Off the Record: A turf brain trust

Mike Kenna

Every spring, it seems a golf course somewhere in the Transition Zone will have winter damage. Bermudagrass greens or fairways are the most likely victims. Spring management headaches result from having to deal with dead grass and golfers coming out of winter dormancy. Desiccation, ice cover or extreme cold are often the physiological stresses to blame.

Yet, I have lived in Stillwater, Okla., since 1979 and know the Oklahoma State University (OSU) bermudagrass breeding history well. It is an excellent story addressing the need for turfgrass to survive the summer’s heat and humidity while pulling through cold winters.

Turfgrass research started in 1948 at the Oklahoma Agricultural Experiment Station under the supervision of Professor W. C. Elder. For the first three years, the work was supported, in part, by money furnished by the Tulsa Golfers Fund for War Wounded, through the USGA Green Section.

Early research focused on evaluating species and strains of turfgrass that would survive cold winters and hot summers in Oklahoma. As a result, U-3 bermudagrass was placed with foundation growers and increased for commercial usage.

Wayne Huffine, Ph.D., started working with turfgrass at Oklahoma State University in 1953. Huffine enjoyed traveling and, by 1963, had gathered an extensive amount of bermudagrass from around the world. Huffine’s collection was the primary source of taxonomic research by Jack R. Harlan, Ph.D., and J. M. J de Wet, Ph.D., which resulted in the 1970 publication, A Guide to the Species of Cynodon (Gramineae).

In 1965, Charles M. Taliaferro, Ph.D., started at Oklahoma State University. He worked a short time for Glen Burton, Ph.D., at Tifton, Ga., after he finished his doctorate in 1963 at Texas A&M University. Taliaferro began breeding grasses for improved forage quality and winter hardiness. He did not have to start from scratch since a significant collection of bermudagrass was already available.

Over the next 40 years, Taliaferro and Huffine added more common C. dactylon and C. transvaalensis to the collection. Many originated from Africa, Australia, Europe and Asia.

In 1986, the USGA began to support bermudagrass breeding at OSU. The program’s initial objective was to develop seed-propagated, cold-hardy bermudagrass with improvements in turf performance quality. The hope was to increase the use of bermudagrass in the Transition Zone. The effort was novel since previous cultivars performed best in the far southern states, and their use in the Transition Zone was at high risk due to winterkill.

Since then, Taliaferro has independently or collaboratively released seven bermudagrass cultivars. These include Midlawn and Midfield in 1993, Yukon and Riviera in 2005, Patriot in 2006 and NorthBridge and Latitude 36 in 2011.

Denis Martin, Ph.D., has helped with turfgrass evaluation since his arrival in 1990. In 2006, Yanqi Wu, Ph.D., was hired at OSU after Taliaferro’s retirement. Wu and Martin added Tahoma 31 in 2019 to the list of successful cultivars. All OSU releases are popular in the Transition Zone due to improved turf quality, cold hardiness and spring dead spot tolerance.

The research team at OSU has collaborated with turfgrass scientists at Texas A&M University, University of Georgia, University of Florida and North Carolina State University. The five universities were successful in securing several U.S. Department of Agriculture grants since 2010. More than $14 million of support from the Specialty Crop Research Initiative has helped these universities collaborate on drought and salinity tolerance of warm-season grasses.

The OSU bermudagrass breeding program has contributed significantly to moving the species farther north into the Transition Zone. With increased collaboration among universities, the effort will continue to improve cold hardiness while providing a turfgrass that tolerates summer heat, requires less water and fewer chemical inputs.