Evergreen Corp and How to NOT Grow A Few Things
What I learned from stealing a "No-mow grass" startup idea from a stranger
I was at the Aspen Ideas festival and chose to approach a stranger to eat dinner with. He happened to have an education non-profit, which has everything to do with grass, of course 🙄 (well, kids also grow). Really nice guy, he told me how he helped more children in the Middle East get access to quality education. Then I introduced myself as someone who engineers plants to make new things. “Plant synthetic biology is what we call it”.
We were about to say our goodbyes as he was looking for a potential funder for his organization, when he said “You know, I know nothing about plants or genetic engineering but ever since I was a child I’ve had this idea of making grass that doesn’t grow. Sounds like it’s down your alley and could be a big business. You know, cause mowing your grass is always a pain in the neck, especially for big national parks or sports clubs. If you like it, you can run away with the idea, make a lot of money and then donate some of it to my foundation”.
I’d oooobviously never thought about that idea before! I’ve never actually mowed my own grass. I don’t know how much of a pain in the neck it is, I’ve only rejoiced at the smell of freshly cut grass from afar and felt some empathy for those adults who let their homes’ grass grow until it looks like a jungle. “Grass that doesn’t grow” sounds something out of an 1980s futuristic cartoon.
So of course I said “bet, I’ll run away with your idea”. After going down some rabbit holes, I’ve decided to share it with you you can now run away with it too, if something about it happens to be a good idea after all, and if you’re more passionate about grass than I am. Don’t mind donating money to me though! Just tell your friends to subscribe to Biopunk so we all keep creating and enjoying the smell of real fresh biotech 😝.
What’s the problem?
Entrepreneur hat on. When asking myself for whom it is the greatest pain in the neck to mow grass and is willing to try out EverGrass’ biopunk solutions, golf courses were the most obvious call. Their main problem areas, ranked in considered order of importance are:
Salaries represent over half of total maintenance costs. The US national median is 30% of gross profits going to course maintenance. Rough mowers were budgeted at $100,000 in 2023. The greens are the most expensive area to maintain, taking 4,920 annual labor hours greens in mowing and rolling plus fertilizer and chemical applications.
No-play Mondays and mowing mornings suck. Even if clubs spend what they can afford to spend, they’re limiting their users in play time as maintenance takes time. Since workers don’t arrive before 4am in most cases, there’s only so little time to finish before the first tee goes off. Stopping maintenance activities for 2-4 weeks or more, the first mowing will lead to scalping of the playing surface and turfgrass loss.
Disease and weed control are second most expensive. Changing weather conditions in some areas mean new things growing that we definitely don’t want to see in a golf course, like Bermuda grass. Other pests like Dollar Spot have also caused trouble in the past and need a lot of costly chemicals adding up to the budget. Can you guess what the most effective prevention against weeds in turf grass is? Mowing!
Humans aren’t perfect. Never remove more than one third of the leaf blade in a single mow, for grass cut too short or allowed to grow too tall can adversely affect the health and playability of the putting green and stressed turf is more susceptible to diseases, uneven growth, and decline in overall quality.
Machines are noisy. EverGreen could solve this for courses located in residential areas. Not that anyone else might care too much.
Bare in mind that some of this info is outdated, and my interpretation of it may be wrong as I did not talk with any actual industry expert or golf player (though I did play for one year when I was 13 and I used to live very close to a golf club) — If you know better, please let me know if any of this makes sense.
Are the robots enough?
Intern consultant hat on. Outside of mini-golf and some ranges for practice, it’s clear that artificial grass does not even barely make the cut. So naturally, I turned to autonomous mowing. What if there were robots that operated 24/7, mowed flawlessly, didn’t make so much noise, and saved clubs thousands of dollars every year?
Some can provide a sweet 80% reduction in annual maintenance costs of fairways. The drawbacks include the short cutting width (~10 in), having trouble handling slopes, requiring hours to replace the blades, and stumbling upon animals.
I’m not sure if these have been or can be used for the greens, given how much care these areas require. I guess if you can have the robots operating all the time, you want them to cover as much area as possible, without worrying too much for precision.
Interestingly, I’ve seen these myself at Kew Gardens in London. Together with golf greens, botanical gardens don’t receive as much mechanical stress as much as the fairways. Maybe those would be better areas for Evergreen to control grass growth!
Speaking of which, there’s a magic poison through which golf courses already halt this growth. Some plant growth regulators claim to reduce grass growth by up to 50% AND nutritional needs down by 30%. It’s applied once every month and requires you not to cut for at least 48 hours to avoid bagger pick-up or movement.
