunction with the monthly “crop coefficient” for turf, it’s possible to know exactly how much water a plot of grass needs and to adjust irrigation schedules in an educated way—thus saving money through the conservation of acre-inches of water.

One San Diego landscape service that’s had success using CIMIS is a company called New Way, owned by Randy Newhard. Among its promotional material New Way has distributed a flyer that reads, “Can you believe it? Well the Belsara Community Association in Tierrasanta believed it!” On the flyer is also a statement from a Belsara board member that the appearance of the landscape hasn’t declined despite a lowered water usage. Emphatically in bold print the flyer reads.

“7,586,964 gallons of water saved in 1 year! Savings of $12,557 that year or $1,046 per month! Let’s Get Water Tight!”

Newhard grew up in Pennsylvania and worked at a sod farm in Denver before moving to San Diego. He worked for the Port District doing landscaping and at Balboa Park, taking care of home lawns as a sideline. In 1980 he went on his own, took courses in irrigation, and joined the California Landscape Contractors Association. He was among the many in that group who during the long drought of the 1980s—when average rainfall dropped from 9 inches to 3 or 4 inches a year — were told to let the grass die and to think about painting the grass green. That stopped with the “miracle rains” of 1991, after which rainfall rose to 16 inches a year for three consecutive years. But by then conservation programs were in place, with rationed amounts of water for landscaping.

During the drought, while Newhard was developing his company, New Way Landscaping got hooked up to CIMIS and began trying to work with it. “We took a general approach at first,” Newhard says, “and then fine-tuned the system. We’d run an irrigation system for, say, three days a week, twice a night for 30 minutes. Then we might tweak it to 8 minutes, adjust it by inspection, and leave it for a month or two. We wrote down the amounts, and once we got everything fine-tuned we’d adjust the amounts of water the site needed by using the evapotranspiration rate through CIMIS. By doing that, we saved thousands of gallons of water and thousands of dollars in water costs for the complexes. We were getting a 25 percent reduction by fine-tuning the system and by being scientific about what the plants needed for moisture, and not doing a guesstimate.”

Newhard provides detailed usage surveys to the larger condominium complexes — free of charge to complexes spending more than $1500 a month on maintenance. “Not a lot of companies do it because it’s time-consuming,” he says, “but we do it because we’re leaders in water management.”

The director of water management at New Way is Don Schultz, who formerly conducted water audits with the San Diego County Water Authority. Schultz looks at the efficiency of the irrigation systems, things such as the spacing of sprinkler heads and the number of heads per water meter. He also looks at the plant life, doing “microclimate data collection” and analyzing water needs according to turf type, shade patterns, and the kinds of shrubbery and trees. Schultz feeds the data into a computer program and comes up with a micromanaged irrigation program with a water budget. If a complex is using 50 percent more water than specified by the survey, New Way will then hunt for leaks — in one system they found a line dumping five gallons a minute down a drain, at a cost of about $800 a month.

When Schultz looked at the Belsara irrigation system, he found one source of big savings right off. Belsara was paying for nine water meters but using only seven in their irrigation system, at an expense of $60,000 over several years. The discovery led to a refund for the Belsara organization and also to a New Way promotional flyer that read, “$60,000 REFUND Acquired for one Association!!! How Much Can We Save You?”

Schultz ran an analysis of the irrigation system within Belsara, which has about 1000 units and ten acres of landscaping. There are eight control units, each running 198 valves, each valve controlling 30 sprinklers, about 6000 sprinklers in all. Schultz did soil probes in the zones to determine soil moisture. He made records of the plant material, the weather and precipitation, the sunlight and shade patterns, and then developed watering programs and water budgets. A water budget is set up according to “hundred-cubic-foot units,” with 748 gallons per hundred-cubic-foot (HCF) unit. During the second week of June, for example, Belsara had an irrigation budget of 900 HCF units (673,000 gallons), which at a price of $1.55 per HCF would amount to a week’s irrigation cost of $1395. But in the second week of June in 1997 the complex only used 770 HCF units, going under budget for an actual cost of $1193.

