Transparent shader breaks static batching?

Hi guys & gals,

While working with a scene that contains grass plane textures spread throughout an area, I noticed that the amount of draw calls was abnormally high.

After having checked 3-4 times that everything is set to static (and flagged for static batching), I started playing around with the shader. The shader we are using is an unlit texture with a tint and a texture with alpha (for transparency).

The moment I set the shader to a non-transparent one, the amount of draw calls is reduced by around 300, bringing the draw call count much more in line with expectations for the scene.

After having tried damn near every transparent shader from Unity's standard library, plus a few from proprietary libraries, it seems this issue remains throughout every shader that tests for transparency.

Is this a known issue? I have used several hours checking around the web for this, but it seems everyone is discussing dynamic batching with transparency. In our case we are interested in static batching. Is it simply impossible, or are there any workarounds?

Thanks in advance!