When the World Cup kicks off this summer, the turf in each of the tournament’s 16 stadiums will become the world’s most-watched grass.
And when some of the planet's best soccer players take the field for games in Philadelphia, they’ll be playing on Garden State sod grown specifically for the event at Tuckahoe Turf Farms, a sprawling complex of fields, sprinklers and dirt roads surrounded by blueberry farms in Hammonton, New Jersey.
Keith Salmon, the farm's director of sports turf, knows those fields well. Salmon showed Gothamist the turf for Philadelphia's six World Cup games on the morning it was being harvested and installed at Lincoln Financial Field early this month.
Tuckahoe Turf Farms has been growing high-quality ball fields for the past six decades. Today, the farm counts a range of professional teams among its clients, like the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers. The New York Red Bulls and NYCFC both get their turf from the farm. The Giants and the New York Jets both use it for their practice fields.
“There's very few teams that we do not do in the area, and we're extremely lucky,” Salmon said.
Hammonton, in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey, prides itself as the blueberry capital of the world. Salmon said the same climate, soil and water availability that makes the area perfect for growing blueberries is also ideal for growing turf.
“It's a lot of sandy, acidic soil, which is why there are so many blueberries around here,” Salmon said. “It makes it very, very easy for us to be able to grow in this sand.”
Allen Carter, the farm’s chief financial officer, also advocates for New Jersey farmers as president of the New Jersey Farm Bureau. He said turf farms play an important role in the Garden State’s $1.7 billion agriculture industry.
Turf farms are considered to be part of the nursery sector, and nursery products make up about half of New Jersey’s agricultural output.
“ New Jersey's well known for the Jersey corn, the tomatoes, et cetera,” Carter said. “But what a lot of people don't realize is how much nursery items, whether it's the trees, the shrubberies, the turf grass, the cut flower business, all that really does add up in New Jersey to half of $1.7 billion.”
Turf for the 2026 FIFA World Cup games in Philadelphia awaits harvesting at Tuckahoe Turf Farms.
FIFA contracted with Tuckahoe Turf Farms for the playing fields more than four years ago. Carter said working with FIFA has brought different challenges from other clients. That's largely because the relationship had to start from scratch. He quipped that the contract with FIFA is a bit longer than the ones with other clients.
“They read about us, but they don't know much about us,” Carter said. “So they visit us quite often.”
FIFA did not respond to a request for comment.
The farm has also supplied the turf for Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, which will host seven World Cup games. The farm is installing the World Cup turf at MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands, but someone else grew that field.
“MetLife will have a warm-season grass, a Bermuda grass, and this is a cool-season grass, which is bluegrass,” Carter said. “That's the major difference.”
The farm is supplying Kentucky bluegrass fields for the World Cup, and those fields have taken about a year to grow.
Rolls of turf for the 2026 FIFA World Cup games in Philadelphia are loaded onto a truck for deliver
The process starts with seeds being planted in a biodegradable mesh that acts like the underside of a carpet, keeping everything stitched tightly together. The World Cup turf is bulkier than the farm's normal sod: Salmon said 1 square foot of a World Cup field weighs about 15 pounds. Typically, the farm’s playing fields are just about four pounds per square foot.
The sod is mowed constantly to keep the grass at its playing height, and regularly raked clean to make sure each blade is able to grow upright, straight and strong.
“It's a very tedious process to make sure that it is exactly in the specifications that we want,” Salmon said.
Harvesting the turf takes workers acting in precise choreography. One man drives a tractor with a big tube attached to the back. Then three men standing shoulder-to-shoulder lift up a strip of sod and bend it around the tube. As the tractor moves forward, it pulls the sod off the ground and rolls it up like paper towels.
When the roll is as long as it can be, a forklift takes the roll off the tractor and moves it to a staging area, before a different forklift loads it onto a truck to be delivered to the stadium.
It takes hundreds of rolls of sod to fill out stadiums for World Cup games. Salmon said the Philadelphia field was about 600 rolls, and took about 25 truck trips to move it all from Hammonton to the stadium.
One square foot of a World Cup field weighs about 15 pounds, nearly four times as much as the farm's usual fields..
The whole world will be watching this grass — almost literally. The last World Cup in 2022 had 5 billion people watch some form of game content across platforms, according to FIFA, and TV viewership for each game averaged 175 million. Salmon said he knows the farm has grown high-quality grass for the World Cup. But even still, the weight of having the eyes of the world on his work strikes him sometimes.
“There is a little bit of pressure to make sure that everything is essentially perfect,” Salmon said. “We're all very much perfectionists in a way, but once you get over that and just do what you do and just reach out to anyone for help regarding anything with this, it's pretty much the same.”
Carter said he used to spend time thinking about how many people would be watching this grass.
“ We're confident now. We've got the product. It's looking great,” Carter said.
