Getting to the Roots of Water Efficiency
Though we drink over one billion glasses of tap water each day, AWWA reports a large chunk of our household water budget goes to outdoor uses.
The more than 55,000 community water systems in the United States process nearly 34 billion gallons of water per day according to the American Water Works Association (AWWA). Installed water-saving features typically come to mind when we think of conservation. The AWWA estimates that 5.4 billion gallons per day could result from such water-conserving measures as updating plumbing systems or installing low-volume toilets. Another way to conserve is by acting on that large outdoor usage chunk of our water budgets. Such conservation savings may be as close as the plant roots in the ground outside our back door. Throughout the country, researchers are finding ways to conserve water through soil development, equipment, and plant genetics.
Water Efficiency Through Turf Grass Science
For Peter Landschoot, professor of turf grass science at Penn State University, some of the advances that are being made and will be made in the future include the use of grasses that don’t require as much water. This is more of a critical issue in the western US where there is limited water and a greater need for some turf grasses due to high evapotranspiration. “A considerable amount of research and development is going into not only drought-tolerant turf grasses but also salt tolerance in order that saltier water, which is not good for much of anything else, can be used as reclaimed water,” says Landschoot.
As he points out, however, grass species considerations are something of a tough sell in the turf grass industry as species choice is not yet regulated. When people choose a particular species, they usually do it based on past history, what performs well in a particular area, and what the characteristics are of that species. “Though the decision is not usually made based strictly on water-use requirements, we are starting to see some changes,” says Landschoot. “We are seeing some use of tall fescue—a deep-rooted species able to take advantage of water deeper in the soil—not only in the West, but also in the eastern US. Also, some warm-season grasses are being looked at and selected now more for their drought tolerance than before.”
Landschoot says more efficient watering equipment is being studied and used now. There’s been some interest in the research community in subsurface irrigation of turf grasses. “That was something never considered until very recently—the thinking being you’ll bring too many salts to the surface. Preliminary research results in New Mexico show that this might be an efficient delivery system for watering.” Subsurface irrigation is similar to a drip system, but the water instead rises due to capillary action into the soil. The main points to remember when it comes to water management with turf grass, according to Landschoot, are not overwatering when you do water and only watering when you absolutely have to.
“As you speak to those in the golf and sports turf industry, you find that most look at this as an art, not a science,” says Landschoot. “It doesn’t always work out to be ideal as sometimes the time allotted for watering is not the best time of day either because of sports usage or because it’s not the best time for the plant to be receiving water.
“If you talk to an experienced turf grass specialist, despite what the public may think, the last thing we want to do is overwater; it creates drainage problems, root systems don’t receive enough oxygen, and it even favors certain types of pests, such as weed and disease species.”
Watering at night may sometimes do those things too. A growing concern is that we still are using too much water in this industry. “Some of the best ways that significant improvements will be made, aside from soil development, is through equipment and through the genetics of the plant. Many efforts are under way now to go in that direction.”
 |
Magro choosing unique bentgrass segregate in
Hawaii |
Soil Development
Rick Allen, owner of BioLynceus LLC, a biological solutions company in Lyons, CO, believes soil development is the key to turf grass water conservation. “Our philosophy during the 12 years we’ve worked on soils has been that ‘people need to farm the soil and not the plant,’” says Allen. “If you have healthy soils, you’ll have healthy plants. Healthy soils are not heavily compacted, contain plenty of soil microbiology, have sufficient amounts of organic matter for the plants to access, and are able to hold both water and nutrients. Once all of those things are in balance you can cut back on your water simply because the water is more readily available to the plant.”
All plants are dependent on microbiology to stay alive. By stimulating the soil microbiology, more nutrients are made available to the plant; plants therefore access water better and also develop stronger and healthier root zones.
In BioLynceus’ early days, the development of healthier grass was always a primary goal. A parallel benefit became the development of healthier root systems in plants. In the course of its work in this area, the company also discovered a residual benefit: Not as much water had to be used to maintain healthy grass or plants, which resulted in more green in its customers’ pockets.
“We normally recommend when people start using our flagship product, which is a humic acid–fulvic acid blend, that they in turn cut back on their water usage by anywhere from 10% to 25% during the first year,” says Allen. “Our product is actually a soil amendment that helps alter the soil, increasing the amount of flocculation occurring.”
