Innovation

After 12 years of intense research, Jackson Madnick developed a revolutionary new grass seed mix for lawns - grass that is low-maintenance, rarely if ever needs watering, grows painfully slow and does it all without the use of chemicals. It also acts as a carbon sequestration, "carbon sink", empowering any lawn to fight climate change. Once established, the grass grows very slowly so it needs mowing only once every four to six weeks, rather than weekly mowing with conventional grass, and thrives without chemicals. Even in areas of extreme of heat and cold, the grass stays green year round.

In 2010, Pearl’s Premium Ultra Low Maintenance Lawn Seed, one of 446 entries from 26 countries, won first prise in the MassChallenge Prize for innovation. It also won the 2013 prestigious “Invented Here” prize awarded by the Boston Museum of Science citing it as one of the three most important US Patented innovations to come out of New England out of more than 600 great inventions considered.

Madnick's Pearl’s Premium Ultra Low Maintenance Lawn Seed grass also has a positive impact on climate change, acting as a carbon sink, sequestering carbon, pulling it out of the air and dropping it into the soil at a rate four to eight times higher than conventional grass.

Pearl’s Premium has received rave reviews from more than 300 environmental and media experts. Newsweek magazine called it the “Holy Grail of Grass”, and it's been endorsed by Popular Science Magazine and the master gardeners at ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX News TV, NPR, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal, among others. People, pet and planet friendly, the grass is barefoot soft.

Inspiration

Jackson Madnick, longtime environmentalist and water resources sustainability expert: “My mother, Pearl, sparked my life-long commitment to protect our Planet Earth. Among all of Earth’s natural beauties, water has always enchanted me the most. Betsy and I live with our daughter, Pearl, on a beautiful pond. Looking out our living room window, I witnessed the environmental damage up close. As I investigated the problem on our little pond that became chucked with invasive weeds, it became clear that lawns, and the lawn chemical run off that ended up on the surface waters to trigger the invasive weed growth, were a primary culprit. The deeper I dug, the more compelling case for change became. So, I set out on an eight year journey to save our pond and, in the process, found a solution to save our waters and save you money, too! I tested almost ten thousand variations of this special seed mix before we perfected and patented it to create a truly low maintenance solution.”

"I understand how difficult it is for individuals to take meaningful action to avert climate change. “There are only a few number of things that we can do to impact climate change, like buying an electric car.” What people don’t realize is how large an impact something as simple as replanting their lawn can be. “Everybody’s got grass. If we can just convert over some portion of the 45,000 square miles of irrigated grass in this country to low-water grass, we can dramatically impact global warming and climate change.”

Because Pearl’s Premium grass “uses one-quarter of the water of any grass in the world, and one-quarter of the maintenance, and never needs pesticides,” replacing current, short-rooted and high maintenance grass reduces energy use and water waste. “19% of all the energy used in the US is used to pump and filtrate water and, in the summer, 50% of that water is used on lawns! 10% of the energy in this country is being used on our lawns in the summer.” Using Pearl’s Premium reduces lawn watering by 75%!

Add to this Pearl’s Premium’s better performance as a carbon sink and you create a real difference for climate change activism. Jackson explains, “You can’t plant a 70 or 80 foot mature tree in your lawn, from the difficulty and tonnage or having to wait 50 to 100 years. However, a Pearl’s Premium lawn can produce the same carbon sequestration impact of a 70 – 80 foot tree because it delivers four to eight times the carbon sequestration of today’s common lawn grass.” And the impact goes beyond private residential use. “There are 45,000 square miles of irrigated grass in the US; there are huge tracts of lawns along roads, cemeteries, airport. It can be significant for saving water, saving health (no chemicals), and sequestering carbon for lessening climate change.”

“This is easily affordable,” Jackson continues, because of the reduction in “mowing, watering, and fertilizer,” the transition to Pearl’s Premium has “a 2 to 3 week payback rate for the costs of the seeds.” And this reduction is permanent: “Some brands simply coat the seeds to reduce the need for watering by 20% during only the first few months; but then the coating wears off and the grass requires constant watering. Pearl’s Premium remains permanently 75% lower-water, reducing water use by 75% or more forever.” And the user “doesn’t need to tear up their lawn. Just put it over their present grass and the Pearl’s Premium grass will out-compete the shallow root weaker conventional grass and even out-competes most weeds without chemicals.”

