Desert Bunch Grass (Du’a Grass)

Desert bunch grass (Panicum turgidum, known across Sindh and Makran as murat or gharam) is the tussock you plant first when the only thing the wind moves is sand. It is a perennial that throws up dense, knee-to-waist-high clumps on open dunes and sandy plains, anchoring loose ground while it feeds stock through the lean months. On the Sindh coast and in the Balochistan highlands it is a pioneer that asks for almost nothing and holds the soil that everything else will later need.

Where it thrives

This is a true desert grass. It grows from below sea level up to about 3,200 m, carries mean temperatures of 25–35 °C, and persists on as little as 100 mm of rain a year, doing best in the 200–400 mm band that covers much of arid Sindh and Makran.¹ It prefers light, sandy soils around pH 6.5–7 but tolerates pH 6–8 and saline, nutrient-poor ground where little else establishes.¹ A stout, fibrous root system runs to roughly 2 m deep and spreads some 3.5 m around the plant, which is exactly what lets it survive drought and bind shifting sand.¹

Role in the system

In syntropic terms this is a sand-stage pioneer and a soil-fixer. The felt-like roots aggregate loose grains, so the grass is widely used for erosion control, for rehabilitating degraded desert range, and for stabilising wind-blown dunes.¹ That stabilised surface is the precondition for everything that follows: once the sand stops moving, you can bring in hardier shrubs and, in time, trees. The clumps also trap blown litter and their own dead leaf, building the first thin skin of organic matter on bare dune. Treat it as groundwork rather than a permanent crop — it buys the standing ground that a guild needs before anything taller can hold.

Grazing value

Young green leaves and shoots are palatable to all classes of stock, though the forage is moderate to poor in quality and the plant earns more of its keep as a sand-binder than as a feed.¹ In the dry season, when the grass is dormant and coarse, mostly camels and donkeys still take it — which is precisely the season when a Makran or Thar herd has little else to eat.¹ Where it gets some moisture it can be surprisingly productive, with stands yielding on the order of 60 tonnes of fresh matter per hectare a year under favourable saline conditions, so it is bulk standing feed even if the quality is modest.¹ The grain is the other half of the story: in hungry years people have long gathered the seed, ground it into meal, and boiled it into a porridge, making this one of the desert’s traditional famine foods.¹

Cautions

The main limit is yield, not safety. Dry-season forage is low in protein and digestibility, so this grass supplements a desert ration rather than carrying it — pair it with browse or a legume where you can. Like most desert perennials it resents waterlogging, so keep it on free-draining sand and off any flat that ponds after rain.

Sources

1. Heuzé, V., Tran, G., et al. (Feedipedia). “Desert grass (Panicum turgidum).” INRAE, CIRAD, AFZ & FAO.