Heads up on a New Grass - Is it a GMO ????

Just a heads up-
There's a new grass on the market and it sounds fishy:- they claim this grass has a 2” top with a 48” root? Sounds fishy to me cause nothing in nature like that can exist – the top growth is ALWAYS in proportion to the green top by 1 to 2 times the most. Is this a GMO??? And its going on lawns?

They want this weird grass in lawns where pets and children play? NOT!

The trouble is-it took years to get labels for GMO foods and a product like this isn’t food so who knows what it really is. And FYI- GMOs carry a wildcard gene that is not secured to a DNA molecule so it can jump from one organism to another. I have no intention of putting this in my lawn and am asking my neighbors to be aware of it.

With gas prices on the rise, it might sound like the ideal thing but there have been products out like no mowing grasses for years. Find one of those and the labels all say What They Are (hybrids-not GMOs).



cutting edge natural lawn technology grass seed short "no mowing"

Most likely not. You have to remember that most of the motivation for GMO is so that Monsanto can sell more Roundup. Would a new grass like this allow them to indenture more seed-buying slaves who are committed to ever increasing purchases of Roundup? No.

And you may want to do some more research on native prairie grasses and their root systems. There is plenty of soil profile research out there that shows that when bison graze the tall grass prairie down to 2" stubble, it regenerates from roots that go down several feet. Maybe this new grass falls into that category.

According to Carbon Sequestration in Plants, -by any cutting of the top green portion, the root system dies back to a proportional depth to be supported, which leaves carbon in the ground. It also leaves old root systems for moisture to wick downward, and later upward when the air is drier.

Plants like alfalfa "Nitrogen Sequestering" AKA, "fix nitrogen" by the same process-cut the top or harvest the top and you capture nitrogen in the soil. As with all plants, including the prairies, as tops were eaten or trampled, the roots died back proportionally because that's how plants operate. The root dies off in proportion to what was taken off the top.

I wrote a bit on some of that phenomenon on How Plow Pan Steals Profits, Productivity and Depletes the Aquifer.

Very informative bit on plow pan there. I have the natural kind of plow pan where I am -- thick beds of kaolin that start 8"-12" below the surface and give me all sort of trouble.

But back to your new grass. Is there a name for this stuff? Genus? Species?

Thanks for the compliment on the plow pan article. I live near the area that only got 50% planted this spring and it's a bad scene around here.

Here's one article Is Cutting Edge grass seed a GMO?

It's better to stick with the low growing, no mowing grasses on the market before 1997. My favorite is Low growing no mowing less watering no chemicals lawn grass seed...... I just had to throw that in!

A couple observations about that article: (1) it's eleven years old, what's happened in the meantime? (2) people seem to hate broadleaf "weeds". Seems to come from some primitive desire to have a monoculture, all the same plant, the same size, uniform in color, even under the trees.

We have a big teaching task in permaculture to change people's thinking to: monoculture - bad, lots of diversity - good. In primitive subsistence farming, a small stand of plants uncontaminated by weeds might have been a good thing, but something was lost in the translation of this to modern industrial agriculture's monocultures of thousands of acres at a time. Something that suburbanites want to replicate in their lawns. The bigger and more uniform the lawn, the more social status they have.

Not me. My lawn is deliberately seeded with alfalfa, clover, dandelion, chicory, mustard, prickly lettuce, wild garlic, chanca piedra, and whatever else tastes good to chickens. Yes, it can get tall and not having any sheep to run in the front yard, I have to break out the lawn mower. But that's not a chore, it's a harvest.