Jackson Madnick founded and runs this business, and has been recognized for his 30 years of caring about the environmental. “We are a profit making company but also have a non-profit side: for environmental education.” But Jackson goes beyond education, and donates money and grass seed to a number of causes related to children and animals and also donates a several tons of grass seeds to Habitat for Humanity, enough to create lawns for 100 homes.” By blending his love for this environmental business with his love for the environment, Jackson Madnick developed a seed blend that helps sustain both. But that’s not enough. “I also live in a sustainable house that produces 90% of its heating, cooling and power from the sun and earth and give free tours to show others how to live lightly on the earth.”

Overall impact

A well-established Pearl’s Premium lawn can decrease your carbon footprint in four ways:

1. No Lawn Chemicals: you can cut your use of lawn chemicals that are carbon-intensive. A slow growing and deep-rooted Pearl's Premium lawn needs only 1/4 of the nutrients of conventional grass that a Pearl’s lawn can make simply by leaving the grass clippings to break down and return nutrients to the soil. Plus, its uses very little organic fertilizer made without carbon, or a little organic compost once a year, to stay green year round. Also, with no lawn chemicals ever needed, Pearl’s Premium lessens the risk of a dozen diseases linked to lawn chemicals, including increased risk of Learning and Behavioral disorders for children, Alzheimer's, Parkinson’s, Sexual Dysfunction and Cancer, this according to Dr. Alex Lu of the Harvard School of Public Health.

2. Less Water and Energy Used: According to the EPA, NASA and the American Water Works Association, the leading organization of water departments, US lawns consume more than 50% of all U.S. clean drinking water. Once a Pearl’s Premium lawn is established, you may seldom if ever again need to waste clean drinking water on your lawn. Remember, most lawns are irrigated with the same clean water we drink – water that's energy-intensive to create given the filtering, treating, and pumping large distances, sometimes up over mountains. According to the Department of Energy, 19% of all energy consumed in the US ( cars, trucks, industry, buildings, etc) goes to filtering and pumping water. Half of that water, cleaned and pumped, is wasted on lawns. So lawns consume almost 10% of our country's total energy which translates to a lot of coal, oil and gas burning.

3. Less or Never a Need to Mow: Pearl's Premium creates less polluting toxins and carbon from lawnmowers. Pearl’s Grass grows so slowly, you only need to use that polluting lawnmower only once every 4 to 6 weeks, not weekly mowing as is common with conventional grass. If not mowed at all, after passing 6 inches tall, a Pearl’s Premium lawn won't support its weight and so it just leans over to a height of three to four inches. Less mowing means a huge lessening of carbon in the atmosphere. A typical lawn mower produces as much carbon in an hour as a mid-sized car, fully-loaded, produced in 13 hours of driving or what a hybrid car produces in 43 hours!

4. More Oxygen and More Carbon Sequestration: Your Pearl's Premium lawn, properly maintained and mowed tall, produces dramatically less carbon than the typical American lawn. A university study by Dr Roberts in 1992 demonstrated that fescue (flowering plant) grass blends like Pearl's Premium, cut 3" high, produces 5,760 times more oxygen than carbon in 24 hours and sequestered 4 to 8 times the carbon into the soil with 12 in roots in 4 months and up to 48 inch very deep roots in a year, compared to conventional grass with only 2 to 3 inch roots. The same study found that a typical bluegrass lawn, cut one inch high, produces oxygen to carbon in a 1-to-1 ratio. It's like having your very own carbon sink in your backyard, like an 80 foot tall mature tree!

The impact? You can enjoy the ultimate green lawn that saves you time, money, water and health ,and do your share to fight climate change.

Business benefit

Pearl’s Premium is now used on over 400,000 residential, commercial and municipal lawns, a number of foreign countries and the company is now working with their fourth generation grass seed. “We’ve had rave review letters from over 300 experts including NASA and again from the Boston Museum of Science, for being one of the three best patented ideas to come out of New England,” competing against 600 inventions. However the grass grows in all 50 states

According to Jackson Madnick, “We’ve been growing at the rate of 300% per year in terms of numbers of lawns.” In recent years, because of some contractual obligations, Pearl’s Premium was only sold through non-retail venues: landscapers and municipalities. But today Pearl’s Premium is in all Whole Foods Markets in New England and has been tested in 135 Costco stores around the country. “Costco is willing to carry only Pearl’s Premium grass seed in the future but requires national marketing on our part first to create more brand awareness. In order to get into all 550 stores we will depend on investors or general sales to grow our national brand awareness.” With the increase in brand awareness Pearl’s Premium may be able to grow twenty fold.

