Seeds Of Excellence: Seed Development

The process of developing a new turf seed variety for the marketplace is a long, and to the outsider, painful process.

Each year, university researchers and seed producers start out with great hope, testing literally tens of thousands of varieties, each with the potential to become the next rage for professional use in the lawn. Quickly, however, reality sets in. The researcher begins to stress the plants, testing for a plethora of negative environmental and manmade factors. Thousands succumb to the torture, leaving only a handful of survivors to rival varieties already on the market.

This selection process, while time consuming and difficult, ensures that high quality, durable and good looking turf will be available to the marketplace.

THE HUNT. One of the important ways that turf researchers create breakthroughs is by discovering a new turf plant, referred to as germplasm, to work with. Each germplasm represents a unique set of genetic material, allowing researchers to cross-pollinate it with existing varieties to produce turf with improved qualities.

When researchers look for “new” germplasm, they go on collection trips looking for turf with desirable characteristics, such as heat and drought tolerance and disease resistance.

Turf breeders travel as far as Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia and Asia searching for germplasm. They look for grass plants performing well on sites where they are not usually considered adapted.

“We usually take one or two collection trips each year,” noted Doug Brede, director of research with Jacklin Seed, Post Falls, Idaho. “I would say our collections account for about 5 percent to 10 percent of the germplasm we examine, but it’s an important percentage because it’s always new and unusual.”

William Meyer, director of turf breeding at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., said the department travels the globe extensively in search of new germplasm. “I spent two weeks in eastern Poland collecting bluegrasses, and we had a scientist in Argentina looking for new endophytes,” he said.

Some collection sites are more unusual than exotic. According to Mike Robinson, president, Seed Research of Oregon, Corvallis, older stands of turf commonly found in cemeteries and historic sites are the best for domestic turf collections.

“We’ve even gone to old Civil War battlefields behind fences where the grasses have been allowed to grow for decades,” said Robinson. “We’re interested in finding samples of turf that were originally brought over from Europe, and the main source of these varieties are very old areas of turf.”

Determining where to search for new varieties is based largely on where the species is thought to have originated, noted Brede. “We took a trip to Wales to look for bentgrass because many botanists believe that is where bentgrass originated.”

International samples usually require a native scientists grow the plants to seed, collect the seed and ship it to the turf breeder in the United States.

Samples collected domestically are easier to handle. They range from a 2-inch square piece of sod to individual turf plants, called tillers. These are packaged and shipped back to the research facilities.

PASSING THE TEST. The next step is the process of testing and selecting the turf varieties, which is both time consuming and extremely tedious. Each sample must be separated into individual grass plants, which are then grown individually. Each plant is observed for a variety of appearance and durability characteristics including color, growth habit, resistance to disease, texture and speed of establishment. Each step in the process is designed to eliminate under-performing varieties.

One of the most important considerations in the first stage of observation is the amount of seed the plant produces. Some of the most attractive varieties don’t produce enough seed to make growing it profitable for the farmer or the marketer. “Turf plants will vary widely in their seed production from many seedheads to none,” said Brede. “Many plants are discarded in the testing process due to poor seed production.”