The Grass Expert: James T. Snow

How have golf-course grasses changed over time? How are they changing now?
Well, 100 years ago, golf was all in the North. There was almost nothing in the South. Then Dr. Glenn Burton in Georgia developed the first really good Bermuda grasses for fairways and roughs and even greens, in the '50s. When I joined the USGA in 1976, everyone was talking about Penncross. It was the only bent grass anyone was using. But by 1980 there were new grasses that were better than Penncross. So every decade has its innovations. Today there are a lot of new strains and new species that are being used. Seashore paspalum is making a huge change. It has extreme salt tolerance, so you can irrigate it with sea water. It looks nice and it plays very well, so it's really catching on in the Southeast, primarily, and the Caribbean islands and Mexico -- anyplace that's coastal where it doesn't ever get too cold.

There's a huge number of new, improved grasses, but you really need to spend money to have good results. Through our research program we've developed cold-tolerant Bermuda grasses, and you can use them all the way up into Kansas and Iowa, which is remarkable. That saves 50 percent of the water that you would otherwise have to use in those areas, and you hardly have to use any pesticides. That's pretty good. When the time comes, when water truly becomes a major issue -- and it is in some parts of the country already -- that's when we'll switch to these new grasses. There are constant incremental improvements. Salt tolerance, heat tolerance, cold tolerance, disease, insect tolerance -- they're working on these all the time. They're producing a lot of great new grass products. And there are new turfgrass diseases every single year. You've got to keep on it or you'll fall behind, and if you fall behind you'll have a lot of dead grass.

Mostly fungal diseases?
Yeah. And the other thing is, as soon as you get an improvement, golfers demand more. They want faster, more uniform, darker green. It never ends. Courses used to mow at a quarter of an inch; now we're down to a tenth of inch. Every time you take it down, the poor grass gets weaker and weaker and weaker, and more susceptible to disease -- probably a lot of the new diseases have come about because of that. It's like people -- you wear yourself out, and that's when you get sick.

So the more technology advances, the more people's demands advance, and the more diseases advance. It becomes like a crazy arms race.
It does, that's right.

What about low-mow grass -- wouldn't it be a benefit not to have to mow as often?
It's a farce. For a golf course, it's all about traffic. If you can't regenerate the leaves of the grass fast enough when people are playing, you're going to end up with no grass. With a home-lawn situation, if you don't have dogs and kids running all over the place, you could have a low-mow type of grass and not have to mow it as often. But -- here's the "but" -- if it gets diseased, the grass can't outgrow it, and the disease will kill it right down to the ground. So low-mow stuff doesn't work very well. Grass needs to grow.

How about the genetically engineered so-called "Roundup Ready" grasses, which haven't been approved -- could they help?
Roundup Ready grass could be very useful on a golf course. You would just have one application of Roundup and take out the annual bluegrass, crabgrass, clover; you could get rid of the Poa annua, and the bent grass would be unaffected. It would save a huge amount of pesticide use. And Roundup is a product that, once it dries on the leaf, is not going to go anywhere, and it degrades fairly quickly. It wouldn't solve everything, though. You're still going to have new diseases develop. It's like if you use the same antibiotic time after time, eventually it becomes worthless. But overall, if you look at the potential problems, they aren't there. There's a big potential benefit.

But the genetically modified grasses are hugely controversial. There have been cases of protestors doing damage to research facilities, and Scotts was recently ordered to pay a fine of $500,000 after some Roundup Ready grass escaped from a research facility in Oregon.
It's a political issue, not a scientific issue. From our perspective, it's like anything that's new: People are worried about it until they see it. It's just like when they came out with Roundup Ready corn. It was a huge thing; there was worldwide screaming and hollering. Well, people have been eating Roundup Ready crops now for decades, and there's no apparent issue with it. Not to say you shouldn't be careful, but if you look at the rationale with creeping bent grass, it's just not a threat to the environment. If it spreads, we already know that there are five other herbicides that can kill it. So what's the problem?

Will it be approved?
It's going to take a long time.