After 30 years of research, Penn State startup reinvents the putting green

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — While they are on opposite sides of the country, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in New York and California’s Pebble Beach Golf Club have at least two things in common. They are both hosting the U.S. Open Golf tournament and they both now seed their greens with a weed that most of the nation’s golf clubs spent decades eradicating.

With professional golf season in full swing, David Huff, professor of turfgrass breeding and genetics at Penn State, says that seven out of the top 10 courses are using Poa, a type of grass that was once considered a weed — and his startup, PennPoa, is playing a critical role in making the grass the go-to seed for luxury courses.

So, Huff added, there’s a reason he won the “Crazy as a Loon” award at the 2001 International Turfgrass Conference in Toronto.

After all, he is dedicated to the widespread distribution of a grass that the golf industry long considered a problem. Huff wanted golf course developers to adopt Poa annua, also known as annual bluegrass, over the industry’s darling, creeping bent grass.

At first glance, the early industry-wide skepticism about Poa annua seemed warranted. The annual version that comes in as a weed is “big and ugly and doesn’t tolerate extreme temperatures or disease so it dies out real fast,” Huff said.

Huff’s love for Poa annua though, wasn’t just for the sake of being a contrarian, he said. He had noticed that, while the rest of the industry had been treating it as a weed, seven of the top 10 golf courses in the country had it on their putting greens. What did these elite institutions know about the grass that the rest of the industry had staked entire careers trying to eliminate?

The trick, it turns out, lies in letting the weed be.

After years — often decades — that same ugly weed grows back as a “beautiful, high shoot-density, perennial grass that serves as a premier putting surface,” Huff explained. The elite golf courses had simply let the Poa annua thrive and reaped its rich rewards after decades.

Sure, Poa annua in its perennial avatar is hardy and drought- and disease-resistant, but its much sought-after trait is its ability to deliver championship playing surfaces.

“Poa annua has very upright growth; it’s dense like bristles on a brush, and you can mow it extremely short to less than a tenth of an inch,” Huff said. It’s this dynamite combination that leads to greens with a very fast putting surface, the kind of challenge professional golfers love.

The rest of the country’s nearly 16,000 golf course developers might want in on the action but don’t have the luxury of waiting 50 years for the perennial version of Poa annua to grow. To short-circuit the process, Huff said, he went to work to develop a strain that would exhibit all the desirable characteristics and do so over a shorter weeks-long time period.

That’s when Huff encountered a significant obstacle: the loss of dwarfism, the valuable trait that allowed grass to be mowed short without losing its plushness. Even if golf course developers might want dwarfism, successive strains of Poa annua in the lab didn’t deliver. After decades of additional lab research, Huff said, he came up with the "Goldilocks" strain of Poa annua, with all the desirable characteristics, including dwarfism. In addition, once established, a process which usually takes 8-12 weeks, the new strain of seed can be immediately used as a putting surface.

Cole Thompson, director of research, Green Section, at the U.S. Golf Association (USGA), said he has been impressed by Huff’s tenacity in understanding the breeding mechanics at play. The USGA funded a grant that helped Huff resolve the frustrating issue.

“Dr. Huff has stuck with it and done some really interesting science along the way in resolving the issue,” Thompson said. After extensive tinkering and production, when the product was ready for its time in the sun, Huff said, he wasn’t sure how to make the leap to industry distribution.

It was the Office of Technology Transfer, along with the Office for Research Protections, at Penn State that helped him establish a startup, PennPoa, in 2024 and sell the seed to professional golf course developers. The Small Business Development Center at Penn State assisted with sorting out business details. In addition, the Penn State Startup Leadership Network encouraged Huff to set up a board of advisers for his fledgling company.

“They have been helpful in giving me so much insight and turning me into a business person, which I wasn’t before,” Huff said with a laugh.

Finding farmland to grow PennPoa has been another challenge, which Huff has solved so far by leasing acres at the Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center, a part of Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences. Penn State owns and operates the land. Huff said that demand for PennPoa is far outpacing supply — the startup has completed its 2026 harvest and filled nearly all of its domestic customers’ preorders and will have to invest in farmland very soon.

For now, Huff said, he is focused on delivering high-quality turfgrass — with the help of Penn State’s technology transfer and business development institutions.

“OTT was critical because they gave me the first push to start my own company and later it was the College of Ag that helped me with the land problem; I am very grateful,” Huff said.

PennPoa’s success doesn’t surprise Thompson.

“We always know we’re going to get good work from Dr. Huff and from Penn State, one of the original turfgrass research institutions in the U.S.,” he said.

As for Huff, despite his success with PennPoa, he admitted his golf handicap is not very impressive, but he’s happy to leave that to the pros, he said.