Upheavals mark seed trade

Turfgrass is the green thread binding the diverse Green Industry. Its utility and versatility is the cornerstone of our industry. Turfgrass is essential to our livelihoods — reason enough to keep track of what’s happening with the turf seed business.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Catastrophe strikes

Did you know that a cataclysmic event occurred 15,000 years ago, defining the regions of our country that developed into our prime seed production areas?

Imagine the volume of water flowing in all the world’s rivers. Multiply that by 10 and put it into a lake on a high plateau stretching across northwestern Montana. Now picture a 2,500-ft. tall glacial ice dam holding back this lake. Picture the dam collapsing under the pressure of the lake, producing a wall of water 2,000-ft. high traveling at 65 mph sweeping away everything in its path.

Geologists say that just such an event shaped the landscape of much of the Inland and Pacific Northwest.

As the deluge rushed west, it stripped the soil from the earth, leaving behind bedrock and gravel. Some soil was deposited in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, 400 miles west. Today, the “scablands” in northern Idaho and eastern Oregon, which are 80% gravel, grow much of the nation’s bluegrass seed. In the Willamette Valley, farmers produce most of the nation’s ryegrass, fescue and bentgrass seeds.

Another big blow

A more recent upheaval in the same regions, this one economic, is easier to picture: the collapse of seed consolidator AgriBioTech in 2000. Its failure rocked the turf seed market and left growers with tons of seed in their fields with no place for it to go. This was a big blow for the seed business, coming in a period of overproduction. Seed prices have been in a funk ever since.

When we toured the seed producing areas of northern Idaho and the Willamette Valley in Oregon several weeks ago, we learned that suppliers and farmers there have plowed under thousands of acres of perennial ryegrass fields to balance supply with demand. Taking into account 2001’s short crop, the ryegrass surplus could be history by spring of 2003, and prices will likely rise.

But, the turf seed business is complicated. As seed producers meet one challenge, another always arises.

More challenges still ahead

Insiders say a bumper crop of K-31 tall fescue is being harvested in the Midwest this year. K-31 is a pasture grass, no match for the quality turf-type tall fescue seed grown in Oregon. But it will keep producers there from getting the prices they want, considering that thousands of acres taken out of ryegrass ended up as tall fescue fields.

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p> The price of turf grass seed, many varieties of which have remained unchanged for decades, is one of the biggest bargains going. It looks like it’s going to remain that way.