Water is a hot topic these days among golf course superintendents. This week's Golf Industry Show provides a platform for them to speak their mind.
That includes Shawn Emerson, who weighed in on it this morning during the education session "DIY for your facility: Ideas that make an impact." As director of agronomy, he oversees six Jack Nicklaus-designed courses at Desert Mountain. There are homes on the courses that range from $2 to $9 million. Expectations are pretty enormous for sparkling golf courses, Emerson says, and that usually means they have to be of a particular color.
"Brown does not sell at my property. Green does," says Emerson, 24-year GCSAA member, whose presentation was titled 'Golf is green. Green is good.' "When you have (brown turf), there is no way back except for water. The strategy I'm after is a healthy plant."
Emerson is aware that many courses out West, especially in California, are participating in turf elimination rebate programs that are designed to save on precious water in that drought-stricken region. He, though, simply can't go that route. Not right now, at least. There is too much at stake.
"I'm a turf manager. I really don't want to take out turf. Or they'll be taking my job pretty soon, too," Emerson says.
Cloninger offered advice on how to inventory trees, including mapping and tagging all of them. He uses GPS and GIS systems to capture and display tree locations. Not all of them survive. Shadow Creek loses 200 trees a year. Cloninger planted 486 new trees in 2014.
Paul Carter, CGCS, followed Cloninger with a presentation called 'All quiet on the front nine.' It featured electric equipment that Carter now uses at his course, The Bear Trace at Harrison Bay in Tennessee. He showed images, with sound, contrasting gasoline-powers equipment versus his new equipment and how much noise there used to be at The Bear Trace compared to today.
Carter, GCSAA's 2015 President's Award recipient, pointed out that probably everyone in the session (including himself) had violated the Noise Control Act of 1972. "We've all broken the law in one way or another," he said.
Terry Buchen concluded the session with 'Travels with Terry: Ideas for equipment modification.' His slide show depicted several examples of how golf course managers have devised some pretty fantastic ideas and not spent a whole lot of money doing it.
One of them was transforming a blower into a pump by reversing the blade. Another was a hand aerifier composed of scrap metal. And trailers virtually made from scratch.
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