OSU turf team drives decades of innovation

Monday, December 16, 2024

Media Contact: Gail Ellis | Office of Communications & Marketing, OSU Agriculture | 405-744-9152 | gail.ellis@okstate.edu

In his 34 years at Oklahoma State University, Dennis Martin, OSU Extension specialist for turfgrass, has served as the bridge between turfgrass scientists and the turfgrass industry.

“Some people think of the university as THE giant county Extension office,” Martin said. “In some ways, it is, and in some ways, it isn’t. As specialists, we like to spend our time on specialty issues that require a higher level of problem-solving. When we have a lot of problem solvers who can take care of general questions, the university and the state’s investment is best used by letting our specialists work on specialty problems.”

Martin stepped into his role as the state Extension specialist in 1990, adding professor to his title in 2004. More than 30 years in, he still finds joy in talking about turf.

“People think of me as being versed only in turfgrass, but as an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois, I started in forestry, then rapidly moved into greenhouse production, then to nursery management, then to turf,” Martin said. “In Oklahoma, I think my biggest impact has been working with sod producers, golf course superintendents, and parks and grounds managers.”

Innovative turfgrass management has been the trademark of the OSU turfgrass team for the past 40 years. Although the land-grant institution has developed and advanced turf varieties since the 1890s, it was around 1986 that it fully transitioned into the turfgrass research and breeding program that it is today.

At the time, Charles Taliaferro led the breeding program, creating and releasing the Guymon variety in 1982, a common, seeded Bermudagrass that was reliably cold hardy for the transition zone of the country with cold winters and hot, dry summers. Guymon could be used as a turfgrass, but it was mostly used as a forage grass. It was the first seeded turfgrass variety to put OSU in the national spotlight.

“That was a transition grass between the old program and the new,” Martin said. “You could use Guymon as a turf, but it didn't look nice. It was coarse but durable.”

Following Guymon, OSU released the vegetatively propagated, hybrid bermudagrasses Midlawn and Midfield in 1991. These were collaborative releases bred and developed by Kansas State University and released jointly with OSU.

“They were higher quality than seeded bermudagrasses and more cold-hardy than the vegetatively propagated bermudagrasses of the time, such as Tifway, but they weren’t exactly what the industry needed,” Martin said. “They were good stepping stones for getting us to where we are today.”

The Patriot variety was then released in 2006 with slight improvements over Midlawn and Midfield, but it wouldn’t be long before all three varieties were outmatched by their successors, Latitude 36 and Northbridge, which added tremendous value to the turf industry.

OSU turfgrasses change the game

When Taliaferro retired in 2006, Yanqi Wu stepped into his role as head of the breeding program, later receiving the title of professor in the OSU Department of Plant and Soil Sciences.

At the time, the team was already working on the up-and-coming variety Latitude 36. In November 2006, Martin, Wu and Taliaferro came together to decide what experimental entries would be submitted to the National Turfgrass Evaluation Program the following year.

“At that time, we didn't have many funds to support entries in the test, but we selected two,” Wu said. “Apparently, we chose well because those two varieties went on to become Latitude 36 and Northbridge, both still very active in the industry today.”

In the early 2000s, the OSU seeded bermudagrass varieties Yukon and Riviera increased the visibility of the OSU turf program internationally. Riviera was used in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

“Yukon created a lot of excitement in the transition zone because it had good winter hardiness,” Wu said. “Its quality by today's standards is not as nice as subsequent varieties, but it was still a breakthrough grass.”

Then came Tahoma 31 in 2017, a vegetatively propagated variety that has gained national attention for its use on professional sports fields and golf courses due to cold hardiness, drought resistance and a tendency to need less water than other commercial varieties.

“Tahoma 31 is one of the most popular releases we’ve had through the Turfgrass Breeding Program,” said Justin Quetone Moss, department head and professor in the OSU Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture. “It was developed through collaboration with several southern universities.”

Beyond turf

The OSU turf team is highly collaborative, often working with universities from Kansas, North Carolina, California, Florida, Texas, Georgia and other states involved in a project to improve drought tolerance and other turf traits.

“Multistate collaborations help evaluate material under many additional environmental conditions,” said Wade Thomason, professor and department head for plant and soil sciences. “We can better assess factors like disease pressure or cold tolerance, giving us valuable information about the conditions where our cultivars will thrive.”

With funding from the USDA, OSU has expanded its focus to turfgrasses ideal for more southern climates like Florida and Texas, such as Texoma, which was released in 2022 and will soon be available in Texas. Wu is also continuing to improve seeded bermudagrasses and license new related varieties.

Charles Fontanier, associate professor of turfgrass management and physiology, evaluates warm-season grasses for ancillary traits, specifically shade tolerance and sod tensile strength.

“Drought resistance is going to continue to be a key issue for us, but I think we are going to be more focused on looking at how we can package multiple traits into a lawn,” he said. “We’re trying to understand what we can plant and how we can create plants that will be resilient to a changing climate and changing expectations for lawns.”

Meanwhile, Mingying Xiang, an assistant professor in turfgrass science, and Shuhao Yu, research assistant professor in turfgrass genetics and genomics, continue their work using genetics to speed up the breeding process.

“We evaluate a trial of more than 150 plant materials under drought conditions, and we identify the genomic regions associated with the drought resistance trait in bermudagrass” Yu said. “In the future, we will integrate the information on those genetic markers into the breeding program to increase the breeding efficiency and accuracy, so the turfgrass industry can have more drought resistance.”

But it’s not just about turfgrass anymore.

In October 2024, the OSU turf team hosted a gathering with experts from around the world who work with turfgrasses and other types of non-turf plants.

“We are trying to look beyond turfgrasses,” Martin said. “We are collecting germplasm for plants that would be considered weeds in some places but desirable turf-type plants in other places.”

Many of the plants are pollinator-friendly species they will study for use on home lawns in combination with turfgrass.

“We’re trying to develop cross-disciplinary teams to see what we can salvage from the natural world as urbanization continues while also looking at what we can provide in terms of what people want,” Martin said. “There's a lot of pollinator service plants that tolerate mowing and still flower. Rather than the one-species monoculture approach, we are looking at multiple species working together in biodiverse lawns.”

Other members of the turfgrass team include:

• David Hillock, Extension specialist for consumer horticulture
• Nathan Walker, professor and Extension specialist for turf disease and pest diagnosis

  

Story By: Alisa Boswell-Gore | alisa.gore@okstate.edu