Blades of platinum

Blades of platinum

If only growing a company happened as fast as growing grass.

Just ask executives with Turf Ecosystems, a company that developed a grass called Platinum TE that can be watered with salty brackish water. It's taken them five years to develop this grass, which won a patent Sept. 16.

The grass is a marvel of bioengineering. Ronny Duncan and his colleagues transformed a salt and drought tolerant but wild grass called paspalum from its rough texture to putting-green smoothness. Duncan, who joined Turf Ecosystems after a career in academic research at the University of Georgia, is considered a leading expert in turf grass management.

And it helps that the company is an affiliate of Collier Enterprises, a real estate and development company in Naples that is descended from the county's patriarch, Barron Gift Collier.

Still, Duncan and his colleagues took a big gamble when they decided to test their new Platinum paspalum grass on a super-exclusive Old Collier Golf Club that Collier Enterprises started building in 2001. "It was a risky venture," says Duncan, looking back.

It's not that Collier Enterprises had much of a choice: fresh water would not be available on the site off U.S. 41 near Immokalee Road and they could only irrigate with brackish water from the Cocohatchee River nearby. That salty water would kill ordinary grass. But would discriminating golf players be pleased with the texture of the paspalum grass in this $30-million project? Would it resist diseases and maintain its color?

If it worked, they reasoned, there would be a business opportunity to recoup their investment by selling the grass to other golf courses around the world. And if that proved successful, there's the holy grail of the turf world: residential lawns.

Indeed, that's exactly what happened. Duncan had discovered the sturdy grass thriving in coastal areas of the U.S. where slave ships once docked, such as Savannah. That's because paspalum is a grass that originated in southern Africa and slave-ship captains lined the holds of their ships with it before loading their human cargo.

Duncan and senior agronomist Tim Hiers worked to develop a paspalum that would be pleasing to golfers used to Bermuda and other grasses at evaluation plots in Naples and in a nursery in Desoto County.

"A typical breeding program is normally 12 to 15 years," Duncan says. They developed the new cultivar of paspalum in just five years.

With a patent in hand, Turf Ecosystems now licenses the grass to growers, who pay the company a license fee of $25,000 plus royalties that depend on how much they grow. Already, three farms in the U.S. are growing Platinum TE and the grass is growing on golf courses as far away as Dubai, where fresh water is scarce. The company expects to be profitable in a year.

But Turf Ecosystems executives are eyeing much more than golf courses. There are 140,000 acres of irrigated golf courses in the U.S., but 5 million acres of home lawns, they say. The company is looking at a residential cultivar of paspalum or zoysia, another type of grass.

It's where the grass really is greener.

-Jean Gruss