The curse of kudzu
August 27, 2007 at 4:30 pm by Scott Freeman in NewsKudzu sucks.
That goes without saying. But the carnivorous and impossible-to-kill vine, which was brought from Asia and planted throughout the South in an attempt to control erosion, does more than take over our land and trees. It seems it is a leading cause of ozone pollution.
Two scientists, Jonathan Hickman of SUNY-Stony Brook and Manuel Lerdau, director of Virginia’s Blandy Experimental Farm, told a recent meeting of the Ecological Society of America that the soil where kudzu lives may produce two times the amount of the ozone-forming nitrogen compounds of other soil.
Kudzu also produces a lot of a compound called isoprene, one of the volatile organic compounds that combine with nitrogen-oxygen compounds to make ozone. “You could be looking at a plant that’s actually a little ozone factory,” Hickman was quoted in the Athens Banner-Herald.
The scientists studied kudzu patches in Madison County, outside Athens.
There are approximately 7 million acres of kudzu in the Southeast. The scientists also studied kudzu in Maryland, and learned that Georgia’s kudzu is much heartier. “The kudzu in Georgia is much healthier, with denser populations,” Lerdau said.
But we already knew that, right?
August 28th, 2007 at 11:17 am
There’s gotta be a way we could turn the tables on that weed by making it into ethanol or something.
November 2nd, 2007 at 12:01 am
Explain to me how ozone can be a form of pollution when we need ozone to filter everything solar? What makes kudzu healthier in Atlanta than in Central Park when pollution feeds kudzu more than anything else, and surely New York has more pollution than Atlanta? Where is the balance of this article? We do not need to worry about The Dust Bowl effect from the Great Depression, and we can eat kudzu if we have another Great Depression, just as the Chinese did during the Great Leap Forward famine of the late 50’s where 30 million people died, and now we have more kudzu than China, and it came from China. They don’t poison kudzu, now do they? Kudzu won’t grow in deep forests, but only in the sun, and only on the outskirts. And does anyone have a bread recipe including kudzu?