SportsTurf provides current, practical and technical content on issues relevant to sports turf managers, including facilities managers. Most readers are athletic field managers from the professional level through parks and recreation, universities.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/605094
W ith Mother Nature in his corner, not to mention a cheering sec- tion composed of nine out of 10 Americans, according to a recent Harris Poll, you'd think Tobey Wagner would be content to ignore any lim- ited gains in market share enjoyed by the US synthetic turf industry. You'd be wrong about that: The owner and president of Sod Solutions (and STMA Commercial Member) is anything but san- guine about artificial grass, which Wagner clearly sees as a pox on humankind. "I can't think of a more harmful thing that we could do to our environment than using synthetics," he says. "The only reason synthetic turf is used at all is just a lack of education about the real- ity of it." Based in Mount Pleasant, SC Sod Solutions is a developer and marketer of turf grasses. Its founder talks about synthetic grass like someone who competes against it and Wagner markets natural turf with the same competi- tive urgency. For Victor Lanfranco, co-owner of the nation's largest distributor of artificial turf, Synthetic Grass Warehouse (SGW) in Anaheim, CA competing effectively means doing a sufficient job of explaining how much better artificial grass is today than it was 25 years ago. "The engineering, the technology, has come a long, long way, especially in the last decade," he says. "It's now a widely accepted product for the landscape," not just athletic fields. SGW is 100% focused on the distribution of artificial turf, most of it from TigerTurf, which is owned by TenCate subsidiary TenCate Grass of Union City, GA and the remainder from Dallas-based Everlast Turf. SGW does offer a few accessory products such as chemi- cal treatments for areas used by pets. Lanfranco says SGW has achieved revenue increases of 15-20% a year for the past decade. "The drought (in California) may take us to 30% this year," he says, insistent that the growth of the industry as a whole is obvious, notwithstanding the scarcity of publicly traded arti- ficial turf companies, which would be required to make key financial information public. And to be fair, the same limitation applies to the natural turf industry. "Keeping up with demand is a challenge," Lanfranco says, not for SGW alone but for all companies that make and sell synthetic turf. In separate telephone interviews, Wagner and Lanfranco talked about their own businesses as well as the other's. The subject was deliberately limited to landscaping for commer- cial, residential and governmental customers; in other words, athletic fields, a huge but different kind of business in many respects, were pur- posely excluded. Wagner, after graduating from Auburn University with a degree in mechanical engineering, worked his way into the turf industry, eventually starting Sod Solutions about 21 years ago. "Lots of people in the business see us as a marketing company," he says, "but we have horticulturalists and others in that area working with us every day. We're very involved in (the) development" of grasses. Sod Solutions' clients include turf-growing operations nationwide, with which it forms affiliation agree- ments. Wagner's company also has a sizable marketing arm that offers tools such as website design and management, helping to ensure turf growers are connected with buyers, he says. "This is a business that requires knowing the people in our indus- 22 SportsTurf | December 2015 www.sportsturfonline.com LANDSCAPE TURF BATTLE: NATURAL VS. SYNTHETIC FACILITY & OPERATIONS ■ BY DAVID ROUNTREE Tobey Wagner, Sod Solutions "One of the things the healthiest cities in this country have in common is an abundance of natural landscaping," he says. "Are we going to go the route of plastic shrubs, plastic trees?" — Tobey Wagner ////////////////////////////////////////// //////////////////////////////////////////