As Featured in the November 2006 issue of "Southwest Horticulture"

Featured Member: Evergreen Turf

In Tune with the Art and Science of Growing a Business

When Jeff Nettleton and Jimmy Fox started Evergreen Turf, Inc. on 120 acres in 1999, they expected to make mistakes. The last mistake they expected to make was to underestimate the demand for their product. “We thought our initial planting was more inventory than we would ever need,” Nettleton says. “Our goal was never to be a large supplier. We simply wanted to do a good job and fill a small niche for pure sod in Arizona. The thought of selling the entire 120 acres was almost inconceivable in the beginning.”

The demand for that niche nearly caused a customer stampede. In fact, Fox says that, “In our first year, we did more business than we projected to do in our third year and we met our five-year goals in three years.” The duo quickly expanded their initial acreage and today they have over 1,000 acres in production with farms in Eloy and Stanfield. Fox and Nettleton bought the Stanfield property from Gardner Turfgrass where Nettleton was previously employed as a farm manager.

“We have been blessed with the good fortune of demand exceeding our expectations,” Nettleton says. However, he claims that their success has not been a result of any particular business acumen on their part. “We have had a great housing market and the opportunity to buy Gardner Turfgrass’ Arizona division was helpful, but I think the fact that Evergreen Turf, Inc. has attracted such an amazing group of employees has been the real key. Our people are the real reason we’ve succeeded.”

Nettleton began his career working as a field laborer on a sod farm in Southern Idaho. Prior to moving to Arizona he worked on various sod farms throughout the US and Australia. A-G Turf Farm (later to be renamed Gardner Turfgrass) brought him to Arizona in 1994 as a manager trainee. Fox was a shareholder in Garden West Distributors and the two became acquainted as Fox was a supplier to A-G Turf. “I used to think Jimmy was the very best rep in the Arizona turf industry. Now that I have been business partners with him for the past 8 years I don’t think that anymore-I know it” says Nettleton who sought Fox’s counsel for his business plan. “I was surprised by his interest in becoming a partner, but also honored. We have complementary talents; I have unique agricultural and sod industry knowledge while Jimmy is the perfect front man to handle our sales, marketing, and customer relations.”

Their combined talents and reputations brought them their first client—the El Conquistador Resort in Tucson. Since then, golf course installations have become a cornerstone of their business. “We cater to golf construction contractors,” Fox says. “They appreciate the type of work we do, especially the type of grass and quality of installation.”

Evergreen grows 12 varieties of grass, but the most common grasses are: Midiron, Tifway, and Tifgreen, Their newest addition, Celebration Bermudagrass is rapidly gaining in popularity due to its dark color, wear tolerance and ability to transition from overseeding. Evergreen is also Arizona’s largest producer of Palmetto St. Augustine, which is the only warm-season turfgrass suitable for shaded areas.

“We take great care in selecting turfgrass varieties that are best suited for the Arizona market, not simply those that would give us a competitive advantage” explains Nettleton. “We have had many opportunities to produce new and exciting varieties which we have turned down because we did not necessarily feel they would be right for the unique conditions which exist in Arizona. We take great pride in the fact that we have never released an unsuccessful variety and our clientele seems to respect that, because none of our selections have had to be torn out and replaced shortly after installation.”

Evergreen takes great care in making sure their product looks good. Heavy emphasis is placed on “purity” or freedom from weeds, particularly off-type grasses. Evergreen’s fields are carefully mown in order to deliver sod that meets the customer’s individual requirements. For instance, golf course putting greens have mowing requirements that are vastly different from green space areas in residential communities.

Besides purity and mowing, Evergreen also defines quality by sod strength. “If you can pick up a piece of grass, hold it by the corners and shake it and it doesn’t fall apart, you have good sod strength,” Fox explains. “Sod strength is very important because it means the project goes faster and looks better when it is completed.”

Evergreen’s ability to consistently deliver a premium product on any scale as well as their outstanding installation services has allowed the business to grow into a wide range of industry segments. The process, according to Fox, “starts with everybody in the company having high standards, especially at the farm level.

“There are four parts to our business,” Fox explains, “we have the sod farm where we grow the grass; delivery, installation, and it all must be backed by strong customer support. In each of these areas meeting the demands of the market is the most important thing, but if we can’t maintain quality, we won’t be in business long.”

One of the main differences between the sod business and the nursery business is that sod must be harvested and installed in a 24-hour period while nursery plants can be left onsite for several days and sometimes weeks. This, Fox says, means that whatever the weather conditions are, hot and windy or moist and rainy, harvesting can be difficult and the product doesn’t always come in in exactly the same condition everyday. “The days when you deliver really good sod, you raise the bar, and that’s what our customers come to expect every day,” Fox says.

Evergreen Turf’s most challenging project occurred at Laughlin Ranch Golf Course in Bullhead City, 350 miles away from their farms. “Not only was distance a problem,” Fox says, “but they covered the entire golf course with sand and wanted to sod it with grass that was grown in the same sand. So we imported 15,000 tons of sand, and spread it over 100 acres on our farms, and grew the sod just for them. We sent a 25 man crew to Laughlin for five months and shipped 400 truckloads of sod to Bullhead City. We sodded their greens, tees, fairways, everything on their golf course.”

Their latest high-profile project was to provide the turf for the new University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. Instead of seeding or sodding the field as was standard, Evergreen sprigged the field, which is essentially sod which has been shredded.  The sand growing medium was reinforced with StaLok fibers to stabilize the sand which reduces divoting and improves footing. The entire field construction was designed to give “shear strength.” This means when a 300-pound lineman digs his foot into the ground the turf won’t fly out. “A firmer field is a faster, safer field,” says Fox. “We used a hydroseeding truck to apply the sprigs onto the field, then came in with a series of discs and cut the sprigs into the sand and rolled it smooth in six directions. It took us from sunup to sundown to plant this two-acre field. There were only 14 weeks before the first game and because nobody in the NFL had seen this done before, everybody was very nervous. But we grew the field in by eight weeks and based on the feedback we are hearing this is one of the best natural grass playing surfaces, if not the best in the NFL.”

Delivering an excellent product provides the foundation for Evergreen’s business policy; however, as Fox says, “Even though grass is the most important thing we do every day in terms of product, it’s really the way we take care of people. If you’re in business, you’re going to have problems and the way you take care of those problems is the reason people come back to you.”

“We place heavy emphasis on people,” explains Nettleton. “Evergreen Turf is a relationship based business. In fact, you could say we’re not really in the sod business, we’re in the people business.”