3 TIMES MORE LAWN IN US THAN CORN
NASA researchers set out to measure the amount of turf grass grown in the US. The stumbling block was that much of the turf grass is on small plots and hard to distinguish from NASA land assessment satellites. So they found a correlation between impervious surface and lawn that stayed surprisingly constant across the US. With this tool they were able to calculate that there is three times as much turf grass than corn in the US!
This ranks it as the largest irrigated crop in the country covering over 128,000 square kilometers, or almost 50,000 square miles.
The study also showed that as much as 16.7 teragrams of carbon each year could be kept out of the atmosphere and stored in lawns by simply leaving clippings on the grass and letting them decompose. That’s equivalent to about 37 billion pounds—the weight of about 147,000 blue whales. Additionally, the lawns will require at least half as much fertilizer, saving even more carbon.
Our homes will be so much prettier if we replace much of these lawns with native plants. They won’t need chemicals, many can absorb and filter so much more water than grass can, and they provide food and housing for the insects, amphibians, and birds we all need. This is such an easy and beautiful way to improve our water quality!
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