Divot Mix

"Golf is no longer a game of hitting the ball, finding it, and hitting it again. There is wind to be measured, whether that means tossing blades of grass in the air or studying the gentle movement of 60-foot high branches. There are caddie conferences for even the most routine shots. There are sports psychologists who tell players not to hit until they're ready." -- Doug Ferguson, AP writer on the pace of play on Tour

GCSAA members have opportunity to "Ask Nancy"

GCSAA members have a unique opportunity at the Opening Session of the GCSAA Education Conference, Feb. 9, in Atlanta, Ga.

They can submit questions for keynote speaker and LPGA legend Nancy Lopez. The session, sponsored by Bayer Environmental Science, will be in a question and answer format, with questions for Lopez submitted by attendees to the session.

Question should be sent to mailto:lopez@gcsaa.org.

One of golf's most celebrated and popular players, Lopez began playing golf at the age of eight under the guidance of her father, Domingo, and turned professional after her sophomore year of college. She was LPGA Player of the Year in 1978, 1979, 1985 and 1988 and was inducted into the LPGA Tour Hall of Fame in 1987 when she was only 30 years old.

In 2000, Lopez was given GCSAA's highest honor, the Old Tom Morris Award. More on her and the award is available in a 1999 Golf Course Management magazine article.

GCSAA and The Institute to launch national study

GCSAA has announced the launch of a study that aims to fill a significant void in the available data on golf course environmental performance. The study is being funded by The Environmental Institute for Golf, thanks in large part to a grant from The Toro Foundation.

The Golf Course Environmental Profile  will be a multi-year project with the goal of collecting information that will help golf course superintendents and other facility personnel to become better managers, help facilities operate more efficiently and lead to GCSAA developing more valuable programs and services.

The information will be collected about playing surfaces, natural resources, environmental stewardship efforts and maintenance practices.

“Organizations such as the USGA Green Section, GCSAA, universities and private industry have funded and administered research that has been invaluable for the game. We know that golf courses are compatible with the environment.” GCSAA President Tim O'Neill, certified golf course superintendent, said. “But we also know there are gaps in the data, especially in the collection of aggregate golf course information. We believe the data will be helpful on many fronts.”

The most glaring absence comes in collective golf course performance data. Existing data is limited and not complete, uniform or centralized. A multi-year initiative will not only benefit superintendents and golf facilities, but communities and golfers as well.

“Golf courses are community assets from an environmental, economic and recreational perspective,” GCSAA Director of Research Clark Throssell, Ph.D., said. “The data and case studies clearly point that out. Years ago, we never thought golf courses would be used as habitat to restore species of wildlife, become part of a community's water purification process or be employed as an element of a city's green space program. Yet, that is happening today. I think we will find that in the future golf courses will have even greater value to communities. I believe this survey project will help guide the industry in attaining that.”

The project will actually be several cycles of surveys conducted over many years, with each individual survey cycle being conducted for multiple years. Each survey cycle will collect information of the physical features found on a golf course, water use, water quality, wildlife and habitat management, energy use and nutrient and pesticide use. The first cycle of surveys will establish a baseline of information from which environmental progress can be measured. The second cycle of surveys will begin five years after the start of first cycle of surveys and will be used to document environmental change and environmental progress on golf courses.

Beginning March, 2006, GCSAA member and non-member superintendents will receive questionnaires regarding their facilities and golf course management activities. Data to be collected in the first survey consists of a profile of physical features of the golf course (including acreage and grass species on greens, tees, fairways, rough and natural areas); the facility grounds (including area devoted to the clubhouse, parking lots, maintenance facility and recreational amenities); and water use. 

Is grass America's top irrigated crop?

What started as a simple graduate student project for Cristina Milesi has turned into a several-year project calculating how much of America's land surface is covered with turf and what impact all that grass has on the country's water and carbon cycles.

Milesi works in the ecological forecasting research group at NASA's Ames Research Center and since 2003 she's worked on the lawn project.

An article on her project is available at NASA's Earth Observatory. Milesi, a native of Italy who moved to the U.S. in 1998, said, “I think the interest in lawns started because I'm kind of an outsider. When I first came here I lived in Montana, in a town that was surrounded by mountains. Past June, everything surrounding the town would turn brown and dry. A lot of the natural vegetation goes dormant in the summer.

