Golfdom • September 2023 • The Wild West

With unusual weather influencing grass seed production, seed prices become unstable

Leah Brilman, Ph.D., director of product management and technical services at DLF, is a longtime Oregon resident, so she’s no stranger to the weather you’d expect from the Pacific Northwest — a wet spring and a dry summer.

But the last few seasons have been different, she says, bringing unpredictability to turfgrass researchers and growers.

“I’ve lived in Oregon for 34 years now, and for the first 30 years, the weather was pretty predictable. But these last three years have just been weird, and it’s influenced the seed crops,” she says.

Like Brilman, the Fricker family are Oregon lifers. The Pure Seed brand dates back 40-plus years in the state, starting with Bill Rose and continuing with Crystal Rose-Fricker, president of Pure Seed and Pure Seed Testing.

Several of the company’s species have a home on the course at Marco Simone Golf & Country Club in Rome, host of the 2023 Ryder Cup. The company also supplied turfgrass species for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Rose-Fricker started working on her family’s seed farm at 13 years old. Her son, Austin Fricker, now vice president of research for the company, did the same. Both echo Brilman’s feelings, the weather has never been as unpredictable as it is now in the Pacific Northwest, the country’s cradle for turfgrass seed.

“It’s been the most condensed growing season I’ve ever seen,” says Rose-Fricker. “Every (species) was done flowering in about a three-week period, where normally it’s spread out of six to eight weeks.”

Why is all of this a problem for those who rely on growing grass for a living, like you, the golf course superintendent?

The pricing uncertainty that has already affected mostly every product you use — fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, etc. — is here to stay for turfgrass seed as well.

“It’s kind of back to the wild west as far as pricing goes,” Brilman says. “The weather is influencing grass seed production and we don’t really know where it’s going to finalize out.”

This period of uncertainty really kicked off in 2019, when Oregon saw an uncharacteristically dry spring. That wreaked havoc on the yield for growers across the area, cutting crop yields drastically.

That dry spell coincided with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, which raised several new issues for the turfgrass seed industry, Austin Fricker says.

“I mean it was crazy because we were coming off that short crop in 2019,” he says. “We were already trying to allocate towards our most important customers, and then we had people that had never worked with us calling in because they were allocated down by their old supplier.”

Similar to how most of the country reacted to the early stages of the pandemic, Fricker says the turfgrass seed industry went into a complete shutdown for the first few months of 2020.

That changed around April when the seed industry’s sales picked back up as more and more people took an interest in beautifying both their lawns at home and their golf courses.

That demand was a blessing and a curse for turfgrass seed producers. To compensate for the lower crop yield in 2019, Fricker says turfgrass growers planted more acres than usual, expecting another low yield.

Instead, Mother Nature smiled upon Oregon’s seed growers, leading to an extended growing season and a heavy yield in 2020. Unfortunately for those in golf, as Fricker explains, all of that extra seed wasn’t necessarily there for the taking.

“On the business side of things, there were a lot of mergers and acquisitions happening, where retail companies were buying up large amounts of seed for home consumers,” he says.

“That created a lot of supply chain issues on the professional side of the market because those acquisitions were of companies traditionally involved in golf and sports turf.”

As the season progressed that seed hoarded for retail consumers wasn’t moving through the system, leading to inventory backups and further supply chain delays. Which, of course, led to further increases in the price of turfgrass seed for golf courses nationwide.

As far as the last year has gone, Fricker says the weather, yet again, has thrown a curveball the way of turfgrass producers.

“We had an extremely cold fall in 2022 and on top of that, it was dry all the way through October,” he says. “We basically didn’t have any significant rainfall from May until late October. Normally, we’d get rain into the middle of June, and it would start back up again in September.”

Fricker says this meant crops didn’t see much growth until the spring of 2023 when the area saw another extreme. At the beginning of May, temperatures shot up to the 90s and the rain all but stopped.

“That brings some uncertainty,” he says. “A lot of the crop yield will depend on the species and the ability of the farm to irrigate the turf. Irrigated perennial ryegrass is probably OK, but anything that’s dry land is going to be around 40 to 50 percent off of what the average would be.”