My napkin calculations say:
$87.88 for a 15.42 kg bag → $5.7/kg
15 kg enough to cover 1,800 m2 → 8.3 g/m2
average area of turfgrass in an 18-hole golf course is 404,686 m2 (100 acres)
at that price, you would need to spend $19,757 to cover all the course with this
if a club spends $750,000 on maintenance and 44% goes to the course maintenance, then the growth regulator would represent 6% of those maintenance costs
Bear in mind that you need to maintain a consistent interval of application to prevent a rebound effect in which turf growth exceeds the growth of an untreated plant.
My interpretation of this is that the robots are too small (and likely too expensive too) to completely replace their human counterparts, and the growth regulators are like chemotherapy to be disrupted by cell therapy (provided black numbers come through).
If I truly wanted to solve this for the golfers, I’d simply go figure out how to make bigger robots to cut all the grass. However, I’m a biotechnologist and this is a Biopunk blog. If you want to learn about robots making plants, check out my previous post. Now, my friend, it’s time to dip our toes into EverGrass. For you, for your old uncle Joe, Kew Gardens, whomever wants it.
How does grass grow?
Biologist hat on. Bermuda grass (Cynodon dactylon) is one of the most popular species used in golf courses. Its leaves are gray-green and 1.5-5.9 in (4-15 cm) long. Average daily temperatures above 24° C are necessary for substantial growth and temperatures of 38° C result in maximum growth rates. It needs direct sunlight in order to grow and dies out with increased levels of shade.
To my delightful surprise, grass growth is quite related to lab-grown cotton (which I worked on for 2 years) in that it has to do with the elongation of plant; and with lateral root growth, which I learned about during my summer at the Brophy Lab.
To my unappealing surprise, I found little literature on the morphology of this type of grass. Here are a few clues, however, that might be helpful for the future creator of Evergrass, in case they know less about grass bio than I do:
Tillers (the green part of the plant we see) grow from meristematic tissue (stem cells) that typically exists just beneath the soil surface but can also be found below ground, which is helpful for survival and regrowth after grazing or in the event of a fire.
Grass can “grow” in two main ways: cell division and cell elongation. Respectively, this means more cells or longer ones. Both can happen at the same time. Type I growth regulators like mefluidide attack division while Type II regulators like flurprimidol, paclobutrazol, ethephon and trinexapac-ethyl, influence elongation through the inhibition of GA synthesis.
Just like in my precious cotton, elongation is regulated in part by enzymes called expansins which loosen the cell wall, which allows for the accommodation of more cell material and water takeup, which increases “turgor” pressure.
GAs (phytohormones) promote expansin activity by degrading DELLA proteins (growth repressors). This lets prefoldins assist in the folding of β-tubulin, which is a vital component of the cytoskeleton. Different regulators act on different stages of the GA synthesis pathway.
From my cotton archives I remember a paper where they overexpress GhHOX3, a factor that targets genes that regulate expansins and thus cell elongation. They also confirmed that its down-regulation leads to over 80% reduction in fiber length… which makes me wonder: could a knock out of a few key genes involved in grass cell wall elongation be the first step towards grass that doesn’t grow?
I still don’t understand if the grass could still be alive if it’s not growing. Perhaps the growth could simply be redirected towards the roots, which happens under the use of many of the aforementioned growth regulators. Or maybe a variety like that would simply grow less — That’s all yours to figure out! 🤠
For the record, I did try applying different GA concentrations on Arabidopsis cell cultures while I was at Imperial College London. I didn’t know what I was doing, I don’t think cell cultures were the best idea in terms of measuring elongation but it was fun exposure and I did notice higher cell division under higher GA concentrations.
A few other things
Dreamer hat on. It’s very ironic how one of the first things I ever learned about biology, from germinating that little bean seed in elementary school, is that if something grows, if it changes, if it expands or elongates, it’s a sign that it might be a living. Biology grows and usually, we want it to grow.
In agriculture, we want biology to grow as much food (or cotton!) as possible. In most cultures, the taller you are, the more respected you are. Many organizations are dedicated to growing as many trees as they can to capture CO2. For obvious reasons, beer brewers care a lot about their yeast multiplying.
At the same time, we like to stay in control of this growth. We want shorter stems and more produce. People can also be discriminated for being too tall. We prune trees when they disrupt our modern world on the streets or when we want yet more growth. We want just enough yeast growth according to the nutrients we can provide for them and how much beer we want.
When thinking about the living things we’ve tried to make shorter, bonsai trees and teacup dogs are top of mind. We think of them as cute, not only because they’re small but because they’re still living. Those, however, have so far been created through more physical means and selection.
Evergreen engineers growth, starting with elongation. In the future, I would like their technology to control the growth of everything from miniature dragons like those in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, or absolutely gianormous plants like those in Mario Bros’s Colossal World.