Flocculation, or the process of forming lumps in soils, increases the amount of water penetration, allowing water to be in contact with the root of the plant longer. The plant in turn can use water more efficiently.
“We are adding a carbon-based, liquid material that is easily incorporated and high in organic matter and live microbials that helps stimulate the soil microbiology to make it more active and effective,” says Allen. “If you don’t have healthy soils, basically what happens is the plant doesn’t develop a strong root zone. Therefore, it is also less heat tolerant; in order to keep the plant from stressing in high temperatures, more water must be added.
“What most of us in this country do is end up creating a catch-22 situation. We keep adding more water, which in turn doesn’t tell the plant that it needs to drive a root zone deeper because everything is at the top. When things get hot, plants cannot stand the stress of the lack of water. What do we do? We add more water.”
Typically, unhealthy soils are heavily compacted, contain chemical residues, and often are high in sodium levels. Problems may be further compounded by stresses from extremes in the climate in which the soil is located, like drought.
Another client, Rodney Myers, manager of Montana’s Fox Ridge Golf Course, has used Allen’s product for one year. He first used it on nine of the greens at his course and sprays the product directly on the turf. “It has softened up the greens as well as reduced the water consumption,” says Myers. “I’ve only used it for one year so far, but I am definitely planning on using it in the coming year. I have a bunch that I plan on using on the fairways too.”
 |
| Penn State University creeping bentgrass breeding nursery plot |
Ron Smith, grounds manager (now retired), for a Longmont school district, 30 miles north of Denver, used BioLynceus’ products for the larger schools in Boulder County and found the product helped the root growth, making the roots descend a lot farther. At one of the schools he did some core samples and found the roots had gone down about 6 inches plus. Two blocks from that location was an elementary school that was not using the product. “We took a sample there, and our root system only went down an inch and a half, at best. It was clearly working for us.” Smith used the product for a couple of years before he retired, and the school district is still using the product.
New Technologies in Equipment
Van Cline, Ph.D., a turf research manager and agronomistwith the Toro Co., does much new work in the area of site assessment. Work is being done with a variety of sensing equipment, mostly within the context of golf courses. “The idea is that there is so much variability in agronomic conditions on a golf course that if you really want to apply water efficiently you must know where you need to apply water and where you don’t,” says Cline.
Irrigation systems today are generally scheduled to run on certain days for “x” amount of minutes with every head watering during the irrigation cycle, according to Cline. “Because they tend to water according to dry spots, you have areas that are overwatered much of the time. Unless you understand the critical conditions, such as those of soil and topography and how they relate to how irrigation systems are laid out, you really cannot do an efficient job of watering; it’s not a thing to do by the seat of your pants.”
For this reason, Cline is working on ways to measure and map important site conditions using sensors and geographic information systems (GIS). This is basically mapping software allowing the collection of a certain type of data, such as soil moisture over a large area. Position data then can be collected from each data point using a global positioning system. The software takes the data with location points and maps it spatially.
“You can literally look at a map of a golf course fairway, sports field, or whatever it is you’ve mapped and see the distribution of moisture or soil compaction, as that has an effect on the way soils accept water,” says Cline. “Toro’s Center for Advanced Turf Technology has been working on all these related issues since about 2001.”
For the last several years Cline’s group has been intensively mapping five golf courses and two sports field complexes in the Twin Cities area. In the summer of 2006 similar work was started on two golf courses in Florida, one in southern California, and one in central Iowa. “We have a pretty intensive test going on this summer,” says Cline. “Our intent was to get beyond the conditions we’re used to here in Minnesota and to look at a number of other areas.
“The really innovative part of things today is that state-of-the-art irrigation control systems are map-based systems; in other words the software is able to basically read maps. The idea of using GIS to map site or soil conditions and relief or topographic conditions and load that map-based information into an irrigation control system gives you the ability to have the control system make decisions for you based on where water’s needed and where it’s not. Based on site conditions it is now possible to turn each individual sprinkler head on or off independently of each other.”
 |
Photo: Ray Frank |
| A healthy, green lawn in Aurora, CO |
When operators understand the specific set of conditions that each sprinkler head represents or covers, the potential exists for the system to automatically control each of those heads based on the conditions that that head serves.
