The book says that according to studies of NASA satellite imaging the country’s number one irrigated crop is, you guessed it, lawn grass. In fact, American lawns cover more than 40,000 square miles, ironically, a land area larger than the state of Kentucky.
It goes on to state that “a 2002 Harris Survey suggests as a nation we spend $28.9 billion yearly on lawns” (that’s about $1,200 per household) and that we use three times as much synthetic pesticide on our laws as we do per acre of agricultural crops, or about 67 million pounds annually according to the Safer Pest Control Project.
Another startling set of numbers comes courtesy of the EPA: “54 million Americans mow their lawns each weekend, using 800 million gallons of gas per year and producing tons of air pollutant…..one older gas-powered mower emits the same pollutants as forty-three cars being driven 12,000 miles per year.” Even newer models of mowers emit “eleven times the pollutants of a new car.”
Adding a final insult to injury, it is reported that “seventeen million gallons of fuel, mostly gasoline, are spilled each year while refueling lawn equipment.”
But the stats of greatest concern are about water. Between fifty and seventy percent of residential water use is attributed to landscape, mostly lawns, translating to roughly ten thousand gallons of water per summer for each one thousand square feet of lawn.
So how did we come to find ourselves on this treadmill of “water, fertilize, mow…water, fertilize, mow” anyway?
The answer is more complex than it might seem at first blush. I remember building in a Southwestern desert climate city that at one time required projects to meet certain minimum percentage of turf in the landscape plan, an insane regulation that was later reversed in order to limit the amount of turf and other water guzzling landscape plants/trees in new projects.
We have seen public policy go to some pretty extreme measures to reduce water demand for landscape. The Southern Nevada Water Authority even offered homeowners $1.50 a square foot for removing grass from their landscape.
May I humbly offer that we might just want to use some common sense?
Posted: 3/15/2012 3:23:57 PM by
Mary Kestner | with 3 comments