The next #1 turfgrass variety is a one-in-5,000 stroke of brilliance
When a superstar football team scores, the crowd roars for their brilliance. But few think of the hours of selection, training, and preparation behind that goal. And even fewer think about the work that goes into creating the perfect, lush-green surface on which they play. Football - and every great field sport - relies on the quality of the turf beneath the players’ feet. The turf of an international sporting venue is the hidden partner behind every legendary goal and trophy-winning putt – the magical playing surface that makes brilliant play possible. And this is the story of the painstaking development and selection processes that give the world its finest turf genetics.
Crowd-pleasing, list-topping turf is a numbers game
Every successful new turf variety - the variety that tops the recommended lists - is the product of an intensive editing and testing process. The three factors behind that process are: selection intensity, variation, and time.
Selection intensity is about numbers - having enough candidate plants from which to choose the one single specimen that magnificently outperforms the rest. That’s why we test many new candidates every year - often many more.
The trials that guide this selection process are intensive and time-consuming. We use them to assess each variety for the traits that matter for sports or lawn performance: quality, density, wear-tolerance, disease-resistance, and low-input maintenance.
Selection is part science, part art. We rely on faultless execution and meticulous measurement using state-of-the-art equipment. Above all, we rely on the expert eye of an experienced plant breeder - someone who understands which variety pairings are likely to prove most fruitful and who can spot tell-tale differences across hundreds of test plots, where others see nothing but grassy uniformity.
Success born from time, diligence, and genetic variety
Variation is the genetic factor that gives us choice. For each trait we seek, we need source plants with a wide range of performances from lowest to highest. Without variation, there could be no selection.
Fortunately, turfgrasses tend to exhibit a broad range of genetic variability. Our breeders exploit this variation to combine the best characteristics of one individual with those of another. Every summer, in row after row of enclosed cabins, they let matched pairs of plants of different origins and performance superiorities exchange genetics through pollination.
Their aim is to produce offspring that surpass both parents. Such outstanding offspring are rare and can only be revealed by intensive selection. The process is exhaustive. To account for varying weather and disease conditions, we test candidates across countries and climates, and over multiple years. That’s why our breeding efforts for the top variety can easily create more than 5,000 test plots around the world. It’s expensive and time-consuming, but it’s the only way to find the #1, list-topping needle in our turfgrass haystack - the specialist variety that will thrive in your local or regional market.
Finding that #1 variety typically takes around ten years from the initial pair crossing over seed multiplication to intensive testing. Since wholesalers and their customers can’t wait ten years between innovations, we start a fresh breeding cycle every year. That gives you and your customers a constant conveyor of superior new varieties as each rolling ten-year cycle comes to an end.
Tested, tested, and retested to reach the top
Before any new variety reaches the wholesale or distributor network, it is subject to many more tests. The first is a straightforward, technical test to check that the variety is genuinely new and not someone else’s property.
The other tests are the crucial ones: the independent tests carried out on behalf of various national or regional market authorities to confirm that claims of higher quality, improved wear-tolerance, superior disease-resistance and other traits are fully substantiated.
This is where the decade-long process of selection and refinement comes into its own. If we’ve done our work well, the new variety earns its place at the top of the world’s leading recommendation lists.
Few players ever reach the final of a global football tournament. And only a few exceptional varieties land that #1 recommendation. But when they do, superstar players and superstar turfgrasses come together to create a sporting spectacle so magnificent, fans will be talking about it for years to come.
To learn more about DLF varieties that made it to the top of the recommended lists and to the top international sporting events - and which will, as a result, top your own wholesale sales charts - speak to your DLF representative.
