Stewart Bennett drove the golf cart for Duncan as he scoured the course. Bennett had recently bought Alden Pines, which sits on a barrier island on Florida’s gulf coast - one of the few locations in the lower 48 where Paspalum vaginatum had adapted. Paspalum is a necessity in arid, salty climates that punish bentgrass or bermudagrass into withered lumps. Duncan staked his career to paspalum, believing environmental concerns and restrictions on clean water use might squeeze bent and bermuda courses from existence.

Duncan’s visit to Alden Pines followed the protocol agronomists have used since the 19th century, in which a researcher offers a course owner a handshake agreement: The samples the course provides, combined with the nurturing and expertise of the scientist, will benefit the game, not either of us.

Duncan took his snippets back to the University of Georgia campus at Griffin, an agricultural research center where he is a professor of turfgrass breeding and stress physiology. “I have spent my entire career developing grasses for environmentally-stressed conditions, working with drought, acid soils and salinity,” he says. “The probability of finding or creating a new cultivar with all the traits needed in one package is a numbers game. Less than one percent ever reach the market.”

But one sample from Alden Pines, grown first in greenhouse pots and then in the field, proved to be exceptional. It withstood wear, salt and stress better than all the others. It possessed the traits Duncan sought for putting greens: tight growth, disease resistance and a tolerance for low mowing heights. After more extensive field research, Duncan formulated guidelines for the best possible management practices for commercial production of the strain. He prepared the turf for market in the late 1990s by officially turning the grass over to the University of Georgia Research Foundation (UGARF), which filed for a patent on a grass named Sea Isle 2000.

Then, just as validation of Duncan’s work drew nigh, the culmination of years of work, Bennett brought the process to an abrupt halt. He filed a lawsuit - unprecedented in turfgrass history - questioning the validity of the handshake agreement. Bennett’s complaint in Lee County (Fla.) Circuit Court claimed Duncan misled him and did not explain the possibilities offered by any of the samples he collected.

The UGARF, which released Sea Isle 2000 for large-scale production in 2000, filed its own suit in Georgia Middle District Court in Athens. It claims Bennett engaged in predatory and anti-competitive conduct by trying to secure his own patent for three strains of paspalum developed from Alden Pines.

 A year later Sea Isle 2000 remains on the shelf, in limbo because of the litigation. And the placid world of agronomy, meanwhile, has suddenly been thrust face-to-face with an unexamined question: Just who does own grass?

There are no easy answers. The lawsuits go beyond the property rights of a putting green or lawn. They treat strains of grass as intellectual property, eligible for market protection, just like toothpaste or a better mousetrap. In a worst-case scenario, researchers say, the lawsuits threaten to constrain their hunt for the samples that feed their experiments. Researchers may be forced to negotiate usage rights with a landowner before stepping on their property, not knowing whether they will find anything of worth. Or they may be banned from courses to avoid legal entanglements.

“I don’t think it’s going to affect me as much in this stage of my career,” says Dr. Terry Riordan, 58, a University of Nebraska professor of agronomy and horticulture who holds patents on about 15 grasses. “But it could affect the students I’m teaching now and how they work.”

Riordan says he has enough field samples to see the end of his work in buffalograss, a niche species he developed that thrives in the nation’s breadbasket. That may seem a strange statement from a man nearly a decade from retirement, but it often takes that long to turn a sample the size of your thumb into a saleable product. Although the development curve is compressing, long lead times remain the norm.

“I remember the only thing Professor [H.B.] Musser said to me,” recalls Dr. Joseph Duich, who spent 36 years as lead researcher (and Musser’s successor) at Penn State University before retiring in 1991. “He said, ‘I expect you to do in 10 years what I would do in 30 years.’ It was a professorial challenge.”

Still, most turf researchers rarely release anything of widespread impact until they are in their 40s - after years of more error than trial. A young researcher, already hampered by nature’s slow development timetable, could be forced to wait even later before making a significant contribution.

Why have these ownership issues never surfaced before? A brief history told with a smattering of genetics, business and federal legislation helps one understand.

For more than a century, nearly all plant research has been performed at state universities, which built campuses in rural areas. Taxpayers covered costly research and development carried out through Cooperative Extension Service Agents with the help of farmers. Any benefits and products passed to the farmers eventually improved what was served on dinner tables, as well as the economy and environment.

The Georgia Station, where Duncan teaches, is one such

facility. Opened in 1888, the Griffin campus has played a hand in countless developments, including dozens of crop varieties and the freeze-preservation of foods. It is also one of the few places in the U.S. where paspalum research is taking place.

When a university has a worthy product, it turns to a commercial developer such as a seed company, nursery or farm to handle the production, packaging, distribution and marketing. The problem for many years was that there was no product protection. Developing an improved tomato didn’t have the same potential for royalties as inventing a toaster. It wasn’t until President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Plant Patent Act in 1937 that vegetative plants became eligible as intellectual property. (There are the two methods of plant reproduction: vegetative and seed. The former  reproduce asexually, “extending” into identical plants by growing or by being grafted onto another plant.)

After the Plant Patent Act, universities had more luck forming exclusive deals with developers or bidding products out on an item-by-item basis. They could sell the royalties and rights for a lump sum or take a small annual return. That income - more often trickles than torrents - nurtured continued R&D.

