Technical
Sustainability
Documenting your progress
Wendy Gelernter, Ph.D, Larry Stowell, Ph.D and Micah Woods Ph.D suggest that simple monitoring approaches can help you provide measurable, science based data on sustainability
S
ustainability. The word is getting a bad rap these days, and justifiably so, as it is used (and misused) for every purpose under the sun - from advertising chewing gum, to
“greenwashing” environmentally damaging practices, to political campaigns and the workplace. Chances are, it even shows up in your own job goal documents. But how can you meet a goal of sustainability
when its meaning has become so vague and diluted that a recent Google search on “define sustainable” yielded more than 28 million entries? How do you develop tactics, strategies and plans around an idea that no one can pin down? And how will you and your co-workers know how successful you’ve been without some system for measuring sustainability? Without the ability to measure it,
sustainability remains a mushy, confusing and frustratingly unobtainable goal. Without quantification, evaluating the achievement of sustainability goals becomes wholly subjective - in the eye of the beholder. Although you may think you’re doing a great job, you have no way to communicate it or to prove it, unless you have some way to measure and document it. In this article, we present several simple monitoring approaches that can help take the
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mush out of sustainability, and instead treat it as a measurable, science-based agronomic phenomenon. All of these procedures can easily be put into practice at your facility.
The single biggest impact on sustainability: reducing turf acreage
Decreasing the number of highly maintained acres is without doubt the most effective way to increase sustainability by reducing almost all inputs including water, pesticides, fertilisers, labour, energy and money. A recent USGA Green Section Record article calculated savings of $1,700 to $7,000/acre/year in water use alone for golf courses in the southwestern US that have implemented turf reduction projects. Depending on the situation, superintendents have converted out-of-play areas, tee surrounds, shady locations and other turf areas to native and/or low-maintenance vegetation, mulch, non-overseeded turf or other lower- upkeep replacements. Software tools can provide a hard and fast
quantification on turf acreage at the start of a turf reduction programme, and periodically thereafter. These can quickly obtain approximate measurement of turf acreage using satellite photos from Google Maps. For more precise measurements of acreage, a
superintendent can purchase a geo-rectified aerial photograph of the course that can be used with one of many geographic information system software packages, or ground-based GPS systems, to survey and inventory a course and produce detailed maps and measurements for the entire property.
Fertiliser inputs: How low can you go?
We have suspected for many years that most soil nutritional guidelines (including our own) overestimated the amounts of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and other key nutrients needed for turf health. The operating principle in most cases was a desire to ensure that there is never a deficit in soil nutrients. But, as economic and environmental concerns have grown, the emphasis has shifted to targeting the lowest levels of soil nutrients that will provide turf performance that meets expectations. This may seem like a subtle shift in thinking, but it can have enormous impacts on sustainability, as shown below. To find out how low we could really go in
terms of soil nutrition, Pace Turf and the Asian Turfgrass Center pooled a huge database of more than 17,000 soil samples that had been collected from turf facilities over the past twenty years. Of these, we identified 1,500 samples that met our requirements (primarily that they were collected from areas where the turf was performing adequately), and then statistically analysed the data to determine the lowest levels of each major nutrient that could predictably support good-quality turf. The result was the Minimum Levels for
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