Seeing green

Story by Bruce Barker

The business of ground cover is big.  When you take a stroll along a lush city pathway, swing a golf club, pot a plant or watch your kids play soccer, you’re enjoying ground cover. From grass seed and sod, to peat from an Alberta bog, agriculture is helping people appreciate the great outdoors.

“WE PLAY SPORTS.WE USE GRASSES FOR EROSION control.We like grass for aesthetic purposes. There are so many ways that turf grass is used that the size of the business is hard to get a handle on,” explains Jim Ross, executive director of the Prairie Turfgrass Research Centre at Olds College at Olds, Alberta. A good guesstimate puts it around $1.2 billion.

What does it include? Golf courses. City and regional parks. Sports fields, cemeteries, school grounds, home owner property. Sod. If it’s green and soft, Alberta’s agriculture industry was likely involved.

There's more grass than you think

Turf grass seed grown in the Peace River Region of Alberta travels the world.Creeping red fescue seed is used in grass mixtures for turf and land reclamation. If you scatter grass seed on your lawn in the spring or lay sod for a new lawn, chances are the seed came from the Peace River Region. In fact, the Region is one of the world’s top grass seed producers.

When you chase the little white ball down the links, you’re walking on made-in-Alberta grass.With 300 golf courses in Alberta covering around 12,000 hectares of land, there’s a lot of green growing out there.

Paradise wasn't paved over here

Outside of provincial and national parks, towns and cities have some of the greatest areas of green space set aside for public enjoyment. Ron Krell with the City of Calgary’s Park Development and Operations says that theurban development industry is required to set aside 10% of their developments for green space, which includes areas for school envelopes, community buildings and parks.

“We estimate there are 9,125 hectares of green spaces in approximately 3,000 park sites in the city,” says Krell. That spreads over 885 playgrounds, 398 ball diamonds, 435 soccer fields, 227 tennis courts, 6,103 park benches, 330,000 trees and 456 kilometres of pathways! Not to be outdone, Edmonton bills itself as having more green spaces than any other city in Canada. Their North Saskatchewan River Valley forms the country’s largest urban park system.

For peat's sake, there's even more

When you are digging around in your garden, transplanting bedding out plants or planting flowers in pots, your fingers are in another Alberta industry that leads the world. Peat moss harvested in Alberta ends up in greenhouses and potting soil and is even used in growing mushrooms.

The peat that you buy in those rectangular compressed bales at the local garden centre comes from dead and decomposing sphagnum moss that slowly accumulates in a boreal bog. Alberta has 103,000 square kilometres of peatland, which represents a whopping 16.3% of Alberta’s land base.

Alberta peat sales total about $33.5 million. Roughly 30% of the harvested peat moss is used by home gardeners and landscapers. Professional growers in greenhouses use 60% and the final 10% are used for growing mushrooms. Over three-quarters of the Alberta production is shipped to the U.S.with other exports moving to Japan and British Columbia.

Gerry Hood, the Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association (CSPMA) president says Canada has approximately 25% of the world’s approximately one billion acres of peat bogs, but only a small percentage is harvested in Canada annually.

“We are making this a sustainable industry. We only harvest about one acre in 6,000, so the impact is very small,” explains Hood. On top of the minimal harvest rates, CSPMA also uses reclamation practices to ensure that harvested bogs can regenerate – albeit at a glacial pace of one millimetre per year.

“It takes centuries to replace the amount of peat harvested, so it has to be managed sustainably,” says Hood.“Peatlands are important for water filtration and wildlife ecosystems and, as such, they’re a vital environmental tool.”

Indeed, sustainability of peatlands is also important when looking at carbon sequestration, green house gases and all things Kyoto. Peatlands are an important carbon sink and store 25% of the world’s terrestrial carbon.According to the Peatland Resource Centre at the Devonian Botanic Gardens’website, the amount of carbon stored in peatlands is roughly equivalent to threequarters of the global atmospheric carbon.

Surprised by the importance of ground cover in Alberta? Don’t be. The industry is accustomed to being walked on, dug around in, played on, or just silently admired.