The Plant Patent Act was wonderful for vegetative research, but it did nothing for scientists who worked with plants that reproduce from seeds. In 1970, the Plant Variety Protection Act did. For turf, the enactment of that act rivals the switch from hickory to steel shafts in clubs.

“That was a really big breakthrough,” recalls Penn State’s Duich. “Prior to that time, nobody was going to invest in propagation from seed because there was no intellectual property protection. That opened the door for all the private breeders.”

And many breeds. “Before the PVP Act there were three improved varieties of perennial ryegrass,” says Duich, who was in his 40s when the act passed. “There are 150 to 170 now. Back then there was one creeping bentgrass, Penncross. This year there are probably 30 to 35 on the market.”

The 1970 law is why supermarket produce sections and garden catalogs now contain seedless watermelons and peppers of every hue. The slightest alteration in composition made a plant eligible for a new patent until a 1995 amendment restricted the law somewhat.

These legal developments invigorated the turfgrass business, causing some commercial developers to raid university faculties and set up their own research teams. But they didn’t make anyone rich quick. Agreements vary but the royalty for planting an entire course with one strain might be $1,200. A university’s share of that might be 5 percent, or $60 - split among anyone whose name appears on the patent: lead researcher, graduate assistants, others on the development team. Researchers sometimes grant a share to a course or superintendent who allowed a key sample’s collection. Commercial developers make out somewhat better because fewer parties have a hand in the till.

“It may be different in [Duncan’s] situation, that there is so much potential value that it’s worth arguing over,” says Nebraska’s Riordan. “But I don’t think any of us who are involved in this get more than $3,000 a year from a single patent.”

The smallest funding, however, can become crucial at a state-run institution. Not long after the seed floodgates opened - at least, not long in turf development - universities began pruning agricultural budgets. The USGA, which has bankrolled turf research since the Green Section’s debut in the 1920s, stepped up its support. (The USGA has provided more than $350,000 for Duncan’s work and, as with most funding offered to researchers, is entitled to a percentage of any royalties. But it stands little chance of recouping that amount regardless of the outcome of the litigation.) Funding appeared from corporate developers. For researchers working on other plants, the grass suddenly proved greener on the other side. That was true for Duncan, who until the early 1990s had been doing stress tolerance work on grain sorghum.

“Most research projects are selected by individual scientists because there is a source of money, they have a lot of experience in that area or they think there’s an opportunity to make some pretty significant progress,” says Earl Elsner, director of the Georgia Seed Development Commission. “Since there had been no significant breeding work done with paspalum as a species, Ronny focused his early energies on doing plant exploration and bringing in as many different ecotypes as he could find.”

When Duncan visited Alden Pines in 1993, course owners did not demand - or expect - anything in return for allowing access. A handshake was a handshake. So pervasive is this philosophy, in fact, that no one interviewed for this story could point to a written protocol for collecting samples.

Duncan arrived at Alden Pines a few months after Bennett and Tom Robertson bought the course, a 5,596-yard layout that opened in 1980. Bennett, who has an associate’s degree in golf course operations from Lake City (Fla.) Community College, had spent several years working on courses but hadn’t seen much paspalum.

“I had to start doing a lot of research and tried to find out what I could in literature, magazines, libraries, the Internet,” Bennett recalls. “This amounted to about 30 pages, maybe, and I realized I had to start finding things out on my own. I did experiments, test plots, evaluations, mowing heights, salinity, insect resistance.”

Bennett is not a trained researcher. The encyclopedic background belonged to Duncan, who last year released a virtual owner’s manual, Seashore Paspalum, The Environmental Turfgrass, written with fellow professor Robert Carrow.

     Paspalum is drawing interest in a U.S. market that relies on bermuda. Southern Turf Nurseries has unveiled a product called ‘Salam’ paspalum for fairways, roughs and greens. It was developed from a sprig discovered  in Hawaii by company vice president and agronomist Don Roberts. One of Duncan’s strains, named Sea Isle 1 and formulated for fairways and rough, went into production in 2000. Experts believe Sea Isle 2000 will have a far greater impact (see story on page 34). Bennett has patents pending on Sea Way, Sea Green and Sea Dwarf.

For every promise of ecological benefit shown by these strains (a researcher’s dream), the lawsuits reduce the potential impact of the discovery (a researcher’s nightmare). Neither Bennett or Duncan will speak about their pending actions, although Bennett says he filed his suit “for business reasons, to get a decision on this.”

Their year in limbo chills researchers. Those near market with a product wonder silently if courses that provided key samples will follow Bennett’s path. Many say the prospect is unlikely, but are uncertain.

“When I arrive, most superintendents have the attitude of, ‘There’s the electric carts, if you do something that helps my job, be my guest,’ “ says Dr. Bill Meyer, a Rutgers University and former commercial development researcher. “There could be 1,000 people who walk across a green, but only one person recognizes a superior strain. So part of the question is, Who discovered it?” Meyer says today’s students may find a changed attitude  in a few years. “If you were anal about the whole thing, you would have a document for the superintendent to sign,” he says. “Yet that wouldn’t suffice because club members could say, ‘He doesn’t own the grass, we do.’ “