Zooming eastward aboard his corporate jet, Jim Hagedorn is sprawled on the sage green carpet and holding forth on the subject of grass. Not once does he stand to gaze out the window, perhaps because he already knows what’s there: golf courses, athletic fields, public parks, highway medians, and front lawns. As chair and CEO of ScottsMiracle-Gro, Hagedorn knows that many of these plots are planted with seed from his company. But that’s not enough for him. Hagedorn envisions a new dawn for the American lawn. "I’d like to see biotech in every backyard," he says.
Pugnacious and energetic,-Hagedorn is a former F-16 pilot who collects muscle cars (40 at last count). For him, the lawn is not the boring domain of suburban dads and little old ladies. It’s a business battlefield where innovation is crucial. When it comes to grass, people worry about watering, maintenance, and weeds, three headaches that genetic engineering –transgenic turf - could dramatically alleviate. "That’s the big kahuna for consumer lawns," he says. "Solve those three-issues and you’re a friggin’ hero!"
Hagedorn wants to be that hero, and he just might pull it off. That is, if he can keep environmentalists off his back, get a green light from nervous government regulators, and make the rest of the world understand that what went down in central Oregon is no cause for alarm.
Nearly 50,000 square miles of the continental US is covered by lawn, according to estimates by ecologists at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Using satellite and aerial imagery, the team calculated that irrigated grass covers three times more land in the US than irrigated corn does. That makes turf the nation’s most widespread irrigated crop.
Lawn care and gardening is also the most popular outdoor leisure activity in the country, and the global industry supporting it generates an estimated $7 billion a year. ScottsMiracle-Gro accounts for more than a third of that - $2.4 billion in 2005. Numbers aside, though, that neatly trimmed front lawn is a Rockwellian feature of the American landscape. It’s safe to say that no other nation commits even a fraction of the land, resources, chemicals, and water that the US does in pursuit of the perfect greensward.
All that vegetation has some environmental benefit. According to the NASA group, lawns collectively absorb some 12ébillion pounds of carbon each year - effectively cutting greenhouse gas emissions. And if that grass weren’t there, much more soil would run off into storm drains, waterways, and-rivers, polluting reservoirs and hastening the erosion of hillsides and valuable farmland.
But the great American lawn is not exactly eco-friendly. Lawn mowers cough pollution into the atmosphere, and pesticides and fertilizers trickle into waterways, harming wildlife in wetland and marine environments. Then there’s the watering. Pick a rain-starved, water-scarce, growth-crazed state like Nevada or Arizona. All those new subdivisions have lawns, and all those homeéowners are watering like crazy. A typical one-third-acre lawn receives 10,000 gallons of water a year; in dry places like Las Vegas and other areas of the Southwest, a lawn needs more than 100,000 gallons annually. This huge demand for water means more rivers dammed, more wildlife threatened, and more aquifers drained.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Over the past decade, biotechnology has revolutionized agriculture. In 2005, 13 percent of US farmland was planted with biotech crops - primarily corn, soybeans, and cotton - and biotech proponents happily enumerate the resulting environmental advantagesé. The Conservation Technology Information Center at Purdue University estimates that 1ébillion tons of topsoil per year is prevented from becomingé runoff becauseé genetically modified crops allow farmers to reduce how much they plow to kill weeds. (Plowing accelerates the loss of topsoil.) Meanwhile, the amount of pesticide used on crops shrank by 34épercent from 2003 to 2004; that’s 15.6 million pounds of chemicals not dousing fields, because biotech crops don’t require as much herbicide.
If biotechnology can do all that for farmers cultivating thousands of acres, surely it can do the same for busy suburbanites managing their yards. What if grass were engineered to require less water, fertilizer, and pesticide? What if it required fewer trimmings by toxin-spewing mowers? What if lawns were customizable? For Hagedorn, such bioétech turf is a no-brainer. "If we want to keep gardening attractive and relevant in the Internet age," he says, "we have to meet this need." In other words, GM grass is coming, and Hagedorn is hell-bent on being the first to sell it.
Hagedorn’s father, Horace, founded Miracle-Gro in 1951. After the younger Hagedorn retired from the Air Force in 1987, he joined the family business. In 1995, he orchestrated a merger with Scotts, and in 2001 he was tapped to run the whole show. Now 50, Hagedorn has a penchant for bold, even macho gestures. Four years ago, he ordered that the Revolutionary War-era Gadsden flag - the one with a coiled snake and the slogan DON’T TREAD ON ME - be flown at ScottsMiracle-Gro headquarters in Marysville, Ohio. Some on the comépany’s board of directors would like to remove the flag. Hagedorn won’t budge. "Until bin Laden goes down," he says, "the flag stays up."