“It’s easy to overwater,” Don Schultz says. “Very easy. You’re under pressure to make the place green because the customer wants green. So it would be very easy to set every station for a high-run time. That’s where this programming helps, with the water budget. The science gets you on the lower end of the watering scale.

“But water management is both a science and an art,” Schultz says. “You can use formulas and spreadsheets and so on, but you have to have someone in the field watching the system. The real savings come from the site foreman, turning down the system, watching and experimenting. It’s really a matter of being conscientious about usage. It can be that simple.”

The supervisor at Belsara is Del Kitts. When Kitts started running the irrigation system nearly five years ago, it took him a week just to learn his way around the complex, which has an almost medieval pattern of circuitous roads. There were no maps of the irrigation system, only a list of the eight controlling units and it took him three months to map and plot the layout. He saw that Belsara had been overwatered — to keep it green — and that part of the reason for the overwatering was because many of the spray nozzles were breaking down and leaking. So Kitts spent six months renozzling the system.

Of operating and mastering the system, Kitts says “I cut back on the watering a little at a time. I didn’t want to stress the turf too much. There was full sun in one area, shade in another, many microclimates. So I kept in touch with the different locations and adjusted them by eye. I saved them about $12,000 one year.

“With the system we use, you can program times into the stations and then adjust the watering percentages with CIMIS. You can even operate the controllers with a remote unit. It’s becoming more sophisticated all the time. Soon you’ll be able to operate the irrigation system right from the office. That’s definitely the way it’s going. It’s a lot different than it was 20 years ago, when you came in and turned on the valve and waited while the water came out.”

Though perhaps a half-dozen sod companies market turf in San Diego County, there is only one major commercial producer — Am-Sod, located in the San Pasqual Valley. Am-Sod is run by Floyd Wirthlin Jr., or “J.R.” as everyone calls him. Born in 1958, J.R. describes himself as a “child of the ’70s,” the son of a military man. He traveled a bit, living in Hawaii and attending college in Idaho before returning to San Diego to help his father with the sod farm in 1979, after a flood. At that time Am-Sod was located in South Bay.

“On the most southwestern spot in the U.S.,” J.R. says. “On the last road in the country. When they were releasing water from the Rodriguez Dam in Mexico it was flooding the Tijuana River Valley. In 1979 there was a flood in December that went into January 1980. The farm in South Bay was flooded out. The farm was two years old, and all my dad's savings were in it. I came back to help and never left. I was studying business at college, but I realized when I came back that I wanted to work outdoors.

“The flood in 1979 took the whole farm out of production. Floods in 1982 and 1983 took half the farm. In 1986, a flood took a third of the farm, and in 1990 another flood wiped out a third. From then on we were trying to figure out how to get out of the Tijuana River Valley. The 1993 flood broke the camel’s back — the turf was under a layer of silt and the equipment was under silt too. We lost more than a million in turf and equipment, and that’s not including what it cost to plant more turf and get back into production. The river was getting thicker and thicker with undergrowth, and nobody was allowed to clear it because the environmentalists wouldn’t let them. In 1994-we started working up here in the San Pasqual Valley, and we dosed down operations in South Bay.

“The North County,” J.R. says, “is committed to agriculture. The local politicians have tried to keep agriculture going and find happy mediums between environmentalists and agriculture.” J.R. doesn’t have a high opinion of environmentalists.

The Am-Sod farm is a beautiful place to look at — about 280 acres of lawn, groomed and flat, nestled in a mountain valley. There’s a dairy farm nearby, a palm nursery, a beekeeper’s apiary. There’s a haze in the air this morning as J.R. gets into a truck and drives to one of the turf plots. Along the way he stops to talk to a representative from an irrigation company. Teasing him, J.R. asks, “Can you get me 4000 sticks at $20 a stick?” The salesman smiles—lengths of irrigation pipe are $37 new, J.R. says, and $28 used. He says he has thousands of sticks at the farm. The salesman says he’s keeping his eyes open. “Open them wider,” J.R. says, and drives off.

