Turf Magazine
Turf Magazine is an American trade magazine for lawn care and landscape professionals, published by Group C Media, Inc. and listed in Red Bank, New Jersey, with the publisher's operations centred in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. It serves landscape contractors, lawn care operators and grounds professionals with coverage of business management, turf care, landscape design and installation, irrigation, snow and ice management and landscaping equipment. Published six times a year and reaching about 65,000 lawn care and landscape professionals, it operates online at turfmagazine.com alongside print issues, digital editions and the LawnSite Network community.
The green industry, the businesses that design, build and maintain America's lawns, landscapes and grounds, employs hundreds of thousands of people and thrives on seasonal, outdoor, equipment-heavy work. Turf speaks to the owners and managers of those businesses, combining agronomic know-how with the realities of running crews, routes and fleets.
Group C Media Acquires Turf in 2018
The modern history of Turf begins with a change of ownership. On 5 June 2018, Group C Media, Inc. announced that it had acquired the assets of Turf, Turf Design Build and Tree Services from Grand View Media Group, Inc. Group C had recently also purchased the online communities LawnSite and PlowSite from Grand View, and the titles joined those communities as part of the LawnSite Network. Group C Co-President Ted Coene welcomed the brands back alongside the LawnSite Network and said the acquisition would create new offerings in print, online and face-to-face events, expanding coverage for landscape professionals responsible for the design, construction and maintenance of commercial and residential grounds. Group C, a business publisher of more than forty years' standing, also publishes Business Facilities and Facility Executive magazines and produces events including Business Facilities LiveXchange and Facility Executive Live!
The Relaunch: From Facility Executive Supplement to Standalone Title
Group C moved quickly to relaunch the magazine. Announced on 27 June 2018, the plan reintroduced Turf as a special supplement in the October 2018 issue of Facility Executive, Group C's magazine for facility managers, with expansion to a standalone quarterly publication in 2019. The supplement strategy introduced, or reintroduced, Turf to an adjacent audience of facilities professionals while the brand was rebuilt, before it resumed independent publication. The title's frequency later settled at six issues per year, the rhythm its publisher described to advertising partners, serving its 65,000-strong professional audience in print and digital form.
Leadership: Ronnie Hall and Dan Ulrich
Two green-industry veterans were named to lead the relaunch. Ronnie Hall became Editor-at-Large, bringing 34 years in green-industry business-to-business publishing, most recently as Editor-at-Large and Editor-in-Chief of Turf itself under its previous owner, with earlier editorial roles at Landscape Management, Lawn Care Industry and Athletic Turf. Hall served on committees of the National Association of Landscape Professionals, formerly the Professional Lawn Care Association, and the Sports Turf Managers Association, was a board member of the American Society of Business Press Editors, and was inducted into the Turf & Ornamental Communicators Association Hall of Fame in 2016. Dan Ulrich became Publisher of Turf and the LawnSite Network, responsible for the brand's print and digital direction, new initiatives and client marketing solutions, after serving as Senior Brand Manager for the LawnSite Network and earlier as an Associate Publisher at Meister Media for the CropLife and Global Agribusiness groups. Ulrich, who holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado and an MBA from Lake Erie College, has remained the public face of the brand in industry interviews.
What Turf Covers: The Business of Green
Turf's own summary of its remit lists business management, greenskeeping, lawn care, landscape design, irrigation, snow and ice management and the latest landscaping equipment, and its recent themed issues show how those strands combine. The February 2025 issue, headlined Hedge Your Bets, focused on business management strategies, employee acquisition, marketing and artificial intelligence. The April 2025 Mowing Issue examined everything about mowing, from the contest between petrol and electric power to professional striping skills. The August 2025 Ground Force issue explored how landscapers respond to natural disasters, alongside battery-powered equipment, decking and technology-savvy lawn care. The April 2026 issue, Master Your Mow, featured the 2026 Master of Stripes, Jerry Sneed, together with landscaping fleets and mower deck design and maintenance. The pattern is consistent: seasonal, practical features anchored in the work readers are doing that month.