The life cycle of perennial ryegrass — which lasts 2 to 3 years according to Fricker — is a double whammy as there isn’t a backlog of acres that has been established for multiple years.

Fricker says turfgrasses such as tall fescue — which have an average life cycle of 5 to 7 years — won’t see as much of a change due to the unpredictable changes in weather, at least not yet.

“It’s still early, so things could change,” he says. “But, from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like tall fescue isn’t as affected, whereas perennial ryegrass is pretty bad.”

What does this mean for superintendents looking to purchase seed in not only 2023 but the years to come? According to Brilman, more planning ahead, experimentation and innovation from golf courses across the country.

“The heat and, in some parts of the country, droughts, have increased interest in utilizing warm-season grasses over cool-season grasses in some cases,” she says.

But, as Brilman and Rose-Fricker have pointed out, it’s not just extreme heat and drought that affect golf course turf. Periods of extremely cold temperatures occur throughout the year just as much. To combat this, superintendents must make sacrifices on what time of the year they want the turf to look its best.

“In some of these environments it’s 110 or 115 degrees and most of your golfers don’t want to be out in that heat,” says Brilman. “So, if you’re getting more play in the fall, spring or even the winter months, knowing when your grass is actively growing and performing at its best is something that’s crucial.”

Atop Brilman’s list of things for superintendents to know is that the days of easily accessible turfgrass seed — specifically bentgrass — throughout the year are, more than likely, long gone.

“The stuff we have in the warehouse right now is basically spoken for already,” she says. “It’s all product for people who let us know in January or February that they were going to need it. It’s no longer possible to assume that we’re going to have everything instantaneously if you let us know in June.”

Rose-Fricker is quick to point out that even though turfgrass seed researchers and growers are facing challenges now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t top-notch varieties on the market.

“Golf course superintendents can get comfortable with a variety on their greens if it performs well, even if it has some problems and they know how to manage it,” she says. “But, as researchers, we seed the variety side-by-side in trials at all of these different locations and it’s evident that these new genetics are so much better than the old ones.”

In order to discover those varieties, Rose-Fricker stresses, it’s crucial for superintendents to develop relationships with and ask questions of turfgrass seed providers and producers because the options are out there.

“You just have to be smart in this day and age,” she says. “There’s a lot of data and third-party validation. This isn’t the old days when people would take a picture of good-looking grass and call it whatever they wanted to sell it.

WHERE’S THE WATER?

Traditionally, there are three pillars on which a great turfgrass variety is built:

But what about the plant’s ability to use water from less than desired sources, or water that might be considered low quality?

“Not only is there importance in reducing the amount of water turf needs, but it’s important to manage the different levels of water quality,” says Crystal Rose-Fricker, president of Pure Seed.

To find that balance, producers like Pure Seed have shifted their focus on how they develop new turfgrass varieties in recent years.

“We’ve shifted to more trait-specific varieties, so salt tolerance and being able to use lower-quality water,” says Austin Fricker, vice president of research at Pure Seed. “We’re seeing droughts become bigger and bigger issues, even in some places where we never thought that would be an issue.”

As a result, species like seashore paspalum — which can take ocean levels of salinity, according to Rose-Fricker — have become more popular in areas of the country where access to quality water is difficult.

A LONG, WINDING ROAD

Researching, developing, testing and then taking a turfgrass seed variety to market is a long process. Add the fluctuations in temperature and weather year after year, and the process becomes that much more difficult for growers.

“It takes 10 years to develop a variety, so that’s 10 different environments that the test has to go through,” says Crystal Rose-Fricker, president of Pure Seed. “So right now, I’m not even selecting anything because they’re all cooked in one of my trials.”

Despite those challenges, turfgrass breeders are still confident in their abilities to stay ahead of the game, says Austin Fricker, vice president of research at Pure Seed.

“It’s affirming to see that some of the things we’ve worked on, like more drought-tolerant ryegrass, has been worthwhile,” says Fricker. “It does make a difference and there is a place for it.”