The Largest Crop in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Is...?

Dick Wanner
Lancaster Farming Staff

What uses more gas than a full supertanker, more water than a whole bunch of rivers, 19 million pounds of pesticides and 215 million pounds a year of nitrogen fertilizer, costs $5 billion a year and the equivalent of 61,000 full time jobs to maintain?

If your answer was, “Grass,” you get an A for paying attention. And if you said, “The largest crop in the Chesapeake Bay watershed,” you can hang a big plus sign and a gold star next to your richly deserved A.

An organization called The Chesapeake Stormwater Network (CSN) came up with these numbers and is spreading the word not only about the size of the grass “crop,” but also about its environmental impact.

The Size. Lawns and turf grass cover more than 3.8 million acres or 9.5 percent of the total land area in the watershed, according to the CSN. Turf cover now exceeds total pasture cover (3.1 million acres), hay/alfalfa ground (3.0 million), and acres devoted to row crops (3.7 million).

The county with the most land in grass is Lancaster County, Pa., with 605,215 acres, or 19.8 percent of the county’s land area. The largest percentage of land in turf is Fairfax County, Virginia, with 46.5 percent of its 251,360 total land area in turf.

The Impact. What really concerns the stormwater folks isn’t the amount of grass in the watershed, it’s the way it’s managed. Or rather, mismanaged.

Some 75 percent of that turf is in home lawns. With an estimated 6.1 million “grass farmers” and another 50,000 paid lawn care workers in the watershed, the CSN reckons there are more than a few mistakes being made.

Less than 10 percent of homeowners, for example, consult technical information on lawn care management beyond the sales guy at the local garden center. And, by their estimate, less than 30 percent of the people who are being paid to manage grass on public lands — parks, golf courses, athletic fields, etc. — have been trained in watershed-friendly practices.

The CSN has some suggestions for people with lawns, but it boils down to one main course of inaction — do nothing. Don’t fertilize. Don’t use pesticides. Don’t water. You can read their suggestions for minimizing the impact lawns have on the Chesapeake in the accompanying sidebar. And you can read more about the organization and their viewpoints at their website, http://www.chesapeakestormwater.net.

Jason Bell and his uncle/business partner, Todd Bell, have 50 acres of turfgrass at their 7 Mountain Sod Farm in Lewistown, Pa., a short distance from the Juniata River. The Juniata flows into the Susquehanna, which flows into the Chesapeake, and there are times when the Juniata looks like chocolate milk. “None of that sediment is ours,” Jason Bell said when we talked to him by phone. “Our soils are our livelihood, and we want to keep them on our fields.”

Bell is a 1999 Penn State graduate with a B.S. in turf science management, and worked on a golf course and a turf farm before joining forces with his uncle in Lewistown. Bell’s dad also helps in the business.

Seven Mountain grows only Kentucky bluegrass on flat fields. They use only as much fertilizer as they need and minimal chemicals, according to Bell. It takes two years to grow a crop of sod, so they harvest about 25 acres each year.

They have sold sod to parks, golf courses, swimming pools, athletic fields, homeowners and other buyers throughout Pennsylvania and surrounding states.

Bell said they keep their grass mowed to a height of two- to three-and-a-half inches to minimize weeds and water requirements. Just before harvest, the grass is trimmed back for shipping. About a quarter- to a half-inch of topsoil is removed with the grass, but Bell said they build up the topsoil faster than they remove it. “When we harvest, we leave behind most of the root systems.

They stay in the soil, helping create more topsoil.” They use a minimum tillage system before replanting harvested land.

The advantage of sod to landowners and the Chesapeake, according to Bell, is that bare ground is covered immediately. If there’s a heavy downpour on a newly seeded lawn or field, sod stays in place. Seed, soil, fertilizer and chemicals can wash away in a heavy rain.

Bell said that to be successful, a good sod farmer has to be a steward of the soil. And, whether by design or by default, he believes that a good sod farmer is also a steward of the environment.

“Grass keeps soil in place, it holds stormwater and it absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. It collects dust from the atmosphere. Grass is great.”

At least it’s great if you do it right, the Chesapeake Storm Network might add.

For more information about 7 Mountain Sod, their website is at http://www.7mtnsod.com.

Dick Wanner can be reached at rwanner.eph@lnpnews.com or by phone at 717-419-4703.