The research at first focused on a varietyé called creeping bentgrass, a particularly lush and uniform species of turf coveted by golfers. Scientists implanted it with the gene CP4 EPSPS to make it resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, more commonly known by Monsanto’s brand name, Roundup. Planting glyphosate-resistant turf would allow groundskeepers to use Roundup to kill unwanted species - like the hated Poa annua, or annual bluegrass - without hurting the beloved bentgrass. In 1999, to further boost the Smart Plants program,-ScottsMiracle-Gro acquired a majority stake in Sanford Scientific, a small-instruments maker. The move gave ScottsMiracle-Gro control over the industry’s basic tool: the gene gun.
A boxy-looking, foot-tall machine, the biolistic gun (from biology and ballistics) inserts genes into plants. Fragile genes are bound to tiny bits of tungsten or gold. These microprojectiles are then fired into plant cells. Most shots miss, or they make it through the rigid cell wall but not into the nucleus. If you repeat the process enough times, though, a few rounds eventuallyépeneétrate the nucleus, adding the new trait to the plant’s genetic code.
Agriculture (which regulates transégenic crops) for a permit to sell the stuff. The companies are still waiting for that approval - but they do have a permit to grow the grass. So in 2003,-ScottsMiracle-Gro contractors planted transgenic bentgrass on 400 acres of high-desert farmland in Jefferson County, Oregon. At this point, the two companies had spent tens of millions of dollars on the project. The goal, says a ScottsMiracle-Gro spokesperson, was to produce a good supply of seed and have it ready to sell "the day they got approval."
In a tiny office in the farmland of central Oregon, just off US Highway 26, crop scientist Marvin Butler is pointing to a map peppered with red dots. For two years now, Butler and a few colleagues from Oregon State University’s Agricultural Extension Service have been testing clumps of grass inside and outside "the district" - the Roundup-ready bentgrass control area here. They roam around in pickups, stopping at median strips and drainage ditches to hunt for transgenic grass.
The genetic test works like a home pregnancy kit. You pluck a few blades of suspect grass, mash them up, and mix them with water in a bullet-shaped plastic tube. Next you stick a strip of spongy paper into the green-tinted liquid. After a few minutes, you check the strip: two red stripes for transgenic grass, one for a conventional strain.
When they find transgenic grass, the field scientists share its GPS coordinates with academic researchers and ScottsMiracle-Gro staff, and mark their map. Under a 2004 USDA mandate, ScottsMiracle-Gro must work to remove all known GM grass that has spread outside, or cross-pollinated with something outside, the original control area.
And spread it has: The pollen ranged up to 13 miles, perhaps farther. Despite efforts to prevent contamination - the company used tractors dedicated to the transgenic fields, stored and transported seed in closed containers, and employed other protection measures - transgenic grass migrated well beyond the boundary of the control area. Scientists, regulators, and farmers knew it would spread; grass, after all, is a wind-pollinated perennial. A few overlooked plants here and there are all it would take. "Any time you let something go to seed," Butler says, "you’ll see a million where once there was one."
What was surprising, says Neil Hoffman, a risk analyst with USDA’s Biotechnology Regulatory Services, was that the grass and CP4 gene traveled so far. The migration was driven by two-factors. First, a heavy summer wind kicked up, depositing seeds onto neighboring farms and into patches of no-man’s-land like drainage ditches. Second, the grass cross-pollinated with other species - red top, for instance - passing on the trait of-glyphosate resistance. This kind of hybridization is what environmentalists most fear: Plants with a new, survival-boosting trait gain a competitive advantage that will launch them on a global-ecological conquest, potentially disrupting whole ecosystems.
In the case of the Roundup-ready bentgrass, though, such a superweed scenario is probably a stretch. Researchers have found no indication that the transgenic variety has any advantages over its conventional cousin besides its resistance to glyphosate. And the grass can still be killed with other (harsher) herbicides. In other words, Butler says, a clump of Roundup-ready bentgrass along this or that irrigation canal is doing what any clump of grass does: photosynthesizing and keeping the banks from falling into the canal. That’s about it.
Nevertheless, the rogue-grass story exploded in September 2004, when The New York Times ran a front-page article detailing a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of bet365体育赛事s: "genes from engineered grass spread for miles, study finds." Predictably, environmental groups - the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, the International Center for Technology Assessment, the Union of Concerned Scientists - warned of dire consequences.
Even experts who support the commercialization of certain transéégenic agricultural products have expressed concern about the controversial grass. Rick Roush, director of the Integrated Pest Management Program for the University of California system, says ScottsMiracle-Gro’s bentgrass project has him and other scientists worried. "It really gives us heartburn," he says.
