Hanna Receives Coveted TPI Membership Award

Internationally renowned turfgrass breeder Dr. Wayne Hanna was awarded the prestigious Turfgrass Producers International Honorary Member Award at the 2006 TPI Midwinter Conference held in Savannah, Ga., last month.

Hanna, famous for his breeding work throughout a 30-year career with the United Stated Department of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS), is now retired from ARS, but continues to work full-time as a professor and turfgrass breeder with the University of Georgia.

The TPI Foundation’s Honorary Member Award is presented to individuals who have improved the turfgrass industry in a significant way. It is the highest honor the organization can bestow. Hanna joins the ranks of only 23 recipients over the last 33 years. Ben Copeland, Sr., a past president of TPI who has known him for 32 years, introduced Hanna and praised his “tremendous contribution to the turfgrass industry throughout his career,” noting that “he has been responsible for the breeding and release of TifSport and TifEagle Bermudagrass and TifBlair Centipedegrass, which are all the leading warm season turfgrasses.”

Hanna’s achievements are well known to the industry. His TifSport Bermudagrass, which he released in 1996, has become the turfgrass of choice for golf course fairways, tees and roughs. As Hanna recalls, “My main goal was to develop a new variety that was superior to Tifway 419. We wanted a grass with superior color, cold-hardiness and disease resistance. We concentrated on turf density, turf strength and turf quality, and we wanted TifSport to be able to tolerate frequent lower mowing heights.”

You can see TifSport in action at venues as varied as the Redskin’s FedEx Field in Landover Md., the Georgia Governor’s Mansion, and the lush fairways of the Sunset Course at Mirasola Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., home of this year’s Honda Classic.

TifEagle Bermudagrass, which Hanna released in the spring of 1998, is the third generation of bermudagrass varieties developed exclusively for golf greens at the Coastal Plains Experiment Station in Tifton, Ga. While Tifdwarf became the warm-season standard for putting greens during the last three decades of the 20th century, TifEagle was bred to meet the challenges faced by today’s golf superintendents and the expectations of a new generation of golfers. It can tolerate the intense management program necessary to deliver the putting speed and consistency even club players have come to expect. TifEagle recovers quickly from mechanical injury, has excellent color, and is extremely cold hardy, drought tolerant and disease resistant.

Centipede is a slow-growing, medium-to-coarse warm-season grass that produces a very dense, attractive, weed-free turf. It’s also more shade tolerant than bermudagrass, and because it produces only surface runners, is more easily controlled around flowerbeds, walkways, airport runways and highway medians. Hanna bred TifBlair Centipede to overcome these problems. As research from Georgia to Oklahoma has shown, TifBlair is exceptionally cold tolerant, has impressive fall color retention, and develops a deep root system even in poor growing conditions. TifBlair is also the one and only certified centipede.

Hanna has another legacy, perhaps just as important as his meticulous breeding work. From the beginning, he has insisted that stringent oversight protocols be established for all of his new grasses. TifSport, TifEagle and TifBlair are patented varieties that can only be sold as certified sod, sprigs or seed (TifBlair), and only by licensed sod producers who are required to become members of carefully monitored growers associations. In short, Hanna has made sure his grasses are grown, inspected and sold under a rigorous set of rules and guidelines designed to promote ongoing purity and uniformity. This concern for the maintenance of varietal purity was a major factor leading to the development of the International Turfgrass Genetic Assurance Program (ITGAP), the first-of-its-kind effort to maintain the integrity of certified varieties in international turfgrass markets.

Hanna is currently working diligently on a new shade-tolerant bermudagrass, which he hopes to release in 2007.