The Real Home Field Advantage
It’s football season, that magical time of year when regalia-bedecked fans gather to cheer on the home team and elevate tailgating to an art form. But fans aren’t the only ones who have favorite colors: it turns out that the football fields themselves also have a preference. Why? Because the health of the turf on a football field is directly related to the color of the turf paint applied to it.
Casey Reynolds, an NC State graduate student in the Department of Crop Science, set out to discover why this is so. It has to do with photosynthesis, but not in the way you might think.
Reynolds and crop scientist Dr. Grady Miller are currently testing all of the colors used by ACC schools – and other regional schools like East Carolina University and the University of South Carolina – to determine how each team’s colors affect turfgrass photosynthesis.