"But then throughout our town, I would see these oases of green patches—people's lawns. I had a neighbor who would water every day, even twice a day. It was not familiar to me."

At the time, she was working on her Ph.D. at the University of Montana and signed up for an e-business class. The final exam required her to submit a proposal for an e-business.

That business, an e-mail service for homeowners that would tell them if they needed to turn on their sprinklers and for how long, got her thinking about the potential customer base. This meant she'd need to know how much surface area in the United States was covered by lawns.

She found out that no one had ever published an observation-based estimate of lawn surface area in the United States. That, she thought, was an important part of the America's ecology, so a few months later, she submitted a research proposal to the NASA Earth System Science Fellowship Program

Several years later, she's arrived at some conclusions. One of which is, “Even conservatively, I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.”

In other word, lawns—including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses and sports fields—could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all.

To calculate out the ecological impacts of the turf crop Americans are cultivating, she first had to account for the fact that turf management methods vary from person to person, and business to business.

She used a computer simulation to calculate the effect of different management techniques on the water cycle and carbon cycle. The variables tested included watering a fixed amount (including rainfall) versus watering according to weather and evaporation rates, adding different amounts of fertilizer, and leaving the clippings on the lawn after mowing or bagging them for removal.

One of the conclusions was that about 200 gallons of fresh water per person per day would be required to keep up the nation's lawn surface area.

She also found that that a well-watered and fertilized lawn is a carbon sink. If people recycle the grass clippings, leaving them to decompose on the lawn, the U.S. lawn area could store up to 16.7 teragrams of carbon each year. That's equivalent to about 37 billion pounds.

For the complete article, visit http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Lawn/lawn.html.

Hurricane recovery continues

Hurricane Katrina has long passed, but Bud White, USGA Green Section senior agronomist, says the cleanup and recovery are still in full swing along the Gulf Coast.

In his Region Update for January, White wrote, "Golf courses in the path of Katrina are healing from injury experienced by very few in the United States before: significant flooding with salt water. This greatly complicates recovery compared to normal flooding--not that recuperating from flooding alone is easy."

He says the salt has not only burned the turf, but it has also loaded soils. The problem is exacerbated by the heavy clay “gumbo” soils that do not readily drain. This limits the leaching of salts out of the root zone.

In addition, irrigation ponds were inundated with brackish water and are now contaminated. Irrigation with this very poor water quality also inhibits turf recovery and green-up.

Dr. Tom Koske, LSU extension turf specialist, has information on the LSU AgCenter Website about dealing with salt contamination on turf and other management recommendations. To read White's complete January update, click here.

ARS scientists work on fungi

Agricultural scientists have long known that naturally occurring mycorrhizal fungi help plants take in nutrients and in exchange, the plants provide glucose and other organic materials the fungi need to grow.

They say, however, that there's currently no practical way to add to the naturally occurring fungi in the soil on a large scale.

According to an article in the January 2006 issue of Agricultural Research magazine, scientists with USDA's Agricultural Research Service are looking at way to produce the fungi on-site in quantities that would be useful for farm fields. They hope to use either fungus inoculum already native to the site or introduce nonnative fungi on colonized host plants. The goal is to make the mycorrhizal fungus a practical option for producers.

Philip E. Pfeffer, a chemist on the study, said the work has shown positive results on crops, especially in dryer than normal conditions. But the results indicate there maybe less benefit under optimal growing conditions. According to Pfeffer, the system also requires a low-input, sustainable regime for continued success.

He added that the question of whether or not their work would have any application in turfgrass is as yet unknown.

It's a worthwhile goal for farmers as the most common of the fungi, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, have been shown to enhance disease resistance, increase soil's stability against erosion, maintain soil pores for air and water infiltration, improve soil fertility, and increase concentrations of organic matter in the soil.

Others working on the study are David D. Douds, a microbiologist, who heads the on-farm inoculum production and Gerald Nagahashi, a chemist/cell biologist studying the fungal life cycle.

For more on the study, visit http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/jan06/root0106.htm.