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Social and environmental benefit

• Responsible Water Use to lessen 3/4 of the summer water demand
• Dramatically increase Carbon Sequestration
• Lessening Climate Change
• Lessening Health Risks, Disease and Deaths
• An organic approach to lawn care is overdue for so many reasons:
• Lawns are depleting our groundwater supplies: According to the EPA, lawn care uses 50% of our county’s clean drinking, potable water. Lawn irrigation, particularly in-ground watering systems, increase summer water use to levels three to five times higher than winter water use. Use of nitrogen-rich chemical fertilizers and fast-growing shallow-rooted conventional grass exacerbates the problem. Water shortages from your neighbor’s lawn care lead to increased water prices for everyone, water bans and enforced conservation. Many of the non-native lawn seeds from Europe, with very shallow 2-3 inch roots, are naturally adapted to environments that are wetter than ours. In New England, and most of North America, these foreign, shallow root, high maintenance grasses leads to a pattern of frequent watering and frequent mowing, particularly if chemical fertilizer is used. Along the East Coast, the water table has gone down by 125 feet due to lawn watering in many areas; so much so that the ground water is not holding back the sea water and, in some communities along the coast, sea water is starting to leak in. That may require very expensive desalination in the future.
• Wasting energy and adding to greenhouse gases: Watering lawns with water that is filtered for human consumption and pumped to our homes wastes huge amounts of energy. Producing commercial fertilizers from petroleum is energy intensive. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, running a typical lawn mower for an hour is 13 times more polluting than running a mid-size car full of people and luggage for an hour or running a hybrid care 43 hours. So, the energy-intensive fertilizer, water from the town and lawn mower pollution on a standard lawn greatly increases your family's carbon foot print.
• Run off and unnecessary health risks: A staggering amount of chemicals are used every year on lawns. Between 50% and 80% of lawn care chemicals run off lawns with the rain and into storm drains, ending up in the watershed or local ponds, causing toxic algal blooms and feeding the invasive weeds out of control. Again, the majority of lawn chemicals is feeding the invasive weeds in our ponds, not on your lawn! Then, local communities use expensive herbicides to get rid of the invasive weeds in the ponds and low levels of both the fertilizer, pesticides and the herbicide may end up in your drinking water or the bodies of new born babies. Use of pesticides and fertilizer in urban and suburban communities contributes significantly to contamination of our drinking water and other surface water supplies. This also increases health risks to children, pets and the elderly and increases school department budgets from learning and behavioral disorders caused by the lawn care chemicals. So, chemicals put on your lawn impact the whole community in many ways, including finances, clean up, invasive weeds and health.
• What ends up in our homes affects children, animals and others: Lawn care chemicals and pesticides get carried indoors into homes on shoes, animal paws and air currents from open windows in summer. Once inside, pesticides linger in carpets, dust, on toys and in the air we breathe. These chemicals normally break down outside over time with sunlight. However, away from UV of sunlight, pesticides persist for many months, even years resulting in longer exposure to these chemicals indoors. According to health experts at the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, prolonged exposure to the lawn pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, lawn care chemicals is responsible for an alarming increase in the risk of Learning and Behavioral Disorders in children and increased risk in adults for Asthma, Parkinson’s Disease, Sexual Dysfunction, Birth Defects, Cancer and a number of other ailments. The risks are not the same for all populations. The increased health risks are much higher for children, the elderly and our pets. According to Dr. Margo Roman, a veterinary expert, "50 years ago, only 5% of dogs got cancer. Today, over 46% of dogs get cancer, and there is evidence suggesting this alarming rate is caused by the widespread use of lawn care fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides." In response to these concerns, "all Europe has banned these lawn chemicals and a new era in pesticide use has begun in Quebec with the banning of many domestic products that have chemicals considered toxic to humans and the environment." Read the report from the Organic Consumers Association.
• In recent years, it has been found that lawn chemicals are killing off 40% of the world's bee population. Most of the foods that the human race depend on, needs these honey bees for pollination.

Interview

Jackson Manick, Owner & Founder, Pearl's Premium