Are Lawns Worth the Water they Need?

by Sarah West, Executive Director of the California Sod Producers Association

The answer is yes.  But is there a way for cities to preserve the benefits of lawns while shutting off the water waste?  How can cities keep the lawns their communities need and love with limited water supplies?

Lawns are worth what they need, but not what they get. During this drought there’s no excuse for over watering your lawn.  Yet studies consistently show most homeowners apply more – often twice as much more – water than their lawns need.  Why even bother?  What’s the upside to lawns?  And In a nutshell lawns mitigate the effects of intensive urban and suburban living.  Have you ever walked across a baking parking lot and felt the temperature sink when you reached the lawn? 

Lawns are giant air conditioners, or more accurately swamp coolers, cooling neighborhoods and mitigating the heat island effect through evaporation.  Asphalt, concrete and other non living surfaces trap heat and warm up our cities while lawns have the opposite effect.  Lawns draw us into the backyard, providing safe play surfaces for children and bringing the natural world to our grateful feet. Lawns trap and filter storm water running off hard surfaces like roofs, decks and driveways.  Lawns provide fire resistant defensive space around homes. They trap dust and reduce noise and glare.  But how can cities keep the lawns their communities need and love with limited water supplies?

First of all lawns need less water than most people realize.  Evapotranspiration, or ET for short, is the term that describes the amount of water that evaporates from the soil plus the water that transpires from the leaves of the plant, in this case grass.  ET based irrigation controllers – the gold standard in landscape water conservation tools – are coming online from major manufacturers and landscape professionals are installing them in large landscapes across the state.  All new large landscapes should include an ET based irrigation controller and should meet a reasonable water budget, not more than 80% ET.  The California Sod Producers Association can put you in touch with a landscape contractor that will create a landscape water budget that meets or exceeds your water conservation goals, while maintaining the environmental benefits of lawns.

In an effort to reduce water use some cities are instituting “Cash for Grass” programs, paying people to tear out their lawns and replace them with desert plants or artificial turf.  Cash for Grass programs usually begin with an estimate of the water the new program will save.  But often those calculations compare the new landscape against an over watered lawn with an inefficient, outdated irrigation system.  Rebates for ET controllers, aggressive public education and effective enforcement of good water management will get better results. 

What about artificial turf?  While the new generation of artificial turf looks more realistic it’s still made of plastic.  And the pads are made of ground up used tires, complete with all the chemicals the tires picked up in their former lives on the highways.  If your city won’t accept used tires in its landfill will it accept them in the form of artificial turf?  Plus plastic just can’t provide the environmental benefits that real grass does.

Give the lawns in your city only what they need and they’ll bring the natural world to your feet.