The Biggest Lie Your Lawn Care Provider Is Telling You

The lawn care industry has a bad habit of selling a well-maintained lawn as an effective way to remove carbon from the atmosphere.  In a report requested by the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute (an institute that directly benefits from the lawn care industry) it is stated that an acre of turf grass can sequester 920lb of carbon a year.  While this is true, take away the carbon that is released by mowing, watering, and fertilizing the lawn, and the net carbon sink is a mere 120lb per year.  This doesn’t even include other emissions like the gas burned by companies lugging lawn care equipment around town all day, every day of the growing season. In comparison, an acre of maple trees can sequester 13,740lb of CO2 or 3,750lb of carbon (I had to break out my periodic table for the first time in years to figure that out) in a year.  So it’s pretty hard for me to believe that a lawn is, in any way, an effective carbon sink.

The carbon footprint of maintaining a lawn should not be ignored, but there is something else missing from the conversation about how lawns negatively affect the environment.  Lawns actively destroy valuable habitats for birds, bees, and other animals that are important to the ecosystem.

The bee population has seen a massive decline over the last few years.  Scott McArt, assistant professor of pollinator health at Cornell University, says that managed bee populations have decreased by 40.7% from April 2018 to April 2019.  90% of the world’s nutrition comes from crops that rely on pollinators and honey bees are the most important pollinators in agriculture.  So the loss of bees would mean the loss of most of your favorite foods including apples, pears, coffee, vanilla, and even utility crops like cotton.

Pollinators like honey bees need flowers to survive.  So when cities and other human-made structures interfere with forests, meadows, and other pollinator pathways, it cuts bees off from migrating to new areas.  All the bees need is a few pit-stops along the way and these pathways that link together entire ecosystems can be restored.  To create pollinator pathways in our modern urban environments, we can start by removing a little bit of our lawns and planting native flowering plants in an effort of habitat restoration.

On top of the loss of habitat, the use of pesticides (specifically neonicotinoids) have become many pollinators’ worst enemy.  Neonicotinoids don’t just stay on the surface of the plant but are actually absorbed by the plant due to their solubility in water.  This means that any animal who eats or drinks nectar from the plant, is exposed to the effects of the pesticide.  The farmers trying to save their crops with these chemicals are actively killing the very creatures that allow their crops to thrive.

The future for bees doesn’t look great unless we all play our part in restoring pollinator pathways and stopping the use of harmful pesticides.  The good news is that this is very easy to do with just a few easy steps:

1. Plant bee-friendly plants in your garden
2. Don’t use neonicotinoidal pesticides (and support farmers who do the same)
3. Spread the word about the declining population of pollinators

With these simple steps, we can all start repairing the damage our lawns have been doing to the the planet.  Help me save the bees and save the planet by sharing this post with just 1 person who you think would appreciate it.