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| Science & Technology |
| Turf Warrior - genetically engineered lawn of the future |
| 2006-04-03 |
| Nearly 50,000 square miles of the continental US is covered by lawn, according to estimates by ecologists at NASA's Ames Research Center. Using satellite and aerial imagery, the team calculated that irrigated grass covers three times more land in the US than irrigated corn does. That makes turf the nation's most widespread irrigated crop. Lawn care and gardening is also the most popular outdoor leisure activity in the country, and the global industry supporting it generates an estimated $7 billion a year. ScottsMiracle-Gro accounts for more than a third of that - $2.4 billion in 2005. Numbers aside, though, that neatly trimmed front lawn is a Rockwellian feature of the American landscape. It's safe to say that no other nation commits even a fraction of the land, resources, chemicals, and water that the US does in pursuit of the perfect greensward. All that vegetation has some environmental benefit. According to the NASA group, lawns collectively absorb some 12 billion pounds of carbon each year - effectively cutting greenhouse gas emissions. And if that grass weren't there, much more soil would run off into storm drains, waterways, and ÂÂrivers, polluting reservoirs and hastening the erosion of hillsides and valuable farmland. But the great American lawn is not exactly eco-friendly. Lawn mowers cough pollution into the atmosphere, and pesticides and fertilizers trickle into waterways, harming wildlife in wetland and marine environments. Then there's the watering. Pick a rain-starved, water-scarce, growth-crazed state like Nevada or Arizona. All those new subdivisions have lawns, and all those homeÂÂowners are watering like crazy. A typical one-third-acre lawn receives 10,000 gallons of water a year; in dry places like Las Vegas and other areas of the Southwest, a lawn needs more than 100,000 gallons annually. This huge demand for water means more rivers dammed, more wildlife threatened, and more aquifers drained. It doesn't have to be that way. Over the past decade, biotechnology has revolutionized agriculture. In 2005, 13 percent of US farmland was planted with biotech crops - primarily corn, soybeans, and cotton - and biotech proponents happily enumerate the resulting environmental advantagesÂÂ. The Conservation Technology Information Center at Purdue University estimates that 1 billion tons of topsoil per year is prevented from becoming runoff because genetically modified crops allow farmers to reduce how much they plow to kill weeds. (Plowing accelerates the loss of topsoil.) Meanwhile, the amount of pesticide used on crops shrank by 34 percent from 2003 to 2004; that's 15.6 million pounds of chemicals not dousing fields, because biotech crops don't require as much herbicide. If biotechnology can do all that for farmers cultivating thousands of acres, surely it can do the same for busy suburbanites managing their yards. What if grass were engineered to require less water, fertilizer, and pesticide? What if it required fewer trimmings by toxin-spewing mowers? What if lawns were customizable? For Hagedorn, such bioÂÂtech turf is a no-brainer. "If we want to keep gardening attractive and relevant in the Internet age," he says, "we have to meet this need." In other words, GM grass is coming, and Hagedorn is hell-bent on being the first to sell it. |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #2 Nitrogen fixing would be my requirement. Only since the guy runs Scotts I don't see that angle mentioned. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2006-04-03 18:54 |
| #1 Hell, I'm all for it. Make it really green with no fertilizer, little water and fewer mowes and I'll plunk down thousands to get my yard re-soded. More time to BBQ and drink beer. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2006-04-03 18:17 |