The Wisconsin Turfgrass Association (WTA) Summer Field Day is an annual event that brings landscapers, lawn care professionals, golf course superintendents, and industry together to look at the latest and greatest research happening in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s turf programs. A wide range of studies were on display from both Dr. Doug Soldat’s Soil Science program as well as Dr. Paul Koch’s Plant Pathology program.
The 26-acre, O J Noer Turfgrass Research and Education Facility provides grounds for the studies on home lawns, athletic fields, and golf course turf. Every year, it is amazing to see the amount of care and work that goes into not only this event but also into the care and management of each and every study that takes place at the OJ Noer Turfgrass Research and Education Facility.
In this year’s WTA Field Day, the UW-Madison turfgrass research program highlighted two particular studies that speak to the complexity of management decisions in turf systems.
Dr. Doug Soldat’s research team initiated a study in 2023 that is investigating the long-term impacts of four different athletic field management approaches. The four approaches are:
Although it was only the first year of the study, there were already visual differences in the plots. The conventional and organic approaches both looked very healthy and uniform, though Dr. Soldat noted that the organic approach is 10-20x more expensive than the conventional approach. Can you manage a field with organic inputs and produce high-quality turf? Yes! But it will cost much more than a conventional approach.
Plots from a long-term athletic field management study. An organic approach can lead to excellent-looking turf, at a higher cost.
Long-term, the study will look at the turf’s performance over time, including factors like weed encroachment which may take several years to develop in untreated plots. The companion approach will be an opportunity to see how clover establishment contributes to the nitrogen fertility and quality of the turf over time.
What do you do with your leaves in the fall? Dr. Paul Koch polled the audience and the responses included “rake them to the curb,” “mulch or mow over them to chop them up,” and “nothing, just leave them.” Dr. Koch then discussed the impacts of each idea. When leaves are raked to the curb in Madison, WI, in theory, the city comes to pick them up quickly and they are turned into mulch and disposed of responsibly. In reality, leaves are falling from different trees throughout the entire fall, and long stretches of time go by where leaves are piled on the curb between pickup dates. When it rains, those leaf piles are like giant tea bags, and water leaches nutrients (e.g., phosphorus) from them that goes into the sewers and eventually into our nearby lakes. The best practice then, is to leave your leaves right in your yard, where they fell!
This now leaves us with a choice. Do we simply let the leaves cover the grass going into the winter, or do we take the extra step of mowing those leaves to chop them up and help them decompose more quickly the following spring?
Dr. Paul Koch started a study in fall of 2022 looking at the impact of this exact choice. In one set of treatments, oak leaves were piled to 2” or 4” depths, and the leaves were left fully intact on the turf. In another set of treatments, leaves were piled to 2” or 4” depths, and the leaves were mulched with a lawn mower on the plot surface. These were compared to an untreated control without leaves. Leaves were secured on their respective plots with netting stretched over the study area throughout the winter.
Plots from a leaf mulching study. Keeping tree leaves on the turf leads to a fertilizer benefit and greener grass (B and C) compared to a lawn where leaves were removed (A). If you do keep tree leaves on the turf, mulch them so that they break down more easily in the spring (B), otherwise it could slow down the turf’s growth in the spring and lead to increased weed pressure (C).
After close to one year of the study, it was clear that plots receiving leaves were darker in color and appeared healthier than the untreated plots with no leaves. There also appeared to be a trend of greater weed presence in the plots where leaves were piled up but not mulched. Dr. Koch highlighted that these plots had very little green turf cover in early spring, and though the turf grew back fairly well, that slower start in the spring could have given weeds the opportunity to take hold in these plots.
These early observations highlight the fact that leaves are essentially free fertilizer and keeping that in your lawn and out of the sewers and lakes is a good thing for sustainability. The observations also highlight that leaving the leaves alone and not mulching them could lead to other issues including increased snow mold disease pressure and reduced green turf cover in the spring. A slower start in the spring could lead to more challenges with weeds in the following growing season.
Long term, the study will look at how the turf and weed competition plays out over multiple seasons. The researchers are also measuring important attributes related to soil health to determine whether the addition of organic leaf litter results in improved soil microbial activity and functions in the future.
It is very common for research studies to be conducted at one location over two to three growing seasons. For many research questions, the hypotheses tested can be evaluated on that scale, in that timeframe. However, some research questions require a much bigger scale or longer timeframe to understand. Some factors change on the timescale of years to decades.
Conducting a study for longer than three years requires a vision towards a long-term objective, and a commitment to see that vision through across multiple generations of graduate students and research staff. Put another way, when we start a study in 2023 with a projected 20-year lifespan, a kid is being born right now who could be working on that study as an undergraduate student at UW-Madison in the early 2040’s.
These studies are so important because although our lives are short, processes like soil organic matter buildup and grass/weed ecology take place over decades-long timeframes. The industry is lucky to have researchers like Dr. Paul Koch and Dr. Doug Soldat who help us answer questions that will help future generations.
If you’ve never attended, check out the WTA Summer Field Day next year! Meet some great people, eat some brats for lunch, and check out cutting-edge turf research. And while you may have initially gone to look at grass, you might just walk away with some deeper reflections about time and how our choices today could impact our world for future generations.
More information:
Wisconsin Turfgrass Association
UW-Madison Turfgrass Science Research
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