Grow – Wisconsin's Magazine for the Life Sciences

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An ongoing experiment at Beth Page State Park on New York’s Long Island shows why these goals may never be attainable without some chemical assistance. Jennifer Grant, of New York State’s Integrated Pest Management Program, and Frank Rossi, a turfgrass specialist at Cornell University, divided the greens on a heavily used public course into three groups with different levels of pesticide use, ranging from conventional to chemical-free. They quickly concluded that eliminating chemicals entirely rendered the greens unplayable, and so they modified that treatment to “reduced risk,” using only pesticides that have very low toxicity.

With that change made, Grant says golfers are happy, even with the parts of the course that get minimal treatment. “Basically, over the years, they haven’t picked up any differences,” she says. “They have always rated all of our treatments between ‘good’ and ‘very good.’ ”
But a survey of Beth Page golfers also shows that most golfers will go only so far in accepting reduced quality. Only 2 percent of respondents said they wanted no pesticides used, and 4 percent wanted minimal use regardless of turf quality. Just over half preferred that greens be kept at reasonable quality using pesticides only as needed. But one third said they wanted the best turf possible, using pesticides whenever they might help.

In fact, golfers’ expectations have never been higher, which industry insiders attribute to what they call the “Augusta syndrome,” the net effect of watching blanket coverage of tournament golf — especially the Masters, professional golf’s signature event. Held each April at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga., the tournament is seen on television by nearly 100 million people around the world, some of whom inevitably conclude that the verdant
perfection of Augusta’s course is how golf is supposed to look everywhere.

But much of what viewers see is strictly made for television, explains Greg Lyman, environmental director of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America. “The course isn’t played for months before the tournament. They bring in an army of people to work on it. They have it in spring, when their turf there is in great shape,” he says. “Golfers watch it and have unrealistic expectations.”

Those expectations have made life harder for superintendents such as Monroe Miller. Thinking back to when he took charge of the turf at Blackhawk in 1973—when only the final seven holes of the Masters were televised—he says, “We didn’t spray as much back then as you might think, because the (green) cuts were higher. Plants were healthier. Demands weren’t as great as they are now because people weren’t watching the Masters. Golfers forget that at Augusta, they do it for a week. They want those conditions every day. It’s biologically impossible.”

But tastes in golf change. One trend in course design that favors sustainability is the emergence of links courses, which emulate the sandy, wild and windswept courses in Scotland where golf was born six centuries ago. Whistling Straits is one example. Michael Lee says that what makes Whistling Straits environmentally friendly—grasses that do well in dry conditions—also makes it a good place to play golf.

“Less water is desirable both from the links experience—playing a dry golf course is great—as well as from a water conservation standpoint,” he says. “Golfers love it. They like a firm, tight lie. They love the ball roll. Who wouldn’t like an extra thirty yards?”

“People really embrace that links idea,” agrees Jay Blasi BS’00, a golf course architect with Robert Trent Jones in San Francisco. “If you look at any list of the most highly thought-of courses, it’s dominated by courses that are built on sand and have this windswept look about them.” Blasi went with that look for his first major project—Chambers Bay, a municipal course on Puget Sound in Washington, which is built on a former gravel pit. After opening last year to rave reviews, the course was selected to host the 2015 U.S. Open, one of the prime dates on the PGA Tour.

Blasi says that environmental concerns—above all, the need to save water—are a driving force in today’s golf course design. “It used to be that you would create a golf course so that you would have grass all the way from tee to green,” he says. “(Now) in the desert, they build little pods of tees, then you hit over the desert to the fairway, and then hit over the desert again to get to the green.”

The fact that golfers are embracing a natural look to the golf course landscape is a big step toward truly sustainable golf, says John Stier. Now he hopes they’ll go one step further, toward a truly natural turf.

“Golfers expect a perfect disease- and weed-free golf course with stands of grass that all look the same,” says Stier. “To have a truly organic or sustainable golf course, we have to let nature have its way. That means there will be different grasses growing next to each other. Things won’t be as uniform. It may mean the putting is not as true as it has been. It means that there is a little more chance to the game.”

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Tags: Entomology, Integrated pest management, Sports, sustainability, Turfgrass
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