Each of these soil types will accept and store amounts of water differently; a coarse, sandy-textured soil on a south-facing slope would be watered far differently than a fine-textured soil in a flat area, for example. “The various sensing technologies give us the ability to measure those conditions,” says Cline. “The goal then is to develop irrigation control systems that can understand those conditions. The potential for collecting this type of data and loading it into an irrigation control system and letting the system decide what heads need to run is a real possibility.”
Toro’s irrigation division has an agricultural products group, which manufactures subsurface irrigation for specialty crops such as fruits and other orchard crops. New Mexico State University scientist Bernd Leinauer specializes in subsurface irrigation for turf grass and is experimenting with the use of subsurface drip irrigation for putting greens and athletic fields.
“If you are spraying a stream of water onto a surface through the air, depending on the weather conditions, you are losing a substantial percentage of your water,” says Cline. “Subsurface irrigation is a highly efficient way to minimize your evaporation losses.”
Working on Water Efficiency Through Plant Genetics
Carmen Magro has worked both as a golf course superintendent and as director of Penn State’s Golf Course Turfgrass Management Program. His research at the graduate level now involves working with new varieties of grasses and further development for heat, drought, and salt tolerance involved with species used for sports and golf applications as well as the necessary management techniques needed for optimal performance.
“I just returned from the Hawaiian Islands several days ago with varieties of grasses, particularly creeping bentgrass, to study the tolerance of that species for that climate,” says Magro. “That area uses a great deal of reclaimed water, and their high salinity level means we must study salt tolerance in addition to heat and drought tolerance for their climate. We planted several sites with 24 different varieties, some of which are not yet on the market.”
Out in the field, Magro and his group are always on the lookout for unique-looking species of grass. When these grasses are brought back they are planted in nurseries with up to several thousand plants all spaced apart, within a couple feet of each other. The researchers allow those to grow out, produce seed, and cross-pollinate.
“We then take that seed, plant it, and look for key characteristics,” says Magro. “Some of the hottest characteristics today that we are looking for are drought tolerance and disease tolerance. If we can further develop grasses that are more tolerant in those areas we can reduce both our water and fungicide inputs to maintain these grasses.”
But the time between finding a grass in the field and producing a new grass can be anywhere from five to 10 years. This is the way things work with grass species most of the time. Kentucky bluegrass is one exception, as this species’ reproduction is supplemented by a process called apomixes where a plant can produce seed without pollination from a male parent.
“The golf course grasses are where we’ve made the most advances in such a relatively short period of time,” says Magro. “Although we have seen improvements in home lawn grasses, there is still much more to accomplish. In the cool-season environment, Kentucky bluegrass is the species of choice due to its lush green color and carpet-like feel as well as its traffic tolerance. However, this grass desires direct sunlight and regular irrigation applications, so we certainly have some work to do to further this species.
“The various fescue grasses, while they’re not as ‘traffic’-tolerant as the bluegrasses, are extremely heat tolerant and you don’t have to water them nearly as often as other species. Use of that species gives you what most people would refer to as a ‘naturalized’ lawn. Though we’ve made some advances in lawn grasses, the most dramatic developments have been in golf course and sports turf.”
Over the last four decades tremendous advancements have been made. In the mid-1990s the Penn A and G Series grasses were released to the world; these two grasses are much more heat and stress tolerant, and when left without water for even seven to 10 days, golf courses find these grasses do well. Their root systems plunge 7 to 8 or more inches in depth when grown in desired media and under a strict maintenance regime. They also provide the best putting surfaces that pros prefer to play on, according to Magro.
The water requirements typically described for a mixed stand bentgrass/Poa annua green is generally double that of the new bentgrasses, explains Magro. Poa annua, meaning annual bluegrass, is a highly invasive species found on every continent in the world. Despite its pervasiveness, the species is still rather heat, drought, and disease intolerant. Dr. David Huff, Penn State geneticist and advisor to Magro, has worked over the past decade in identifying segregates of Poa annua from around the world that show a great potential for a future grass that is more desirable than many current varieties in the industry today.
