From Lima to Raleigh

Dr. Susana Milla-Lewis, a professor and university faculty scholar of turfgrass breeding at North Carolina State University, has an impressive and interesting life story. Born and raised in Lima, the capital of Peru, she now runs one of the best turfgrass programs in the nation.

Her attention to nature and green space started at a young age and has only grown. Milla-Lewis remembers as a kid, Lima was a big city where it didn’t rain very often. “So, it’s kind of gray and the only places where you have great green spaces are in public parks,” she says. “It’s not like North Carolina, where everything is green.”

Moving to the United States was in the cards for Milla-Lewis for some time. Her two older brothers had both moved to the U.S. for graduate school. Her oldest brother, Carlos, is an M.D., Ph.D. currently at Stanford. Her brother Marcos, who she says has always had a huge influence on her life, is a biochemist. “They both came to the U.S. pursuing higher education so I kind of had that model to follow.”

She recalls being 12 years old when Marcos left Peru to pursue his Ph.D. and deciding she wanted to go to the U.S. too to get a master’s and Ph.D. degrees. She finished her undergraduate degree in four years rather than the normal five it takes in Peru. After graduation, she did a research internship at the International Potato Center, which has research centers around the world. “I knew if I did an internship there that those references were going to weigh more toward my graduate applications,” she says.

After that, she applied for admission to the master’s program at NC State and was accepted. It was her time to leave Peru. In 1996, she packed her life into two suitcases, including her most meaningful trinkets and even the rug from her bedroom. “Don’t ask me how I fit it into my suitcase, but I did,” she says with a laugh.

She remembers the farewell from her family at the airport being very sad. As she passed through the security gate, crying, she thought to herself that she couldn’t mope because leaving for the U.S. to get her graduate degree was a long-held dream. So, although she was sad to leave her family, she made herself focus on the great opportunities that lay ahead for her at NC State.

“I’m not gonna lie,” she says. “I missed my family, my friends, the food and so many things, but this was the dream that I had pursued and that was coming true. I made a mental promise with myself that I was going to push forward.”

New to the Wolfpack

Upon arriving in Raleigh, Milla-Lewis started to pursue her master’s in tobacco breeding and graduated in 1998. She earned her Ph.D. in peanut breeding from NCSU in 2003. She worked in this field for about five years before delving into building a new turfgrass breeding program at NCSU.

When NC State opened a position in turfgrass breeding in 2008, they were looking for someone who could build a program from the ground up. “Initially I looked at it and said I don’t really know anything about turfgrass,” she says. But the chair of the search committee for this role encouraged Milla-Lewis to apply because of her vast knowledge and experience in breeding and molecular work, explaining she could just apply that to a new species.

At the time she applied, her husband, Dr. Ramsey Lewis, was an assistant professor at NC State. They started talking about what it would be like for them both to be assistant professors if she got the job. Milla-Lewis needed to consider the tenure process she would have to undergo as a new professor, and their daughter was also 1 and a half at the time. She and her husband discussed how they would manage family life while both working at the university and decided they should go for it.

Milla-Lewis says she still didn’t know much about turfgrass so she started doing her homework. “I spent two months talking to anybody who would talk to me,” she says. “I talked to a lot of turf faculty, called industry breeders out west, went to visit sod farms, and I drove out east to meet with our extension specialist there. My main goal was to try to learn more about the turfgrass industry, but also to find out the niches or needs that weren’t being met and find where a breeding program could fit in the big scheme of things. I really did my homework and I got the job, and the rest is history.” Milla-Lewis started as the assistant professor in turfgrass breeding and Genetics. She and Ramsey now have two daughters: Sienna, 14, and Adrianna, 10.

Turfgrass career

Milla-Lewis had worked in tobacco and peanut breeding programs, where the focus was just one species, when she went to work in turfgrass. “I remember, early on, one of my grad students joked that most of the breeders on campus were doctors,” she says. “But I was a vet because I’d worked with all of these different species.”

