Rigby Taylor reveals new environmentally friendly grass seed mixtures

By Alistair June 21, 2019 08:34 Updated

Rigby Taylor has announced a range of Carbon4Grass grass seed mixtures that combine increased levels of carbon sequestration potential with desirable amenity characteristics for a range of sports and general amenity applications – enabling turf professionals to reduce their carbon footprints while maintaining high-class playing surfaces.

For example, the Carbon4Grass Sports Field Renovation and Super Root mixes demonstrate the potential to sequester at least double the amount of carbon over comparative mixes. Low Maintenance, which includes slower growing cultivars with higher carbon ‘scores’, have also been identified by Rigby Taylor to help decrease the frequency and therefore mitigate the impact of mowing.

With the extreme global weather events of recent years universally attributed to climate change and exacerbated by an increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, there are progressive choices and positive actions the groundscare industry can take to help develop and sustain a more enjoyable and healthy green infrastructure, says Rigby Taylor. One is the adoption of Carbon4Grass mixtures.

Grass absorbs CO2 for use in photosynthesis and while it is known that one hectare of natural, open grassland can sequester (lock up) up to 2.5 tonnes of carbon per annum, these new amenity cultivars sequester relatively more carbon.

A Carbon4Grass study at the Top Green Breeding & Research Station in France commenced in 2005 with the initial aim of identifying differences in the carbon sequestration values of managed amenity grass species.

The study revealed significant differences between species in their capacity to store and sequester carbon under the same environmental conditions (depending on local environmental conditions and maintenance inputs). The study progressed to assess a range of cultivars within species and, over time, new cultivars from the breeding programme were entered into the study.