His Whole World Is Grass
Lawn guru Reed Funk speaks to the tough little cultivar inside us all
Prof. Reed Funk is in search of the perfect blade of grass. It must defy drought, flood and neglect, and vanquish diseases, pests and weeds. It should be slender, thrusting upward like a soldier in an invincible army, and of stubborn stock and good lineage, returning year after year, undiminished in vigor.
Funk is a soft-spoken, self-effacing botanist who was born on a Utah dairy farm, teaches at Rutgers University and is known fondly among his peers as "The Great Reed." He is also the guru of what may well be the nation's largest cult: the 54 million Americans who worship that monochromatic expanse of green known as the lawn, groaning behind their mowers in summer and getting down on their knees to patch and reseed in fall.
The role of lawn guru is no trifling assignment. Home lawns cover about 23 million acres across the country. If you include roadsides and greenswards kept trimmed by businesses and educational institutions, U.S. turf grass spreads over nearly 50 million acres, a land area equal to about half the nation's reserve of wetlands. And lawns are big business: In 1994--the most recent year for which statistics are available--the lawn industry raked in $8.4 billion, with items ranging from a $3,000 lawn tractor to a $10 hand tool called the dethatcher, from rolls of sod at $1 per square foot to 10-pound bags of herbicides at $15 each. For homeowners and golf course managers, the yearly tribute to grass seeds alone is $800 million, and nearly every year all sectors of the lawn industry set new sales records.
Turf king. Funk, however, is more than up to the task. His whole world is grass. Except for the days before he received his Ph.D., when he dabbled in animal husbandry and corn improvement, he has dedicated most of his 67 years to one goal: upgrading the best grass plants on the market. The botanist takes no holidays; he has no hobbies. He says, "When one has such a wonderful specialty as grass, why do anything else?" And single-mindedness has brought him fame--at least in certain, grass-appreciative circles. Kevin Morris, head of the National Turfgrass Evaluation Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, says, "As a hybridizer, Funk is responsible for developing up to 80 percent of the grasses making up our lawns today." Jim Brooks, director of the Lawn Institute, the industry's research arm, is also full of praise. "Dr. Funk is the father of turf research," Brooks says. "No one can touch him."
When Funk travels, he haunts Civil War cemeteries, golf courses and public parks, searching for clumps of grass that have managed to thrive despite thousands of stomping feet, competition from rampant weeds and lack of irrigation. He recalls with particular affection an unusually vigorous clump he dug up 34 years ago in New York's Central Park that eventually sired the cultivar Manhattan--still one of the world's most widely used perennial ryegrasses. (A descendant, Manhattan II, ranks among this year's top recommendations by the Lawn Institute's review board.)
Another memorable find took place during one of Funk's strolls in the early 1960s around Fort McHenry in Baltimore, where he stumbled upon several grass plants that had spread as irrepressibly as a weed. By 1971, the plants he had gathered begat the celebrated cultivar Banner, named after the star-spangled banner that first fluttered atop that fort.
A worthy seed. Funk lugs promising clumps home to New Jersey, where he and his staff at Rutgers' crop science department cross-pollinate their seeds with those of top-rated grasses, select the best of the plants that sprout and cross them repeatedly with their rivals.
It takes at least five years to select a cultivar that can be relied upon to outshine the others. You can keep crossing a good plant indefinitely, Funk explains. But at one point, the breeder must stop, pick the best cultivar, name it, send out its seeds to experimental plots around the country and hope the plant proves worthy. Each cultivar offers its own set of stable, uniform characteristics, and its name and botanical properties may be patented like any invention. The breeder, in this case Rutgers University, is entitled to a royalty of as much as 5 percent on every pound of the cultivar's seed sold.
Funk likes to take visitors on a pilgrimage to his 50,000 plots, each 3 feet wide by 5 feet long, subdividing some 25 acres on three farms near New Brunswick, N.J. Each plot is dedicated to one particular cross, and a computer tracks the progress of each. When a plot shows signs of succumbing to any of the numerous pests, rusts and fungi that attack lawn grasses, it is eliminated. If the grass clumps are not uniformly vigorous or their color has turned pale, out they go. "We throw out 99 percent of our crosses," Funk says. "When we select a cultivar, it is one plant out of millions, maybe a billion." The final test of fitness is a barefoot walk over the plot--the method the botanist is convinced is the best for discovering the truth about "density and bounce."
As Funk walks through the plots, the glories of grass plants, past and future, drift through his mind. At a glance, he identifies one plot as "populated by the old Kentucky 31 before we started working on it"--a reference to the erstwhile standard-bearer among tall fescue, introduced in 1943 and still used in breeding. Another contains a bentgrass imported from the Carpathian Mountains, new in this country, that "shows great promise," as a superior cultivar whose descendants will yield a springier, tougher and more pest-resistant lawn. Funk mentions Poland as offering a treasure-trove of "hundreds of bluegrasses unknown to us," which will soon be bred to the best cultivars in the United States. He is rueful about having paid little attention to bentgrasses, a genus genetically distant from bluegrasses and ryegrasses. So far, gene splicing has not come up with any breakthrough transgenic cultivar to conquer the market.
Critics deride the lawn as an English affectation unsuited for most American climates and soils. Many gardeners are convinced that in most parts of the country, there is no such thing as a perfect lawn, and that people should not wage chemical warfare in an attempt to create one. Environmentalists, too, condemn the grass plant as a guzzler of water (10,000 gallons a year for the average suburban lawn) and chemicals (up to 70 million pounds a year nationwide), which find their way into the water supply. Indeed, the humble grass seed qualifies as an emblem for relentless progress--albeit at a huge cost. A book published last year, The Wild Lawn Handbook by Stevie Daniels, suggests alternatives such as heather and sedum, moss in a shady area and a wildflower patch for a sunny spot.
Funk does not bother to fight back. "We are working on cultivars that will require less water and fewer chemicals," he says mildly. He repeats the lawn industry's mantra: "Turf prevents erosion and beautifies our lives." When pressed further, he cites the fact that each year's top offerings of new grass cultivars--varieties with names like Monarch and Monopoly, Virtue and Touchdown--are superior to those of previous years. He cannot imagine a world without grass: The idea leaves him speechless. He likes to quote the 19th-century writer J.J. Ingalls: "Grass is the forgiveness of nature. ... Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal."
Still, the search for perfection is a risky business. Robert Peterson, a veteran of the seed business in Oregon's Willamette Valley, where most of the nation's grass seeds are harvested, opines--only partly in jest--that "the breeder who comes up with the perfect cultivar should be shot and the plant destroyed." Funk is philosophical. "It won't come to that," he chuckles. "New pests and new races of old pests continue to develop. None of us will ever receive credit for the perfect grass cultivar. Looking for it is a never-ending search that guarantees job security for us turf-grass breeders. Forever."
The embattled blade of grass Fungi and rusts are major enemies of grass plants. But insects and animals snack on them, to. While most of the pests pictured here chew on the stem and the blades, moles and gophers chomp away at the roots.
[Illustration labels]: Gopher; Mole; Grasshopper; Slug; Billbug; Grass webworm (moth state); Cutworm (larva state); June beetle; European chafer
This story appears in the October 28, 1996 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.