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Tripsacum dactyloides
Also called Gama Grass, Eastern Gama Grass, Eastern Gamma Grass, Eastern Mock Grama, Fakahatchee Grass, Northern Gamagrass, Tripsacum
Tripsacum dactyloides, commonly called eastern gamagrass, or Fakahatchee grass, is a warm-season, sod-forming bunch grass. It is widespread in the Western Hemisphere, native from the eastern United States to northern South America. Its natural habitat is in sunny moist areas, such as along watercourses and in wet prairies. In some areas, it has adapted well to disturbed conditions.
Eastern gamagrass is a widely cultivated for its use as forage.
The best growing conditions for eastern gamagrass are provided by wet land, such as floodplains along riverbanks. Moreover, moist, nonalkaline lowland areas will maintain the growth of gamagrass because the land can endure a longer time under flood conditions. The soil that is most suitable for eastern gamagrass is moist, little drained fertile soil that has an annual precipitation of 900–1,500 mm (35–59 in) and a pH of 5.5 to 7.5.
Tripsacum dactyloides can tolerate a maximum of three weeks of flooding without dying. The deep roots, which extend to around 4.5 m (15 ft) underground, are the key structure that allows gamagrass to tolerate drought.
Tripsacum dactyloides is widely spread throughout the United States, from Connecticut to Nebraska and south to Florida and Texas. It is also found as far south as South America, in Paraguay and Brazil. The plant has been cultivated outside of its native range in the southwestern United States and elsewhere.
Eastern gamagrass was widely considered a high class feedcrop among the early settlers of the United States. However, it started to disappear because of grain crops and cattle grazing. Around the late 1980s and early 1990s, people started to pay attention again to eastern gamagrass as a forage in summer, since it is productive, palatable and easily digestible by almost all cattle. For these reasons, gamagrass is ideally suitable for feed crops, including hay and pasture forage for which rotation of grazing seasons is controlled. It is used as forage because the growing season of the grass is earlier compared to other warm-season grasses and later compared to cool-season grass and legumes. Eastern gamagrass requires a moderate amount of carbohydrates stored in the leaf bases for regrowth. If the plant is grazed before carbohydrate accumulates in the leaf bases, the plant will die from overgrazing.
Tripsacum australe · Florida gamagrass · Mexican gamagrass · Grama Guatemala · Gamagrass
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Tripsacum dactyloides by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
