College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
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Surf to Turf
Turfgrass scientists are always looking for ways to conserve natural resources while also keeping grass alive under the greatest of stresses. Advances in golf-ball and golf-equipment technology have resulted in courses that play shorter and sometimes easier than ever before.
To partially offset the ease of play, course superintendents are using advances in turfgrass breeding and agronomics to increase putting green speeds. New varieties of creeping bent grass are so dense and fine that they are now being mowed at less than three millimeters. And if that isn’t enough, the water is turned off during tournaments, resulting in greens that putt fast, but experience significant thinning or death due to drought and heat stress.
Researchers Xunzhong Zhang and Erik Ervin in the Department of Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences studied the effect of drought stress on three popular varieties of creeping bent grass for putting greens. They found that in the early stages of drought stress,
plants that maintain a higher level of a certain hormoneclass,
cytokinins, and the antioxidant vitamin E could maintain greater leaf color and photosynthetic activity, thereby resisting drought. They also found that droughtstressed plants could not sustain these higher levels of cytokinins and vitamin E by themselves.
Zhang and Ervin conducted earlier research with liquid spray applications of two forms of processed organic matter, a seaweed extract and humic acid extract (from leonardite coal), and found that drought resistance was improved by increasing leaf contents of vitamin E and other antioxidants.
They hypothesized that such increases may be due to the hormone content of these two organic products. Their resulting research shows the strong correlation between the cytokinin in supplement products and increased levels of cytokinins in the grass leaves. Seaweed and humic acid extracts do contain significant levels of cytokinins that when applied prior to drought, did function to increase leaftissue cytokinin levels and increase drought resistance. Turf that received the supplement treatments had higher levels of
cytokinins, increasing the plants’ efficiency of photosynthesis making the plants more stress tolerant.
According to Ervin, these organic supplements may be a good turf management strategy to help maintain turf performance throughout the summer months while conserving water.
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