“It is especially adept at taking over any weak areas of lawns or golf courses. Any golf course or lawn containing a combination of this species with others will have a water requirement nearly double that of the new generation bent grasses,” says Magro. “That represents an incredible 50% reduction in water usage.
“But if you do cut back on your water, and if 50% of your grass population is Poa annua, it’s not going to look very good. These newly developed grasses, however, are not only more drought tolerant, but are also very competitive at keeping that invasive species out; one of its characteristics is strong lateral growth, and this helps in competition against invasive plants as well.”
Before World War II there were a bunch of bentgrasses growing in southern Germany. These were called the “South German Bents.” When the war started that seed pipeline to the US stopped, but much of the seed was already planted at the location of the current Pentagon, then one of the first land-grant research facilities.
When construction started on the Pentagon, that seed had to be transplanted somewhere. It came to Penn State University, the first Land Grant University in the country. The seeds eventually yielded “Penncross creeping bentgrass,” the first synthetically bred creeping bentgrass in the world, produced at Penn State in the 1950s.
“That grass is still found on 80% of the golf courses in the world that contain bentgrass,” says Magro. “From there the breeding efforts just continued. We’ve pulled segregates out of those Penncross greens that looked unique and developed the next generation and the next—and so on; the grasses of today are much stronger than the grasses of yesterday. They tolerate more heat and stress, and they also grow much more densely. They can also be mowed at extremely low heights of cut yet still produce a tremendous root system. They don’t grow as thinly as past grasses that would allow many more weeds and invasives to promulgate in their midst.”
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Magro maintains that managing a turf grass system optimally will naturally produce microbial activity. “Microbes coupled with sound cultural practices such as aeration cause a reaction to occur in a plant system in which roots will release a hormone,” says Magro. “When it gets released, they grow even denser roots. While there are a lot of products on the market that may claim to force this hormone production, unfortunately, we have not been able to match what nature does under optimum conditions when it comes to plant physiological activity.”
He feels there are many natural phenomena that occur between the natural microbial activity and what goes on in the plant. “Researchers still don’t understand all of this activity,” says Magro. “But we’re working on it.”
Author's Bio: Peter Hildebrandt specializes in science and engineering topics.
September-October 2006
Getting to the Roots of Water Efficiency
Though we drink over one billion glasses of tap water each day, AWWA reports a large chunk of our household water budget goes to outdoor uses.
The more than 55,000 community water systems in the United States process nearly 34 billion gallons of water per day according to the American Water Works Association (AWWA). Installed water-saving features typically come to mind when we think of conservation. The AWWA estimates that 5.4 billion gallons per day could result from such water-conserving measures as updating plumbing systems or installing low-volume toilets. Another way to conserve is by acting on that large outdoor usage chunk of our water budgets. Such conservation savings may be as close as the plant roots in the ground outside our back door. Throughout the country, researchers are finding ways to conserve water through soil development, equipment, and plant genetics.
Water Efficiency Through Turf Grass Science
For Peter Landschoot, professor of turf grass science at Penn State University, some of the advances that are being made and will be made in the future include the use of grasses that don’t require as much water. This is more of a critical issue in the western US where there is limited water and a greater need for some turf grasses due to high evapotranspiration. “A considerable amount of research and development is going into not only drought-tolerant turf grasses but also salt tolerance in order that saltier water, which is not good for much of anything else, can be used as reclaimed water,” says Landschoot.
As he points out, however, grass species considerations are something of a tough sell in the turf grass industry as species choice is not yet regulated. When people choose a particular species, they usually do it based on past history, what performs well in a particular area, and what the characteristics are of that species. “Though the decision is not usually made based strictly on water-use requirements, we are starting to see some changes,” says Landschoot. “We are seeing some use of tall fescue—a deep-rooted species able to take advantage of water deeper in the soil—not only in the West, but also in the eastern US. Also, some warm-season grasses are being looked at and selected now more for their drought tolerance than before.”
Landschoot says more efficient watering equipment is being studied and used now. There’s been some interest in the research community in subsurface irrigation of turf grasses. “That was something never considered until very recently—the thinking being you’ll bring too many salts to the surface. Preliminary research results in New Mexico show that this might be an efficient delivery system for watering.” Subsurface irrigation is similar to a drip system, but the water instead rises due to capillary action into the soil. The main points to remember when it comes to water management with turf grass, according to Landschoot, are not overwatering when you do water and only watering when you absolutely have to.
