Biologicals in spotlight at LebanonTurf event

At first blush, you wouldn’t peg Bernie Banas as a trailblazer in the world of golf course management.

As the Class A superintendent at Leatherstocking Golf Club at the Otesaga Resort in Cooperstown, N.Y., Banas (pictured left) is like many superintendents who prefer the tried and true over the fresh and new when it comes to the products and services they use on their courses. And in a community such as Cooperstown, which is as attuned to its natural surroundings as any town in America, taking chances with his maintenance routines seems like the last thing Banas would consider.

Yet, that’s exactly what the 23-year GCSAA member did when he first began putting together a turf fertility program for Leatherstocking some 12 years ago, making the decision to dive into the much-discussed and often-controversial world of biological products and making them a major part of his plan. It is, he contends, one of the best decisions he’s ever made.

“I’m a true believer,” Banas told attendees who came to Cooperstown last week for a workshop hosted by LebanonTurf that focused on matters of bionutrition and biofertility. “It took me awhile to believe, but I'm there now.”

When you learn more about the area that Banas and his golf course call home, his decision seems far less radical than it may have first appeared. In addition to being the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown also boasts one of the most environmentally progressive populaces in the country, a citizenry that is involved and asks questions about the maintenance of its parks, lawns and, yes, even its golf course.

And where Leatherstocking GC is concerned, the bulk of that scrutiny focuses on the layout’s location along the shores of Otsego Lake, which sets at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, a tributary that eventually spills into Chesapeake Bay.

“That big body of water out there dictates a lot of things around here,” Banas says, pointing out toward the lake. “So my first goal when I got here was to do something to minimize the impact this golf course was having on the environment.”

After considerable study, Banas decided that “something” should include a healthy dose of organic fertility products in combination with traditional synthetic offerings. He’s tweaked the program often over the dozen years he’s used biologicals, but he says the results have spoken for themselves in the form of reduced fungicide use, reduced irrigation and, most importantly, overall healthier turf.

“When I first took over here, I battled anthracnose. No matter what I did, I could not get rid of the anthracnose,” Banas says. “But once we started incorporating the biologicals, I haven’t seen anthracnose in 12 years.”

Despite individual success stories like the one told by Banas, there remains significant skepticism in the scientific and superintendent communities about whether these biological fertility products really work. Officials with LebanonTurf, which offers traditional synthetic products in addition to a biological line of products it acquired from Emerald Isle and Roots in the last three years, acknowledged those critics up front — they playfully called the event “Bionutrition: From Bugs ‘n’ Jugs to Mainstream Fertility” — but also maintained that opinions are changing.

In a survey conducted by the company, 51 percent of turf-care professionals who responded indicated they use biological products as a part of their normal turf fertility programs; 65 percent of those use them in combination with traditional fertilizer products.

“As an industry, we’re still very much in the infancy of understanding the laboratory science (behind biologicals),” says Bernie Bross, the senior marketing manager for LebanonTurf. “We’re still very much there in terms of the commercial end of this, too. But when a company like Lebanon Seaboard puts their entire weight behind something like this, it starts to signal an arrival in mainstream thinking.”