Pennsylvania Turfgrass – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com
The Turf Zone: Welcome to The Turf Zone. This episode begins our series on the USDA-funded ResistPoa Project. In this, our first episode, we’re talking to researcher Jay McCurdy, Associate Professor at Mississippi State University. How are you Jay?
Jay McCurdy: I’m doing well, thanks for having me.
TTZ: Thanks so much for joining us. I want to give a little intro about what we’re doing here and why. You are partnering with The Turf Zone and all of our publications to help share some information on the ResistPoa Project. Since you are tasked with extension and outreach, we’re kicking off the series with you and in the coming days we’ll also hear from other researchers that are part of the project. Start off by telling me why it’s so important that this information gets out to turf managers at this time?
JM: Well, the hope is that we’re doing this in a timely fashion and sharing results so that stakeholders can make informed decisions about how they choose to control annual bluegrass this fall – it’s a fall emerging cool season plant. Within our listening range or readership range, that’s going to be sometime starting in September when practitioners are making applications of pre emergence herbicides and then after that, post emergence herbicides, and then maybe implementing cultural practices now that actually also influence the success or failure of some of those applications so I think that’s why we’re choosing to do that now. Hopefully our listeners and readership will take heed of some of the things we discuss.
TTZ: For the average turfgrass manager out there, what has been their experience with poa annua?
JM: Reports to us as a group of university scientists usually lead to the conclusion that annual bluegrass is probably the most troublesome weed in maintained turf and in general manmade landscapes in the United States. It probably is also one of the most most troublesome weeds in international markets as well. So what leads us into this conversation is, we want to try to change that and that’s going to be a very complicated, integrated approach, including herbicides, but also cultural practices and so on and so forth.
TTZ: What objectives are you specifically pursuing as part of the ResistPoa Project, and what other interests pertaining to annual bluegrass are you studying separately.
JM: So a little bit of background on the project, we proposed this project in 2017, and then again in 2018 and had very positive reviews in the first round, and then the second round got approved. We have about 5.6 million dollars in this project covering probably about, it’s not complete salaries, but it’s paying for some research being done by roughly 50 employees. I think there are 16 university scientists involved, there are at least 15 universities so it’s a major project across the United States. A number of different variables including cool season and warm season types of climates, various different industry segments including golf, lawn care, sod farms, sports fields. So on this project, these university scientists, myself included, have, at last count, nine different major objectives. Within each of those objectives, a good example would be understanding the seed life cycle and germination success of various different populations. Understanding the germination of those populations would be a sub-objective of one major objective looking at the germination and life cycle of the seed. So I’m actually on a couple of different objectives.
My major objective that I’m responsible for is the extension and outreach component of this project. Part of that has been building a website. That website is resistpoa.org it’s got a number of different things that we’re going to talk about today. Also, managing the Twitter account in conjunction with a few other folks, we maintain Twitter as a means of relaying inform...