TECHNICAL


In recent years, we’ve seen a continually changing landscape in our industry, relating most notably to the chemical armoury we have available to us. The days are gone where we can reactively treat disease, nor now is there an approved chemical out there to inhibit worm casting or the activities of chafer grubs and leatherjackets.


David Lawrence, Grounds Manager, and John Lawrence, Assistant Grounds Manager at Edgbaston Priory Club, spoke to Kerry Haywood about the changes they are making


in the soil and the impact of the surrounding environment. As a result, we have had to come up with management approaches which offer greater and greater levels of integration. Buzz phrases, such as Integrated Pest Management, Integrated Disease Management, and Integrated Management Plans, are ways of describing approaches that we as groundsmen have probably always been implementing. Ultimately, they’re just a fancy way to describe ‘joined up thinking.’ In our eyes, this has meant assessing each maintenance task we carry out, and every chemical and nutritional input we apply, to determine what its positive impact will be and what, if any, the negative side effects may be.


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The challenge we now have of course is that, as we alluded to at the start, we now have less and less chemical inputs we can turn to solve problems. This is


s turf managers, we are having to become better at predicting what is going to happen to our surfaces; not just in terms of sward health, but also activity


meaning that we are having to be exclusively proactive; reactive management is now longer possible.


This is exemplified by the evolution of the fungicides available to us. Around a year ago, Pitchcare published an article penned by John Handley titled ‘Iprodione loss - the best thing that could ever happen.’ We suspect that there were plenty of raised eyebrows from some quarters within the industry as a chemical which had been a staple of most people’s defence against disease outbreaks was no longer going to be available. Iprodione was the last of the old school curative fungicides available to us, and the idea of having no reactive response to disease pressure was an understandably uncomfortable position for some. However, the salient point of the article, as we interpreted it at least, was that in order to continue progressing the quality of sports turf surfaces, innovation would be key. Historically, we’ve always referred to fungicides as being our industry’s equivalent to antibiotics in humans. This was of course true of curative active ingredients


PC April/May 2019 127


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