She says she loves working with multiple turfgrass species as there is never a dull moment; they are always working on something new. Since they work with warm- and cool-season grasses, her program stays busy year-round. One day they’re seeding a new trial, the next they’re putting grass to sleep — and there is always something going on at the greenhouse or in growth chambers.

“I love that. It’s very fun that you can come up with all these different projects in a variety of species,” she says. “You don’t have to think too hard about what you want to research — there’s always something.”

Milla-Lewis describes her research as trying to develop varieties of grasses that are better adapted to specific conditions in North Carolina. “We look at hundreds of new grasses, throw as many environmental stresses as possible at them, and then select those that survive better,” she says. “Ultimately, the goal is to develop grasses that perform better with lower inputs so that they are easier and cheaper to grow for both producers and consumers.”

Her position is 85 percent research and 15 percent teaching. She teaches the undergraduate plant genetics course, which is designed primarily for agronomy and horticultural science students, every spring. She leads the breeding program while teaching this course and is focused only on research for the remainder of the year.

The busiest time of the year is typically as the spring semester ends and Milla-Lewis has to determine what research trials will be planted. “Planting season is crazy busy, but it is the most exciting time of the year,” she says. “You get to put new grasses on the ground and see how they perform. The excitement of identifying a new promising line or seeing one of your favorite lines outperforming standard cultivars is hard to describe.”

During any week, Milla-Lewis could spend one day in her office, the next attending a seminar about research ethics, the next in the mountains planting roadside trials, and the next in a meeting with other plant breeders. She thrives on the variety. “We go from the field, to the greenhouse, to lab work, to data analysis,” she says. “Plant breeding encompasses many different aspects. When I recruit students or talk to people about plant breeding, I tell them that variety is what I love the most about my job.”

Overcoming cancer

Milla-Lewis was diagnosed with breast cancer more than nine years ago, her third year in the turfgrass program. Now in remission and living to the fullest, she shares what that experience was like: “Everything is good now, but a cancer diagnosis is not something you leave behind,” she says. “You live with that for the rest of your life because you’re always thinking it could come back.”

Cancer taught her that she will never know what is going to happen next, but she can reflect on how fortunate she is to have had the last nine and a half years. “When I was diagnosed, my youngest daughter was a year and a half old and it was really hard to think that she might not get to know her mom. And that’s one of the things I always think about now. I have had the last seven and a half years with her and she knows me. No matter what, she knows me and that’s good. I’m very thankful for that.”

She recalled when she was diagnosed and realized how bad the cancer was, the nurse started explaining all of her appointments she’d need to schedule, from scans to getting a port put in, etc. Milla-Lewis reached for her cell phone to check her calendar. But the nurse took her phone and told her nothing else mattered anymore. “I had an epiphany,” she says. “That moment has given me more perspective in life than you would ever imagine. I used to be a panicky person running from one thing to another and I learned at that moment that nothing is that important. Any time I panic about missing something now, I say, ‘You know what? It’s OK. The world will continue turning if you cannot go or if you have to reschedule or if you miss something. It’s OK.’”

Environmental stewardship

Milla-Lewis has witnessed significant change associated with turfgrass environmental stewardship the last few years. She recognized the change when she started interviewing and learning more about the industry in 2008. She drove around Raleigh and observed what grass species were in different suburban yards, and observed a lot of cool-season grasses, primarily tall fescue. But as she started in the program and began researching warm-season grasses, several people questioned what, exactly, she was thinking. Her explanation was that weather and climates are changing dramatically.

“So, if the temperatures are changing, it’s going to be hotter and it’s going to be drier, then we need to be more conscious about what grasses we promote for specific areas,” she says. “For example, for big cities in central North Carolina, warm-season grasses, with their lower water requirements, will be a more environmentally conscious choice.”

While there will always be a group of people that want a manicured lawn, she said more of the market has become content with a lawn that looks good but doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect because they want fewer inputs and less maintenance. She thinks that the market for a low-input lawn will continue to grow.

