One challenge for LCO’s in maintaining healthy and well cared for lawns is the potential for turfgrass to develop excess thatch. Building upon years of research and testing, the team at ZymeCo has created ThatchZyme - the first effective and proven sprayable program for managing turfgrass thatch.
According to Dr. Phil Dwyer of ZymeCo, “Customers have told us how excess thatch can affect lawn quality throughout the season and have shared the different problems thatch causes like: puffy uneven growth resulting in mower wheel rutting and scalping, increased disease pressure, shallow rooting, and poor water use efficiency. Many also describe how aggressive mechanical aerification and dethatching practices may help, these practices also pose challenges and have limitations due to high equipment and labor costs plus the growing potential of damaging buried wires like those used for: internet, dog fences, and autonomous mower guides.”
With these issues in mind, turfgrass researchers looked to fungal biology to discover a way to accelerate thatch breakdown. ZymeCo co-founder Dr. Tad Huber explains “The reason thatch persists and accumulates in lawns is because of a protective component contained in its plant cell walls called lignin. Fungi are especially good at producing very powerful enzymes in order to decompose or “eat” hard to degrade organic matter like thatch. In nature this lignin can only be broken down enzymatically by a specific enzyme called Laccase. Knowing this we were able to develop a fungal fermentation process in our Colorado Springs biofactory to make a highly concentrated and effective proprietary form of laccase”.
Applied to turfgrass in a spray program, this laccase in ThatchZyme works to break down the lignin in thatch which then allows the existing soil biology to do the rest of its work, degrading thatch easier and faster.
Operations seeking an effective sprayable program for managing thatch now have a solution to both offer results for customers and a new source of incremental sales revenue. ThatchZyme is tank-mix compatible and works in yearly programs of 3 to 6 applications per season.
