CARTER: BRET DOUGLAS; SCOTT K. BROWN
Left: At Bear Trace at Harrison Bay, a daily-fee track
in Chattanooga, Tenn., superintendent Paul Carter
keeps a watchful eye on the club’s environmental
impact. Above: Central Virginia’s Salisbury Country
Club is making the most of its on-site water supply.
course operators are caught off guard by this.
Years of preparation have put golf in reasonably
good position, under the circumstances.”
Partly in response to Gov. Brown’s
announcement, The Wall Street Journal
published a long feature in its April 25
edition about steps California courses have
already taken to minimize the playability and
budgetary problems of sustained drought.
The article took note of golf’s unique imagerelated challenge, which comes down to “how
conspicuously it uses water.”
By contrast with manufacturers and utility
companies, the report reads “golf’s lushly green
product is on display for everyone who drives
by.” Water trivia fact, courtesy of this article: A
single semiconductor chip can take more than
2,000 gallons of water to produce.
One of many solution-seeking Western golf
courses lauded for its recent success is Saddle
Creek Resort in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Part of a Castle & Cooke golf community in
Calaveras County, the course has maintained
first-rate playing conditions while reducing
irrigation intensity by 40 percent, thereby
saving 400,000 gallons of water daily all
through last summer and fall. Among the
measures taken by superintendent Pat Smyth
were concentrating irrigation efforts on tees,
fairways and greens, as well as watering the
rough at a greatly reduced rate, limiting many
360-degree sprinkler heads to 180-degree
turns and hand watering fairways.
“We need to do what’s right for California,”
says Rick Morgan, the club’s general manager.
“At the same time, we’re giving our guests a
glimpse of how golf courses may routinely look
a bit more ‘brown’ in the very near future.”
The word is that Saddle Creek golfers have
proven quite receptive to the changes.
Among national media covering this topic,
Golf Digest recently took up the cudgels,
running a two-page spread in its Feb. 11
Golf Digest Stix edition that spotlighted Paul
Carter, golf course superintendent at a public
access facility outside Chattanooga, Tenn.
Carter oversees turfgrass and grounds at
Bear Trace at Harrison Bay, where he won
the GCSAA President’s Award for exemplary
environmental stewardship.
The achievement that made the award
committee really take notice was annual wateruse reduction to the tune of 7.4 million gallons
a year from 2008 to 2011. The trick to cutting
back so dramatically was, according to Carter,
going from “irrigating and mowing 165 acres
of property to maintaining 105 acres.”
The real headroom for savings is at courses
that are “mowing every inch of property,”
as Bear Trace was when Carter first arrived
there in 2001. Along with switching from
maintained turf to a substitute ground cover,
he has shown political skill in helping to
educate golfers about the long-term value of,
in effect, under-watering fairways and roughs
so that root systems get deeper and stronger,
thus more tolerant of dry spells.
Holliday and the crew at Salisbury have
also been on a mission to replace traditional
golf course grass surfaces with ground cover
that doesn’t have to be watered or mowed.
“Implementing native areas” is the phrase
experts use, by which they mean introducing
fine and hard fescues and other grasses that are
extremely drought-tolerant. The club’s master
plan calls for conversion of another 10 to 20
acres over to these fescue grasses, which, when
they do go dormant, are still a hazard of sorts
for the golfer who plays errantly into these
bordering areas.
One important point to remember is that golf
courses don’t simply use water; they also have
the capacity to filter it, manage it and remove
toxins from it. The term environmentalists
often use is permeable versus impermeable
surfaces. A recent University of Delaware
study on sustainable landscapes made clear
the impact of impermeable surfaces, such as
parking lots and commercial rooftops.
“Permeable surfaces allow water to
percolate into the soil to filter out pollutants
and recharge the water table,” the report says.
“Impermeable or impervious surfaces don’t
allow water to penetrate, forcing it to run off”
or pool for extended periods.
(continued on page 37)
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