Fields of dreams: North Carolina grass farm sows success for sports across the USA

Chad Price slides a pocket knife from his cargo shorts, takes a knee and cuts into some of the most desired grass in the Southeast.

The cutting sounds like ripping Velcro. The fresh Earth smells delightfully dewy. It’s just past 7 a.m. on a late-July Friday at the grass farm in Indian Trail, N.C., about 40 minutes outside Charlotte where generations of Prices live and work and harvest joy, and Price is checking on his crop.

“Not the sharpest knife,” Price says under his breath as he slices away. His voice cuts through a quiet morning in a field bedded by acres of Bermuda-bladed carpet. The field is framed by pine trees. The scene is only interrupted by a sunflower patch — “My wife loves sunflowers” — and the occasional telephone-line pole that looks like it sprouted in the fields all on its own, a product of the family decades ago not knowing how big their company could get.

Price eventually wrestles away the heavy, small square of grass from the ground. It’s dense by design.

“Here you go,” he says in his North Carolina-native elocution. He then launches into an explanation of the soil: “So the bottom layer ...”

On this Friday morning, the owner of Carolina Green Corporation is happy. The farm is his peace. For 14 years, CGC has been the company responsible for providing the premium athletic grass you see in many of the football and soccer stadiums across the U.S. That includes the stadiums of the Kansas City Chiefs, the Baltimore Ravens, the Washington Commanders, the Chicago Bears and high-profile college teams, among others.

Price’s company also works closely with the Charlotte Knights, Carolina Panthers and Charlotte FC. It supplied and installed the grass in the Panthers’ beautifully constructed practice facility in uptown this year. It’ll also outfit Bank of America Stadium when Chelsea and Real Madrid come to town on Tuesday evening — offering a local flavor to a global event.

Price is particularly happy today. It’s overcast and cool. The rain is coming but hasn’t yet made landfall. It’s busy but isn’t as busy as it has been earlier this summer on big ship-out days. For the Chelsea game Tuesday, the company harvested 30 truckloads of grass and shipped it up to Bank of America Stadium; today he’s just harvesting eight rolls of the premium sod — what he calls “GameOnGrass.”

As he hops back in his white Chevy pickup truck to check on another field in the morning, he lets out a metaphor that feels familiar.

“We’re always dating, we’re never married,” Price says, a smile sneaking onto his face. “We just love on the sod for a little while. And then it goes away, you know?”

How this North Carolina grass goes from farm to field

The agronomy behind growing this kind of grass is predictably meticulous and complex. But the fundamental process of Carolina Green Corp’s grass going farm to pro athletic field is pretty simple.

It all starts below the Carolinas border, at the company’s “parent farm” just outside of Cheraw, S.C., which is about an hour and a half southeast of Charlotte. The soil there is naturally sandy, Price said — ideal for growing really dense grass — so the grass is grown and groomed there for about four to six months. Once ready, Carolina Green Corp uproots that sandy sod and brings it to the farm near Charlotte and lays it over a sheet of plastic. The grass is laid on the plastic, Price said, so it doesn’t root into the native soil.

The grass then spends about six months growing on the plastic at the farm in Indian Trail. It gets its water from local Goose Creek that gets pumped into the site’s irrigation pond. The plastic underlay creates a barrier so the roots can’t go through it, and thus the roots become mangled — kind of like how the roots of a potted plant do, making the sod as untearable as a phonebook.

About four times over the period of a couple months, Price said, the farm keeps top-dressing the fields with sand soil to make the sod thicker and denser. The soil stays there for another four to six months — depending on the time of year — before it gets the inch-and-half thickness and the gladiator tensile strength that the premium sod requires. Carolina Green Corp tries to do two crops a year at the Indian Trail farm — one laid during the beginning of summer and one at the beginning of the fall — so the product can be available year-round.

The growing process yields a product that not only is thick enough to be laid down and played on immediately — but also one that can drain quite well.

“It’s all made of sand,” Price said. “So we can take water, pour it on this, and it’ll drain vertically. And that’s really important that it drains. Because if we had a big rain during one of these events, we can’t have it turn into mud or get it all loose or moving around.”

Installing it on a field

Once ready, the grass needs to be harvested, transported and installed.

The harvest begins with a worker operating a Big Roll Sod Harvester, a mini-tractor-type machine that uses a tool that gets in-between the plastic underlay and the grass and lifts the grass up like a spatula does a flapjack. (This is quite the flapjack, though: Each roll of grass is about 3.5-feet wide and 50 feet long, and each one weighs just about 2,400 pounds.) That machine simultaneously rolls up the grass and then delivers it to another machine, which then lifts it onto a truck. All the machines are worker-run.

When a trip is “local” — in other words less than a six-hour drive — often the grass will be put on a truck with an open-air truck bed. For longer trips, refrigerated trucks are summoned.

From there, the installation process varies from facility to facility. But when the field is going over a turf, like it does at Bank of America Stadium, the installation team puts a black adhesive tiling — geotextiles — over the turf, and then the heavy grass lays over top of that. Then, one specialized machine — known as a “SideKick” apparatus — squeezes all the grass slabs together and makes for a safe, play-now playing surface. In the case of the Chelsea-Real Madrid contest in Bank of America Stadium, the grass was laid on Thursday, Aug. 1, five days before it would be played on.

Carolina Green Corp didn’t disclose the cost of company projects. Forbes reported in 2022 that it cost around $350K to lay premium sod in an NFL stadium.

Sometimes, the grass can be used for six to eight games. Other times, for special events, it’s just used once and then removed. The grass then either gets donated, laid overtop a compost (the weight helps with that) or gets disposed.

Danny Losito, the director of grounds for Tepper Sports and Entertainment since 2020, described working with Carolina Green Corporation as a joy. He added that he visits the farm a bunch — a benefit of it being local — and that the Price family “is just good people.”

“They participate in a lot of our projects,” Losito said. “We visit at the farm a lot. ... They get what we do. They have experience in what we do. And we have really good communication. We’ve talked about our industry, and Chad’s definitely a leader in our industry.”

All this before 10 a.m.

The harvest is complete by just past 9 a.m. on the aforementioned Friday, and Chad Price retires to his office. He’s rarely here, especially during the summertime, because he’s traveling and supervising field installations far and wide.

Step inside the log-cabin office and you’re reminded of family everywhere. There’s a photo of his son, Matthew, winning a high school wrestling state championship on the back wall. There’s another of his daughter, Jessica, on his desk. His older son, Jackson, lives just up the road. His wife, Kerry, who runs the business alongside Chad, has an office adjacent to him. There’s a Bible verse in the “lobby,” which feels more like a living room, dedicated to Don, Chad’s father.

Chad started working right after college. He played football at Virginia Tech and earned a degree in agronomy. It was there he met his wife, who was on the volleyball team and who graduated with a degree in accounting. In 1988, he began a company called “Chad’s Green And Clean” — a lawn care and street-cleaning company — and then after five years joined forces with Kerry to create Carolina Green Corp.

The company has evolved a bunch since being incorporated in 1993. But over the past 14 years, it’s most known for its premium sod, the sandy grass grown on a farm in rural North Carolina that sets the stage for special sports moments across the country every year.

“Being from Pittsburgh, I went to college and thought I was going to work in New York, in a high-rise,” Kerry said with a smile. “And I ended up on a farm. So God’s got other plans for you. I love it, and my kids love it, they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”

Neither could Chad. By 10 a.m. on that Friday, the rain is pouring down, the grass is on the truck, you’re exhausted, and he’s back in the fields.