He stops at a fumigation site, a field covered with white plastic under which methyl bromide has recently been sprayed. “It kills anything that might live on grass,” J.R. says. “Fumigation costs about $ 1250 an acre.” He walks the edge of the site pushing a wheel, his “measuring tool,” the dry dirt puffing up from his shoes, and discovers the field has been fumigated six feet too short. “Six hundred forty feet by 620,” J.R. says, calculating. “Nine point one acres fumigated.” (At a cost of more than $11,000.) J.R. gets back into his truck and we drive off.

“I’m on a power curve right now,” he says. “I’ve got an order for five acres of turf for a golf course and another order for ten acres. Plus regular stuff” Lawn turf, he means.

He stops by a plot of about ten acres of the turf variety called Tifgreen, which J.R. calls Tif. “A variety that’s dormant in the cold months,” he says. “Tif is good for athletic turf. Some homeowners like it. They can use it for recreation and they don’t have to mess with it in the winter. Some rich people use Tif in their back yards, depending on what they plan to do — Tif is good for tennis, croquet, soccer. Then they use tall fescue out front.” J.R. says that about 90 percent of homeowners in Southern California use tall fescue grass because it’s green year-round. The biggest plantings by far at Am-Sod are tall fescue grasses.

Then J.R. speaks of the benefits of Tifgreen, a warm-weather and winter-dormant variety. “We got to educate people about Tif,” he says. “We got a water problem here, and Tif uses less water. You have to work it a bit, maybe add a little rye seed to have some green in the winter. The problem is, people want green all year round.”

J.R. says that he’ll overseed this plot of Tifgreen with rye soon and that it also needs to be mowed since it’s up to three-eighths of an inch. “One-sixteenth to one-eighth is best,” he says. “You measure by your finger.” He bends down and puts a finger into the grass and says, “One inch to the first knuckle, two inches to the second knuckle.”

They’re also about to “verticut” the Tifgreen for “stolons” — stems that grow horizontally along the grass surface. Tifgreen is a grass that spreads by runners,

and they use a machine with spinning blades to take strips out of the grass. After planting, the stolons “grab the ground and take off” When the workers verticut or mow the warm-season grasses, they have to wash the equipment because stolons can quickly contaminate fields of other varieties. “It’s scary,” J.R. says. “I talk about it all the time with my crew, and they get tired of hearing it. But you can ruin a field if stolons get on it. You have to come back, restrip, and refumigate it.”

J.R. is tall and slender, with a chiseled face and thickly muscled forearms. For professional reasons he took up golf a few years ago—“I have to play golf, or at least I tell my wife that.” He speaks with pride of the golf courses in San Diego County— some three dozen championship-caliber golf courses, he says. J.R. can speak of the grass that grows on them. “A golf course might use Tifway II, Tifgreen, and two varieties of bent grass on the putting greens. Tall fescue in the rough, bluegrass on the fringes. You can find almost all varieties on a golf course somewhere. That’s what makes Southern California unique with golf courses, that several varieties are green year-round. Golf courses have become one of the major tourist attractions. There’s an unbelievable selection, a course for every kind of golfer.”

As the day advances the veil of mist lifts from the San Pasqual Valley, and this farm becomes a brighter green and even more beautiful. In various fields irrigation sprinklers — long lines of wheels, or individual pulsating spinners — throw fountainlike patterns into the air and make the grass seem richer in hue. J.R. says that he irrigates “on demand,” that his water supply is from wells and therefore he’s free from paying agricultural rates for the acre-feet of water he uses. He says that his heaviest use is from June to August, during a time when they are required to shut the wells off in the afternoon, so they fill a pond at night and irrigate from it during the day. Here the grass must stay green—as Dave Shaw, extension advisor for turf management has put it, J.R.’s turf “has to be perfect.”

