Conservation & Ecology
Take advice from industry experts as they are at the ‘coal face’ when it comes to future trends and legislation issues and will have the ear of local and national government departmental bodies
seasonal activity we now experience. Oh, if only we had carried out sensible
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investment into the infrastructure; that would have eased the impact of the problems experienced in the first place. Might I suggest that a well planned,
phased and continued investment plan would have gone a long way to resolving some of the horrific sights we have witnessed in the media and, since time immemorial, another consideration ‘after the event’ by Government to at, long last, “invest in infrastructure” for the future. In this article, I would like to offer my
thoughts about having a plan in place for securing sufficient water resources should things go wrong on the weather front at your golf club. By that I mean having enough secured water stocks to enable you to manage a drought with all its associated problems. “Drought?” I hear you say. Drought conditions can have a devastating
affect on a golf club. In the first instance, it can have a considerable impact on revenue. In the golfer’s eyes the grass is always greener somewhere else. This, coupled with increased maintenance costs to recover playing surfaces before winter sets in, can become not only emotionally difficult but financially punitive on the overall running costs.
With the golfing public judging course performance, it is no longer acceptable to
asting my mind back to past years and the impact of extreme weather patterns, it has become evident to me that we can no longer ignore the change in the
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suggest “it wasn’t our fault, it was the weather, and that's the end of it”. Golfers will give a vote of no confidence and seek an alternative venue that has, in their eyes, better playing conditions with guaranteed qualities. Therefore, sensible levels of water stocks must be an objective to aim for. Drought conditions normally come in a
very unpredictable way and sometimes with little warning. They do have to be managed proactively, rather than is normally the case at the majority of golf clubs, reactively. Why without warning? Well, long term
weather forecasting is becoming a little better worldwide, but there is a common held view that we are all experiencing change. We can no longer rely on ‘normal anything’ when it comes to predicting weather patterns. Over the last decade or so, I have recorded
all the rainfall amounts in my local area and, without exception, these records have highlighted similar amounts of rainfall during each of the past ten years. During this time, we have experienced
some very wet and flooded winters and, on the other side of the equation, a few dry and ‘droughty’ summers. The real change has not been in the amounts of rainfall but, more importantly, how it has taken a pattern of feast and famine in its delivery. We are now in a window of extremes when it comes to the weather.
So I think it is time for some candid
honesty and understanding of the reality of managing a golf course going forward into the future. Golfers demand quality; they will no longer accept the extremes of seesawing
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It is no longer acceptable to suggest “it wasn’t our fault, it was the weather, and that’s the end of it”
PC APRIL/MAY 2014 I 101
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