Arkansas Turfgrass – Doug Karcher, Ph.D., Professor, University of Arkansas
There are a few things that turf enthusiasts can count on each spring, like fescue lawns looking brilliant in the landscape, large patch and spring dead spot showing up in wet or cold environments as our warm-season grasses green up, the need to tune up our mower engines and sharpen blades, and unfortunately, the publication of anti-turf articles in the popular press. Like clockwork this month, it was when I was changing the spark plug and sharpening my mower blades to keep up with my fast-growing fescue lawn that I noted lower than normal spring dead spot occurrence on the north-facing, low-lying bermudagrass areas across the street, and then received a text message from a friend outside of the turf industry with, “Your thoughts?” and a link to a CNN article. The article was titled, “Designing an end to a toxic American obsession: The Lawn” (published April 17, 2020). This article contended that lawns are a big waste of space and water that should be converted to food production and wild-flower areas. Each spring when reading these types of articles, I find it very frustrating that several unsubstantiated claims are made (citations or references rarely included), and as the same outrageous claims are repeated from year to year, no effort is made at offering a counterpoint from turf industry professionals. I first noticed this trend in May of 2014 when the New York Times published, “The Toxic Brew in our Yards”.  And, as of this writing, the New York Times has very recently recycled much of that story as, “America’s Killer Lawns”, which was published on May 18, 2020.
The two most common inflammatory implications from these articles are 1) that homeowners apply 10 times more pesticides per acre to their lawns compared to farmers and 2) that lawns require more irrigation than any other agricultural crop. The pesticide use claim seems to have originated from a U.S. Fish and Wildlife publication on protecting frogs, with no data or references included for substantiation. I’ve called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to get info on the basis of the claim but have only been able to leave messages and my calls have yet to be returned. I am not aware of any such claim being published in the peer-reviewed, fact-based literature. The water requirement claim is likely a misinterpretation of a journal paper published by Milesi et al. (2005) that assumed if 100% of the total area in the United States covered in turf (which they estimated to be 63,244 square miles) was irrigated with an inch of water per week throughout the season whenever minimum temperatures were above 40 degrees (late March to early November in Arkansas), only then would turfgrass be the single largest irrigated crop in the country. Unfortunately, that paper was interpreted as, “Residential lawns cover 2% of US land and require more irrigation than any agricultural crop grown in the country” in the latest CNN article. And this is why I have palm imprints on my forehead a few times each spring.
Our industry often gets an undeserved “black-eye” with regard to water usage, which has led some municipalities and even the EPA to encourage the removal of turf areas in lawns and replacement with other landscape plants in the name of water conservation. Obviously, that is not good for our industry and from a water-requirement standpoint, it simply does not make sense in a humid climate. We receive 40 to 60 inches of rain annually in Arkansas, which can easily sustain our turfgrass species with no additional irrigation because contrary to popular opinion, turfgrass species are by nature drought tolerant.
The turfgrass species we utilize in our lawns evolved naturally over many millennia in geographic regions around the globe where water was limiting, either due to limited rainfall, sandy soils, or shallow soils with low water-holding capacity. Essentially,