“As you speak to those in the golf and sports turf industry, you find that most look at this as an art, not a science,” says Landschoot. “It doesn’t always work out to be ideal as sometimes the time allotted for watering is not the best time of day either because of sports usage or because it’s not the best time for the plant to be receiving water.
“If you talk to an experienced turf grass specialist, despite what the public may think, the last thing we want to do is overwater; it creates drainage problems, root systems don’t receive enough oxygen, and it even favors certain types of pests, such as weed and disease species.”
Watering at night may sometimes do those things too. A growing concern is that we still are using too much water in this industry. “Some of the best ways that significant improvements will be made, aside from soil development, is through equipment and through the genetics of the plant. Many efforts are under way now to go in that direction.”
|
Magro choosing unique bentgrass segregate in
Hawaii |
Soil Development
Rick Allen, owner of BioLynceus LLC, a biological solutions company in Lyons, CO, believes soil development is the key to turf grass water conservation. “Our philosophy during the 12 years we’ve worked on soils has been that ‘people need to farm the soil and not the plant,’” says Allen. “If you have healthy soils, you’ll have healthy plants. Healthy soils are not heavily compacted, contain plenty of soil microbiology, have sufficient amounts of organic matter for the plants to access, and are able to hold both water and nutrients. Once all of those things are in balance you can cut back on your water simply because the water is more readily available to the plant.”
All plants are dependent on microbiology to stay alive. By stimulating the soil microbiology, more nutrients are made available to the plant; plants therefore access water better and also develop stronger and healthier root zones.
In BioLynceus’ early days, the development of healthier grass was always a primary goal. A parallel benefit became the development of healthier root systems in plants. In the course of its work in this area, the company also discovered a residual benefit: Not as much water had to be used to maintain healthy grass or plants, which resulted in more green in its customers’ pockets.
“We normally recommend when people start using our flagship product, which is a humic acid–fulvic acid blend, that they in turn cut back on their water usage by anywhere from 10% to 25% during the first year,” says Allen. “Our product is actually a soil amendment that helps alter the soil, increasing the amount of flocculation occurring.”
Flocculation, or the process of forming lumps in soils, increases the amount of water penetration, allowing water to be in contact with the root of the plant longer. The plant in turn can use water more efficiently.
“We are adding a carbon-based, liquid material that is easily incorporated and high in organic matter and live microbials that helps stimulate the soil microbiology to make it more active and effective,” says Allen. “If you don’t have healthy soils, basically what happens is the plant doesn’t develop a strong root zone. Therefore, it is also less heat tolerant; in order to keep the plant from stressing in high temperatures, more water must be added.
“What most of us in this country do is end up creating a catch-22 situation. We keep adding more water, which in turn doesn’t tell the plant that it needs to drive a root zone deeper because everything is at the top. When things get hot, plants cannot stand the stress of the lack of water. What do we do? We add more water.”
Typically, unhealthy soils are heavily compacted, contain chemical residues, and often are high in sodium levels. Problems may be further compounded by stresses from extremes in the climate in which the soil is located, like drought.
Another client, Rodney Myers, manager of Montana’s Fox Ridge Golf Course, has used Allen’s product for one year. He first used it on nine of the greens at his course and sprays the product directly on the turf. “It has softened up the greens as well as reduced the water consumption,” says Myers. “I’ve only used it for one year so far, but I am definitely planning on using it in the coming year. I have a bunch that I plan on using on the fairways too.”
|
| Penn State University creeping bentgrass breeding nursery plot |
Ron Smith, grounds manager (now retired), for a Longmont school district, 30 miles north of Denver, used BioLynceus’ products for the larger schools in Boulder County and found the product helped the root growth, making the roots descend a lot farther. At one of the schools he did some core samples and found the roots had gone down about 6 inches plus. Two blocks from that location was an elementary school that was not using the product. “We took a sample there, and our root system only went down an inch and a half, at best. It was clearly working for us.” Smith used the product for a couple of years before he retired, and the school district is still using the product.
