This summer saw vast tracts of parks and lawns scorched by drought in the UK, but more watering is not a sustainable solution. So what does the future hold for grass?
John Bennett Lawes and Joseph Henry Gilbert were fired up by an unusual mission: how could they help grass grow? It was the heyday of the Victorian era and grass that was cut every summer for hay was the diesel of its day, feeding the horse-power that grew the food for industrial Britain. So, in 1856, Lawes, the owner of a stately home in Hertfordshire, and Gilbert, a chemist, divided seven acres of parkland into plots, fertilising some with manure, treating others with new synthetic fertilisers and leaving some patches alone before cutting each for hay to see which methods produced the highest yield.
The “park grass experiment” is still going today at Rothamsted, the oldest agricultural research station in the world. This summer, when a notoriously rain-drenched island off western Europe became a place of brown parks and yellow meadows, scientists revealed a startling new fact. Over the past century, during which a second agricultural revolution has boosted the efficacy of food production beyond the wildest imaginings of Victorian farmers, yields of hay from the lush Hertfordshire parkland have fallen by around 35%. Yields of spring hay – harvested in June – are forecast to plummet by a further 20% to 50% between 2020 and 2080.
