Marshall Brain's Blog

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Grass

In DISCOVER magazine this month (July 2003) there is an article on grass that contains these remarkable statistics:

• There are 50 million lawns in America.
  
• They consume 270 billion gallons of water every week. (6 gallons of fresh water for every person on the planet every day)
  
• People apply 67 million pounds of pesticides to their lawns every year.
  
• The lawn mowers that cut these lawns consume 580 million gallons of gas each year.
  
• There are 30 million acres of lawn, golf course, athletic field, public park, cemetery and sod farm in the U.S.
  
• 50 million lawns, 700,000 athletic fields, 14,500 golf courses.
  
• The "turf" industry represents $45 billion per year.
  
• In many U.S. cities, 60% of the fresh water produced by the city goes to lawn irrigation.
  

Other fun facts totally unrelated to the DISCOVER article:

• If your grass looks really bad, you can paint it with Green Lawnger green turf paint.
  
• When they paint the grass for the logos at a football game, Missouri Turf Paint is the vendor.
  
• Artificial turf is so realistic now that you can't hardly tell the difference. Artificial Turf Strikes Back talks about how real it is.
  
  
  This is artificial. Click on it.