New Technologies in Equipment
Van Cline, Ph.D., a turf research manager and agronomistwith the Toro Co., does much new work in the area of site assessment. Work is being done with a variety of sensing equipment, mostly within the context of golf courses. “The idea is that there is so much variability in agronomic conditions on a golf course that if you really want to apply water efficiently you must know where you need to apply water and where you don’t,” says Cline.
Irrigation systems today are generally scheduled to run on certain days for “x” amount of minutes with every head watering during the irrigation cycle, according to Cline. “Because they tend to water according to dry spots, you have areas that are overwatered much of the time. Unless you understand the critical conditions, such as those of soil and topography and how they relate to how irrigation systems are laid out, you really cannot do an efficient job of watering; it’s not a thing to do by the seat of your pants.”
For this reason, Cline is working on ways to measure and map important site conditions using sensors and geographic information systems (GIS). This is basically mapping software allowing the collection of a certain type of data, such as soil moisture over a large area. Position data then can be collected from each data point using a global positioning system. The software takes the data with location points and maps it spatially.
“You can literally look at a map of a golf course fairway, sports field, or whatever it is you’ve mapped and see the distribution of moisture or soil compaction, as that has an effect on the way soils accept water,” says Cline. “Toro’s Center for Advanced Turf Technology has been working on all these related issues since about 2001.”
For the last several years Cline’s group has been intensively mapping five golf courses and two sports field complexes in the Twin Cities area. In the summer of 2006 similar work was started on two golf courses in Florida, one in southern California, and one in central Iowa. “We have a pretty intensive test going on this summer,” says Cline. “Our intent was to get beyond the conditions we’re used to here in Minnesota and to look at a number of other areas.
“The really innovative part of things today is that state-of-the-art irrigation control systems are map-based systems; in other words the software is able to basically read maps. The idea of using GIS to map site or soil conditions and relief or topographic conditions and load that map-based information into an irrigation control system gives you the ability to have the control system make decisions for you based on where water’s needed and where it’s not. Based on site conditions it is now possible to turn each individual sprinkler head on or off independently of each other.”
|
Photo: Ray Frank |
| A healthy, green lawn in Aurora, CO |
When operators understand the specific set of conditions that each sprinkler head represents or covers, the potential exists for the system to automatically control each of those heads based on the conditions that that head serves.
Each of these soil types will accept and store amounts of water differently; a coarse, sandy-textured soil on a south-facing slope would be watered far differently than a fine-textured soil in a flat area, for example. “The various sensing technologies give us the ability to measure those conditions,” says Cline. “The goal then is to develop irrigation control systems that can understand those conditions. The potential for collecting this type of data and loading it into an irrigation control system and letting the system decide what heads need to run is a real possibility.”
Toro’s irrigation division has an agricultural products group, which manufactures subsurface irrigation for specialty crops such as fruits and other orchard crops. New Mexico State University scientist Bernd Leinauer specializes in subsurface irrigation for turf grass and is experimenting with the use of subsurface drip irrigation for putting greens and athletic fields.
“If you are spraying a stream of water onto a surface through the air, depending on the weather conditions, you are losing a substantial percentage of your water,” says Cline. “Subsurface irrigation is a highly efficient way to minimize your evaporation losses.”
Working on Water Efficiency Through Plant Genetics
Carmen Magro has worked both as a golf course superintendent and as director of Penn State’s Golf Course Turfgrass Management Program. His research at the graduate level now involves working with new varieties of grasses and further development for heat, drought, and salt tolerance involved with species used for sports and golf applications as well as the necessary management techniques needed for optimal performance.
“I just returned from the Hawaiian Islands several days ago with varieties of grasses, particularly creeping bentgrass, to study the tolerance of that species for that climate,” says Magro. “That area uses a great deal of reclaimed water, and their high salinity level means we must study salt tolerance in addition to heat and drought tolerance for their climate. We planted several sites with 24 different varieties, some of which are not yet on the market.”
Out in the field, Magro and his group are always on the lookout for unique-looking species of grass. When these grasses are brought back they are planted in nurseries with up to several thousand plants all spaced apart, within a couple feet of each other. The researchers allow those to grow out, produce seed, and cross-pollinate.
