Editor's Focus: Nov. 1998

It will never go away, in all likelihood. Instead, it’s a fact of doing business in this industry.

The ‘it’ in question here? The fact that portions of the general populous will forever decry the industry’s use of pesticide products to deliver a healthier, more attractive landscape. The following information appeared in an article entitled, “Greener Grass vs. Cleaner Water; Effort to Cure Bay Does Little About Doctoring Lawns,” in The Washington Post.

“Ehrlich Green Team is in the business of providing a fragrant piece of the suburban American dream: thick, emerald-green grass. The Pennsylvania-based chain of lawn care franchises makes liberal use of fertilizer and applies chemicals that show weeds and bugs no pity.”

The article goes on to discuss how such “liberal” use of these products threatens the health of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, at least in the eyes of environmentalists and state conservation experts.

“For those who worry about the Chesapeake, therein lies a predicament: how to persuade suburbanites to moderate their visions of the ideal lawn so as to limit reliance on the fertilizers that wash into the water, fueling environmental ills such as oxygen-choking algae blooms and the toxic microbe Pfiesteria piscicida,” said the article.

Currently, the agricultural community is receiving the lion’s share of the criticism in Maryland, and a state law passed there this year imposed controversial limits on the amount of fertilizer farmers could apply. Lawn care operators must abide by the same guidelines, but only on properties of three acres or larger.

Toward the end of the article, a green industry voice is finally heard. Kirk Hurto, vice president of technical services for TruGreen-ChemLawn, shared a widely held view that turfgrass in fact demands more fertilizer requirements than the maximum three applications recommended by the University of Maryland’s Cooperative Extension Service.

But the article offers no direct quotes from Hurto and limits his contribution to just one paragraph before returning to conservationists’ views that “thorough environmental protection demands a cultural breakthrough … a refashioning of lawn aesthetics that ditches the notion that the perfect turf is uniform and utterly free of weeds.”

Such an article illustrates how committed contractors must be to making sure that a complete picture of the facts is presented at all times. Obviously, such efforts may not always yield positive results, particularly when other individuals control the flow of information.

But articles such as this one have the potential to sway public opinion, and allowing this to happen without telling the industry’s story as well leaves the industry no one to blame but itself.