In the research realm, she’s working more on drought-tolerant varieties that require less water to stay alive. “Water is only going to become more scarce and is going to be a very sought-after commodity. We as an industry need to start focusing more on grasses that use less water.”

New cultivars and collaborations

Milla-Lewis shared that although there already are many commercially available grasses on the market, the environment keeps changing and we have to react to it. “Temperatures are going up, we’re having more droughts in different areas and we’re having more unstable winters with temperatures going up and down, which kills grasses,” she says. “Also, the customer is changing. The new generations are looking at property and lawns in new ways. Cities are growing and developing differently.” As the turfgrass industry adapts to new needs that are popping up, she says, they have to develop turfgrasses that will better suit those needs.

When it comes to collaborations, Milla-Lewis says she’s proud to be a part of the warm-season turfgrass Specialty Crops Research Initiative (SCRI), funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The project includes breeders at five different universities: herself at NC State, Kevin Kenworthy at the University of Florida, Brian Schwartz and Paul Raymer at the University of Georgia, Yanqi Wu at Oklahoma State University, and Ambika Chandra at Texas AgriLife System. The project aims to develop drought-tolerant turfgrass cultivars for the southern United States by testing the best lines of each program across all these states.

Since the initiative started in 2010, Milla-Lewis has been impressed with the team approach to breeding drought-tolerant turfgrasses. “This concept where we all evaluate everybody else’s germplasm in multiple locations benefits the entire industry because we are testing materials across a wide range of environmental stresses,” she says. “The top-performing lines are true champions that can thrive not matter what you throw at them. We might have more regional deployment or marketing for a grass, which can be really good.”

Lobo Zoysiagrass

After years of research and hard work, Milla-Lewis announced the name of NS State’s new low-input, low-maintenance zoysiagrass release at the 2021 North Carolina Sod Producers Association Fall Field Day. She said then that she had long known Lobo Zoysiagrass was a special grass.

“We were very excited about how aggressive this grass was from the get-go on roadside trials. But, when the USGA research came into play and we put it on the west coast in California and Arizona, and it was retaining color really well, then we got way more excited,” she says. “When we started expanding it on sod farms, that was awesome. When you have experienced sod farmers like Chris Jones (of Neuse River Turf) saying, ‘This grass is so resilient, I can’t wait to have 100 acres of it”, or Hank Kerfoot (of Modern Turf) telling you, ‘I love this grass, I’m going to put it in at my house,’ … That was really special.”

If she had to pick one word to describe Lobo Zoysiagrass, Milla-Lewis says she would call it ‘adaptive’ because it can be molded into whatever you want it to be. Based on trials, if a homeowner doesn’t want to irrigate, mow often or fertilize, Lobo will retain color and aggressively cover the ground. Also, if a homeowner wants a beautiful lawn and puts maintenance into it, it will become dense and lush. “I think it’s going to cover different niches in the industry and that is really interesting,” she says.

Participating sod farms are steadily increasing Lobo production and limited amounts will be available for purchase this summer.

Taking a chance on turf

Milla-Lewis encourages aspiring high schoolers who have a passion for outdoors or green space to explore a career path in turfgrass. “Seek internships, seek experiences and seek people that work in the industry for advice and for just general information,” she says.

There are many sectors — golf, universities, sod farms, turfgrass outlets, and more — that interested students can explore. “If you want to position yourself better to go after a career in this area, seek as much information as possible,” she says. “A lot of times, people realize years later they could have gone into something they were actually interested in. Look for that information and it’s not hard to find.”

To learn more about Sod Solutions’ relationships with turfgrass breeders at land grant universities, download the Turfgrass Research: Year In Review.Sod Solutions has helped successfully develop and release to the market over 20 different turfgrass varieties over the past 27 years including Palmetto and CitraBlue St. Augustine, EMPIRE and Innovation Zoysia and Celebration, Latitude 36 and NorthBridge Bermudagrass. The company is based near Charleston, South Carolina.