“We then take that seed, plant it, and look for key characteristics,” says Magro. “Some of the hottest characteristics today that we are looking for are drought tolerance and disease tolerance. If we can further develop grasses that are more tolerant in those areas we can reduce both our water and fungicide inputs to maintain these grasses.”
But the time between finding a grass in the field and producing a new grass can be anywhere from five to 10 years. This is the way things work with grass species most of the time. Kentucky bluegrass is one exception, as this species’ reproduction is supplemented by a process called apomixes where a plant can produce seed without pollination from a male parent.
“The golf course grasses are where we’ve made the most advances in such a relatively short period of time,” says Magro. “Although we have seen improvements in home lawn grasses, there is still much more to accomplish. In the cool-season environment, Kentucky bluegrass is the species of choice due to its lush green color and carpet-like feel as well as its traffic tolerance. However, this grass desires direct sunlight and regular irrigation applications, so we certainly have some work to do to further this species.
“The various fescue grasses, while they’re not as ‘traffic’-tolerant as the bluegrasses, are extremely heat tolerant and you don’t have to water them nearly as often as other species. Use of that species gives you what most people would refer to as a ‘naturalized’ lawn. Though we’ve made some advances in lawn grasses, the most dramatic developments have been in golf course and sports turf.”
Over the last four decades tremendous advancements have been made. In the mid-1990s the Penn A and G Series grasses were released to the world; these two grasses are much more heat and stress tolerant, and when left without water for even seven to 10 days, golf courses find these grasses do well. Their root systems plunge 7 to 8 or more inches in depth when grown in desired media and under a strict maintenance regime. They also provide the best putting surfaces that pros prefer to play on, according to Magro.
The water requirements typically described for a mixed stand bentgrass/Poa annua green is generally double that of the new bentgrasses, explains Magro. Poa annua, meaning annual bluegrass, is a highly invasive species found on every continent in the world. Despite its pervasiveness, the species is still rather heat, drought, and disease intolerant. Dr. David Huff, Penn State geneticist and advisor to Magro, has worked over the past decade in identifying segregates of Poa annua from around the world that show a great potential for a future grass that is more desirable than many current varieties in the industry today.
“It is especially adept at taking over any weak areas of lawns or golf courses. Any golf course or lawn containing a combination of this species with others will have a water requirement nearly double that of the new generation bent grasses,” says Magro. “That represents an incredible 50% reduction in water usage.
“But if you do cut back on your water, and if 50% of your grass population is Poa annua, it’s not going to look very good. These newly developed grasses, however, are not only more drought tolerant, but are also very competitive at keeping that invasive species out; one of its characteristics is strong lateral growth, and this helps in competition against invasive plants as well.”
Before World War II there were a bunch of bentgrasses growing in southern Germany. These were called the “South German Bents.” When the war started that seed pipeline to the US stopped, but much of the seed was already planted at the location of the current Pentagon, then one of the first land-grant research facilities.
When construction started on the Pentagon, that seed had to be transplanted somewhere. It came to Penn State University, the first Land Grant University in the country. The seeds eventually yielded “Penncross creeping bentgrass,” the first synthetically bred creeping bentgrass in the world, produced at Penn State in the 1950s.
“That grass is still found on 80% of the golf courses in the world that contain bentgrass,” says Magro. “From there the breeding efforts just continued. We’ve pulled segregates out of those Penncross greens that looked unique and developed the next generation and the next—and so on; the grasses of today are much stronger than the grasses of yesterday. They tolerate more heat and stress, and they also grow much more densely. They can also be mowed at extremely low heights of cut yet still produce a tremendous root system. They don’t grow as thinly as past grasses that would allow many more weeds and invasives to promulgate in their midst.”
Magro maintains that managing a turf grass system optimally will naturally produce microbial activity. “Microbes coupled with sound cultural practices such as aeration cause a reaction to occur in a plant system in which roots will release a hormone,” says Magro. “When it gets released, they grow even denser roots. While there are a lot of products on the market that may claim to force this hormone production, unfortunately, we have not been able to match what nature does under optimum conditions when it comes to plant physiological activity.”
He feels there are many natural phenomena that occur between the natural microbial activity and what goes on in the plant. “Researchers still don’t understand all of this activity,” says Magro. “But we’re working on it.”