There are several steps in the planting of turf. First they “rip” the soil, using a machine with blunt pickax blades, and then they “disk” it, using steel wheels to cut the soil into smaller pieces. Then follows the most important process, J.R. says — the planing of the soil, in which a long curved blade takes out high spots and fills low spots, just as a woodworker planes a tabletop. After planing, they take a soil sample and correct the balance with sulfur or gypsum. The soil is tilled again, and then planed again, this time more precisely. Then the area is planted, with stolons or seed. Finally, plastic netting is laid down to make the harvesting easier.

The busy months are from April to September. “We work 24 hours a day in season. We start harvesting at 6:00 p.m., finish at 3:00 a.m. Trucking starts at 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. The irrigators start at 4:00 a.m., and by 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. the water is going. The day crew comes in at 7:00. They do maintenance and prepare for the deliveries.”

It’s too hot in the summer to harvest in the daytime, and during those summer months the losses reach 20 percent per acre, up from an average of 10 percent in the cooler months. “All the bad stuff gets disked back into the soil,” J.R. says. But the advantage of being a sod grower in this part of the country is that he can harvest two plantings in a year — 100 acres of production for 50 acres of field, twice the amount of a northern turf producer.

In the peak season Am-Sod employs 25 men in the fields and 5 men in the shop. There are 2 salesmen, about a dozen truck drivers, 3 people in the office, 2 in accounting—40 to 48 people altogether in the busy months, J.R. says. In the winter the workforce drops to about 25. In the peak season J.R. works from 40 to 80 hours a week.

There’s a lot of equipment in the business. There’s the big 2000-gallons-a-minute pump, which he got used for $12,500. A new harvester is $40,000, or half that price used. A used fork-lift is $15,000. Semi rigs are $11,000 to $15,000 used, J.R. says, and Am-Sod has ten of them. Semitrailers are $5000 to $8000, used. J.R. figures that he’s got about $500,000 invested in irrigation pipe.

The retail price for Tifgreen is 36 cents per square foot, 32 cents per square foot for tall fescue. Am-Sod has about 280 acres in production altogether. “'There are seven semis going out tomorrow,” J.R. says on this peak-sea-son day. “On Saturdays, five trucks.”

For a while we watch four men working on a harvester, which cuts strips of sod and lifts them up a conveyer, where they’re folded and stacked. The strips of sod are 15 inches wide and 48 inches long — 5 square feet of grass. One harvesting machine cuts about 6000 square feet an hour, or 1200 strips, about one strip every three seconds. “It’s blow and go,” J.R. says.

According to Vic Gibeault, turf is a “user commodity,” unlike most other agricultural products, which are consumed. In California, Gibeault says, there’s a 20 to 1 usage ratio, meaning that for every million dollars’ worth of turfgrass produced there’s $20 million worth of usage generated yearly, in landscaping fees, golf course fees, and other recreational usage.

I wonder what J.R. Wirthlin feels when he sees grass from his farm planted in lawns and public places.

“If it looks good I don’t think about it,” he says. “If it looks bad I’ll stop and ask them about it. I’ll ask questions and tell them how to treat it, do some troubleshooting on the spot. It seems to me when that happens it’s always in my own neighborhood.” He lives in Escondido.

As the day progresses, the workers take a lunch break and play soccer on a green expanse big enough for a hundred soccer games. A semi truck rolls in from the field, loaded with sod, gets wetted down and tarped, and goes out for a delivery. Irrigation lines fizzle out in some places and then spring forth almost festively in others.

Later in the day J.R. Wirthlin is walking alone in one of the turf fields, looking over his crop — the grass that will soon be a user commodity, a vehicle for quality of life if we see it in that greenest of ways. And a vehicle of water usage, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the variety of grass — which is also to see it in the greenest of ways, from the conservation standpoint.