By: Ed Hunter (352) 392-1773 x 278
Source(s):
Paul Mislevy pmis@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu, (941) 735-1314
Tom Sinclair trsincl@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu, (352)392-6180
Ann Blount ablount@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu, (850) 875-7129
GAINESVILLE — With spring on the horizon, Florida ranchers are looking forward to their bahiagrass pastures coming out of their winter dormancy.
Bahiagrass, a popular forage with Florida ranchers, is found on some 5 million acres of pastureland around the state as well as in many lawns. When it goes dormant, ranchers must plant annual forage crops such as ryegrass or clover or purchase feed.
So researchers with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences are looking for a strain of bahiagrass that is less sensitive to low temperatures and the short days of winter and that will continue to grow during the winter months, and they say that several strains already are showing promise.
“A major problem in Florida is that warm season grasses don’t grow in the winter,” said Paul Mislevy, an agronomist at UF’s Range Cattle Research and Education Center in Ona. “We don’t have a winter perennial grass that grows in the winter and not in summer.”
So Mislevy is working with Tom Sinclair of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service and Ann Blount, a forage breeder at the North Florida Research and Education Center in Quincy, to develop strains of bahiagrass that will be beneficial both to ranchers and homeowners.
“Although its not the main thrust of the study, we also are working with turf grass,” Blount said. “We are trying to develop a rough turf bahiagrass for possible use in home lawns. We are hopeful that this research into light sensitivity some day may be applied to other tropical grass species.”
On several test plots at the Ona facility, Mislevy and Sinclair and have set up lights that are turned on about 5:30 p.m. and allowed to burn until 9 p.m., giving the grass the daily 15 hours of light it normally gets in the summer. The lights are set up so half the plot is in light and half is in darkness.
“These grasses think it’s July out there,” Mislevy said. “In December, without artificial light, grass is 4 to 5 inches. With light, the grass is 12 inches high. The lights increased the yield of bahiagrass from October through March by 167 percent, an increase of 2.2 tons of dry matter per acre.”
So is the next step for ranchers to install rows and rows of lights on their pastures? Not quite. Mislevy said the trick now is to find a way to make the popular bahiagrass less sensitive to day length.
“Once we prove the light makes plants grow in winter, we need to find a bahiagrass plant that day length doesn’t influence,” he said.
Along with the second year of testing bahiagrass under light, Sinclair said UF has launched a breeding program at the North Florida Research and Education Center in Quincy. Glenn Burton, a forage grass researcher at the agriculture department’s Coastal Plain Experiment Station in Tifton, Ga. provided seed of the grasses being tested to see if they are less sensitive to day length.
“We’ve tested different bahiagrasses throughout this past winter, with and without the artificially lengthened daylight to see if we can identify lines that are less daylight sensitive,” said Sinclair, who also holds a courtesy appointment as a UF/IFAS professor of agronomy. “The grass potentially could be used in a breeding program to get the continued growth of bahiagrass as the days get shorter in the winter.”
Blount, an assistant professor at the Quincy center, is overseeing the testing of the various strains of bahiagrass in conjunction with Roger Gates, another researcher at the Coastal Plains experiment station. She said preliminary results show that several strains of the grass do seem to be exhibiting the traits the researchers are looking for.
“We’ve identified some plants that grow longer into the fall of the year and have better cold tolerance,” Blount said.
The next step, Blount said, is to begin breeding with the grasses that have the desired traits.
“In addition to extending the growing season and improving cold tolerance, we are selecting grasses for increased forage production, quality and rapid establishment,” Blount said. “We’re trying to build a better bahiagrass.”
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