Laid out in 1891 by pioneering designer Willie Campbell, and respected among golfing cognoscenti, The Machrie on the Isle of Islay is regarded as one of the world’s top links courses.


When Campbell first saw the land being proposed for the course, he said it was “the best ground for a golf course that I have ever had the pleasure of viewing.” In fact, apart from some minor modifications, this challenging course has changed little in over 100 years.


Head Greenkeeper, Simon Freeman, suggests that you don’t have to trust the experts when it comes to sustainability.


I


t’s all well and good all this sustainable greenkeeping stuff, isn’t it. The greenkeeping press has been awash with it for the last couple of years, with


countless experts churning out endless scripts about how we should all be promoting the growth of fescues and bents and following a greener approach to greenkeeping that will stand us in good stead when the day of reckoning arrives and the nasty people at the big, bad E.U. take all our insecticides and fungicides away from us.


It’s alright for them though, isn’t it - they don’t have 1000 manic members breathing down their necks, asking for summer maintenance practises to be carried on right through the winter and demanding the kind of ever- increasing green speeds that force us to maintain our surfaces at a cutting height that ensures that poa annua will inevitably dominate our swards. Surely, the pressure put on us by these members - our employers - makes it literally impossible for most of us to choose a sustainable path, even if we wanted to. After all, many of us will have been in the industry long enough to remember Greenkeepers who stringently followed the teachings of the great Jim Arthur, refusing to overfeed or irrigate their greens, refusing to cut below 5mm in order to pander to the so called ‘preferential’ grass species, only to be handed their P45s by exasperated committees who could not understand why they couldn’t have the billiard table greens they might have seen at the club down the road. And yet now it appears that, 20 years or so down the line, we almost find ourselves in a similar position, one where central government, rather than a fire- breathing agronomist from Devon, is trying to force us down the same apparently disappointing route,


threatening to take away the tools of our trade to such an extent that we will never again be able to produce surfaces to match those of the “halcyon days between 2000 and 2010”.


The difference this time, of course, is that it appears we are not going to have much choice, for once this forecasted legislation comes in it will force our hand to such an extent that we are going to have to come to rely on grasses that can survive with drastically reduced inputs of nitrogen fertiliser (which may well, at some point, be taxed to the extent that its use will almost become prohibitive), and are resistant to the diseases that today we take for granted that we can control with fungicides. This picture would appear to be


pretty bleak. Or is it? Is it possible that, if we took a step back and actually thought about this, it might be possible for us to use this situation to our advantage, to actually make our lives as greenkeepers easier? Do you think it might be feasible, for instance, to persuade our members that, if they stick with us in the short term, and accepted that their greens were going to run a foot slower during the summer, that they could play all year round on greens that putt well and require very little in the way of remedial action. After all, aren’t these same members always telling us that that’s how the greens used to be in the “old days”?


Might we discover that the average golfer actually cares very little about how fast the greens are (up to a point, of course), but gets very miffed indeed when we tear seven bells out of them in October in an effort to remove the thatch built up by the very presence of the grass we are promoting through our aggressive quest for that elusive six inches of pace (the pace that Mister


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111