Turf war: Scotts Co. hopes new grass will make the cut

The grass would be a golf course superintendent's dream.
GERVAIS, Ore. (AP) -- In an unmarked site on the edges of this community of berry farmers, Bob Harriman puts one foot on the world's most controversial grass.
It's a blanket of brilliant green -- as thin as a piece of paper and as uniform as cellophane.
If it sounds unnatural, that's because it is.
The turf is a genetically modified version of the creeping bent grass popular on golf course greens and fairways, and it is being tested here by Scotts Co., which hopes its creation will be resistant to a common weed-killing chemical.
Scotts keeps the test site incognito because environmentalists are trying to ban the bioengineered grass -- and radical groups have gone so far as to sabotage test plots elsewhere.
Other opposition
But while environmentalists have long opposed bioengineered crops of any kind, this silky turf has other powerful voices urging caution: the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.
"Our concern is that if it was to escape onto public land, we wouldn't know how to control it," says Gina Ramos, senior weed specialist for the Bureau of Land Management.
Her words conjure an image of a golf course gone berserk -- a state park, for example, blanketed in acres of perfect putting green turf, with no biodiversity.
Harriman, Scotts' chief research scientist, counters that numerous studies by the company indicate the grass is unlikely to spread. The grass seeds are dispersed by flowering blossoms -- but the closely shorn turf on a golf course is never allowed to grow tall enough to flower.
The natural version of creeping bent grass is the perfect surface for a golf ball because as its name suggests, it "creeps" -- growing in a smooth horizontal plane. But, as Harriman points out, kneeling to \stroke a patch adjoining the bent grass test site, the silky smoothness can get interrupted by a coarse weed -- a yellow grass that grows vertically in bunches, like an artichoke.
On a putting green that acts as a speed bump, deflecting the ball and frustrating even the most talented golfer.
The problem is that trying to kill the weed with an herbicide, such as Monsanto Co.'s Roundup, would also kill the creeping bent grass.
Resistant to Roundup
The grass tested here is engineered to be resistant to Roundup. A superintendent who seeds his putting green with this grass will be able to spray it at will -- and only the yellow weed will shrivel and die, leaving the velveteen bent grass.
That would be a golf course superintendent's dream. Of the 15,000 courses in the United States, only the most elite can afford to wipe out the yellow weed, either by fumigating the entire green, or else handpicking the clumps.
The bioengineered grass is in the final stages of approval. The three-month public comment session ended in early March. Among the opponents were environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy, which have long spoken out against bioengineering.
The United States Golf Association has came out in favor of the biotech grass. After all, 60 different bioengineered crops have received federal approval -- including tomatoes, corn, soybean, canola, potatoes and papaya trees.
Delaying approval
But the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service have urged the U.S. Department of Agriculture to delay approval for the turf in order to do more research on its potential impact.
"What we're saying is let's be very careful until it's proven that it's not going to do the things we're concerned about -- like take over," says Jim Gladen, director of the Forest Service's watershed, fish, wildlife, air and rare plants division.