Does lawn pigment like NZLA Green help with frost protection?
Coming into winter I saw a video suggesting lawn pigment would be good to apply to both provide colour and help protect from frost. Anyone think its worth a go?
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How would that work? Surely any effect would be insignificant and make very little difference.
Never heard that. I watched a 2 hour webinar when the leading turf pigment was released a few years ago (same as what we use for NZLA Green) and it wasn’t mentioned as a benefit.
I would guess they’re clinging on to some theory pigments absorb more solar radiation than untreated grass because of their darker colour. In theory, that extra heat absorption could raise the canopy temperature slightly during the day? Is that what was they said in the video you seen?
I’d imagine the effect is pretty marginal at best. Any warming is surface level and short lived. Once you get a proper overnight frost, the colourant isn’t doing enough to change what happens to your cells. The ice crystal damage that kills leaf tissue happens regardless of whether the turf looks green.
I would avoid walking on frosty lawns as it causes heaps of damage. If you really want to minimise frost accumulation there are products, we used to sell one called Dew Shield that was awesome but it wasn’t a big seller and had the downside that limited foliar applications for 14-21 days.
https://youtu.be/DBh5WWlZAKU?si=gUDPY3lQF7GGzy9I
https://youtu.be/-N09ICvxXSU?si=5aoOwGI4Mw6op0lC
At about 3 mins. On second take it may be more relevant to warm season grass.
@Grant bristow That video is trying to sell a product. I actually went down a rabbit hole with this one and went to the US research database (they have heaps of turf research over there) and I found nothing really in the research that supported it. I also looked for anything out of Australia and came up empty there too.
What I did find is:
The temperature increase angle is consistent across studies, but most of this work is done on dormant warm-season grasses (bermudagrass, buffalograss) in the US, focused on spring green-up rather than frost damage mitigation. The mechanism (darker surface absorbing more heat during the day) makes physical sense, but I couldn’t find a peer-reviewed paper that specifically tested whether pigments reduce frost injury on cool-season turf. There’s a difference between “raises canopy temp by a degree or two on a sunny afternoon” and “protects against frost events.”
So the research supports the temperature-raising effect. Whether that meaningfully delays or reduces frost damage on lawns is a reasonable extrapolation, but it’s not something that’s been cleanly proven in a trial I can point to or find.
Having been in the industry a while now, I’ve found companies will cling onto tiny facts and run them as a marketing benefit to help sell product. Happy to be corrected, but I just can’t find anything from a research point of view supporting it.
I’ll make a call to a guy today who does turf research full time and ask him, will come back if I’m corrected 👍
That video I shared above is worth a watch if you want to geek out on pigments as there are some other interesting benefits other than colour.
The Dew Shield I mentioned in the last comment does work, I’ve tried it and run a couple of home trials and the difference is significant, although it doesn’t completely stop frost accumulation. I’d say it reduced it by a good 75% (approximately).
@Grant bristow Hey mate, I had that conversation and, to be honest, it was pretty much laughed off. The general view was that the frost protection claim is pretty unsupported.
The point he made was that if the argument is based on slightly increasing canopy temperature through a darker surface, you’d arguably get a similar effect from a decent iron application. At least iron is actually doing something within the plant by improving colour and acting as a turf hardener, whereas a pigment is simply a product painted onto the leaf surface.
The guy I spoke to is very well respected in the industry and been running trials for years, so hopefully that’s helpful.
He agreed that a dew retardant in conjunction with an Iron application would be a much better approach.
@Jonny Hicks great work thanks Jonny, always a learning curve 👌