Equipment, Battery Power and Regulation
Few trade sectors are changing as fast as outdoor power equipment, and Turf's publisher has identified the shifts its readers face: the introduction and adoption of battery power, regulatory pressure, especially from the West Coast, over noise pollution and lawn care chemistry, and new alternatives to traditional pesticides, herbicides and plant-health products. Ulrich has described that disruption as also a boost, bringing new products and services into a market that continues to grow. Coverage of mowers, decks, handheld equipment, trucks and trailers is therefore tied to purchasing guidance and fleet thinking, not only product announcements, and issues regularly address how contractors evaluate the switch from petrol to battery across a crew's daily routes.
Turf Care, Design and the Wider Grounds Brief
Beyond business and machines, the magazine covers the craft itself: turfgrass care, fertilisation and plant health, pest management, irrigation efficiency and water stewardship, landscape design and installation, hardscaping materials and techniques, and tree care through its sister brand Tree Services. Its archive ranges from pond pumps and design software to environmentally conscious jointing sands and composite decking, the small product world that surrounds professional grounds work. The crossover with Group C's Facility Executive audience is real: facility managers focus mainly on building interiors and structure, but water efficiency, chemical use and environmental stewardship push exterior grounds into their remit, and Turf's content serves both the contractor and the client side of that relationship.
The LawnSite Network and Community
Turf does not stand alone. As part of the LawnSite Network, it sits alongside LawnSite, the long-running online forum where lawn and landscape business owners discuss operations, and PlowSite, its snow and ice counterpart, together with Turf Design Build and Tree Services. Group C has emphasised the strength of that combined audience, noting in advertising discussions that its email lists and community base dominate its competitive set and generate leads for clients. For readers, the network means the magazine's features are amplified by peer discussion; for the publisher, print, web, email and community form a single green-industry media business. Turf's site also maintains an archive of recent issues and digital editions, with themed print issues republished online in full.
Audience: 65,000 Landscape Professionals
The Turf audience consists of owners and managers of lawn care and landscape companies, grounds managers and landscape contractors serving commercial and residential clients. Publisher figures put the reach at 65,000 lawn care and landscape professionals for a title published six times a year. It is a business audience with purchasing authority over mowers, vehicles, chemicals, irrigation systems and software, which is why the magazine mixes agronomy with marketing, hiring and operations: in a labour-intensive service business, the binding constraints are usually people, routes and equipment rather than plant knowledge alone. Its competitor set includes Lawn & Landscape and Landscape Management, and Turf's differentiation rests on its LawnSite community heritage and its Group C facilities crossover.
Red Bank, Tinton Falls and Group C Media
Group C Media is a New Jersey publisher: its Turf acquisition and relaunch announcements were issued from Tinton Falls, and the brand is listed in nearby Red Bank, Monmouth County. The company states that for over forty years corporate executives have relied on its information brands, delivered in print, online and at face-to-face events, and that its mission is to provide relevant content and connections for its audiences and advertisers. Alongside Business Facilities and Facility Executive, and events and brands in business continuity and resilience, Turf gives Group C a foothold in the outdoor, contractor economy quite different from its corporate real-estate roots, a diversification the company pursued deliberately in 2018.
Why Turf Magazine Matters
Professional lawn and landscape work is easy to overlook and hard to do well at scale: it is seasonal, weather-exposed, labour-hungry and increasingly regulated, yet it shapes the appearance and ecology of suburbs, campuses, parks and commercial sites across the United States. Turf Magazine documents that business for the people who run it, with management strategy, turf science, equipment intelligence and peer recognition such as Master of Stripes. Acquired and relaunched by Group C Media in 2018, led by publisher Dan Ulrich and editor-at-large Ronnie Hall, and read by some 65,000 professionals six times a year, Turf remains a go-to resource for America's green industry.