Here’s why: Annuals like corn and soybeans require a lot of human input if they’re to survive, and if you cut them down, they’re dead. Not so a perennial grass. Longevity is a built-in survival advantage, as is the capacity to broadcast gazillions of pollen grains. These characteristics make total containment of a grass crop, transgenic or otherwise, impossible.
Bentgrass isn’t classified as a noxious weed, but some of its relatives "may become prevalsent in natural areas that we’re concerned about," says the USDA’s Hoffman. "So, in those cases, the weediness potential of bentgrass or a species it could crossbreed with increases."
When the news broke about ScottsMiracle-Gro’s migrating bentgrass, federal regulators realized they’d been caught off guard. Weed specialists with the Bureau of Land Management, who depend on glyphosate as a tool for weeding, worry about Roundup-ready bentgrass escaping onto public lands. A US Forest Service official expressed similar apprehension. On top of that, Oregon-farmers - who had initially welcomed the experiment - began wondering aloud about transgenic contamination hurting their sales in Europe, which has zero tolerance for genetically modified crops.
It’s been three years since Monsanto and-ScottsMiracle-Gro filed their petition to sell Roundup-ready bentgrass, and the USDA won’t say when it will make a final decision. Department officials have decided to draft a full environmental impact statement - a first for a biotech crop. That will be followed by a public comment period and possibly a series of public hearings. The USDA won’t deregulate glyphosate-resistant bentgrass unless it determines that the transgenic turf is not a plant pest and "does not pose a threat to agriculture or the environment."
You’d think that Hagedorn, faced with a balky government-approval process, wary scientists, and a bruised public image, might abandon his quest to commercialize transgenic grass. Insteadé, he and his troops have retreatedé to the lab to engineer a whole new set of modifications.
Sprouting from pint-size pots inside a $5 million, climate-controlled greenhouse, America’s future front lawns bask in artificial sunlight beaming from overhead lamps. Outside, the weather is typical for an Ohio winter: dreary and gray. But in here, where it’s always growing season, some very special specimens are thriving. "These plants have about 30,000 genes, plus the one we’re bringing over," says lead ScottsMiracle-Gro biotechnologist
Bob Harriman, a trim 44-year-old who sports a well-émanicured mustache. He waves his hand over a batch of Roundup-ready bentgrass. "It’s so cool and soft, you just want to lie down on it and take a nap."
Harriman points to five other samples of bentgrass lined up from tallest to shortest. All are Roundup-ready, but the four shortest specimens are also custom-designed dwarfs. "There’s a hormone in the plant that, when expressed, tells the plant to elongate," he explains. "We put in a gene that reduces the amount of that hormone." In so doing, Harriman and his colleagues have created a grass that doesn’t grow as tall and, therefore, doesn’t need as much mowing. For the everyman, that means fewer hours with a lawn mower. It also means enhanced color: The same amount of chlorophyll is concentrated in a smaller blade. The grass on this side of the GMO divide is, literally, greener.
Back on the company jet,-Hagedorn maintains that his dream hasn’t been derailedé. "A year from now, we’re-going to be selling biotech grass to golf-courses," he says. And that’s just the start: "I never would’ve entered the biotech business for something as simple as golf."
If Roundup-ready bentgrass is high tech turf version 1.0, and if it gets USDA approval - hardly a given - Hagedorn will channel those profits into version 2.0 and beyond: Drought-tolerant, disease-resistant, slow-growing grass - whatever cocktail of traits-customers want. Americans from Los Angeles to Orlando could finally have turf that needs less water, weeding, and mowing, while scientists and regulators will have a whole new crop of concerns.
When he talks about business, Hagedorné likes to pull out jargon from his days in the Air Force. One of his favorite terms is FEBA - forward edge of the battle area. ScottsMiracle-Gro was in the FEBA in central Oregon, and the company is clearly in the FEBA with its version 2.0 transgenic grass. Hagedorn may have been slowed down by the USDA, but he has no intention of giving up on innovation. "I decide what I’m going after, and I go after it," he says. "I don’t stop." Watching grass grow was never so exciting.
David Wolman (david@david-wolman.com) is the author of A Left-Hand Turn Around the World: Chasing the Mystery and Meaning of All Things Southpaw. 
credit Nathan Kirkman
Hagedorn, CEO of ScottsMiracle-Gro, wants to see "biotech in every backyard."
credit Nathan Kirkman
At ScottsMiracle-Gro, researchers are now working on transgenic dwarf grass.
credit Nathan Kirkman
Tech turf 2.0 can be shorter, greener, healthier-anything consumers want.
