By David Gould

Turf maintenance has already gone high-tech, but the future will require even greater innovation

It's possible that, in our lifetimes, robots with ray-guns will mow every blade of grass on the links the links and a drone hovercraft guided by GPS will re-cut cups in the pre-dawn darkness. If and when that happens, golf course maintenance won’t be as different from today’s version as today is from the earliest days of professional turf care.

Think about it. Course owners and superintendents may love the game’s stout traditions, but most of them push the envelope on techno-turf care as far as their budgets will allow. New waves of research and development within the turfgrass industry (and borrowed from other fields) make it possible, while stringent permitting and hard-to-please golfers make it increasingly necessary. According to experts, the industry’s next push is to save labor costs and reduce carbon emissions—while still producing posh playing conditions.

Here’s a look at the current state of the art in course maintenance:

SUB-SURFACE AERATION AND HYDRONICS. Looking back, Marsh Benson may have been the only course superintendent in the world whose imagination could stretch as far as it did in devising the SubAir underground turf climate system. Benson’s employers at Augusta National Golf Club are a tough audience, and their budget is basically unlimited.

“Marsh started out with just a shop-vac,” says agronomist Kevin Crowe, an agronomist and golf project director for SubAir Systems and a person well acquainted with Benson’s early experiments at Augusta National. Benson, who remains on staff at the famed club while helping oversee growth and development of SubAir, was trying to address the older-than-dirt problem of how to balance air and moisture in the root zone of a green that’s supposed to run 11 to 14 feet on the Stimpmeter under varying climate conditions. Gravity drainage—through USGA-spec sub-layers—is all the industry had going for it until SubAir. Thanks to Benson, hydraulic pressure was added, by the movement of air through pipes.

“It clears the pores,” Crowe says. “Water that would cling to organic material [like peat or leaf thatch] drains down and lets the roots breathe.”

Benson’s invention is now installed at approximately 500 golf courses, each of which has invested some $300,000 to set up all 18 greens with the sensors and pumps that actually do the work. Dr. Michael Hurdzan, a course architect and noted expert on agronomic issues, knows many courses where they use a budget version of the full-scale system. “For only about $30,000, you can buy one portable unit and move it,” Hurdzan says. “You install the hook-ups at each green then cart the pumping system to whichever green needs it.”

VIBRATORY GREENS ROLLERS.  When it comes to greens rollers, it might be easy to picture a rusty, barrel-sized steel monstrosity filled with water—a tool that went out with Emil Loeffler’s rake. In its place are greens rollers that function like skilled masseurs. Rather than rumble over the grass blades in a single crushing pass, they use a swift drumming action to firm and smooth the soil while straightening grass blades.

Mowing is all about the grass, whereas rollers go a step beyond and treat putting surfaces holistically.  They shake out grit and make it fall to the base of the grass plant. One recently patented device, called a “universal vibratory roller unit,” does all this with equipment that attaches to a triplex greens mower in place of the cutting blades. “The real value in these rolling systems is that you can raise your cutting height and get a faster, smoother green than you would by just mowing,” Hurdzan says. “More leaf surface helps the plant survive stress, so it’s a win-win.”

SOIL SENSORS, INSTALLED. To change pin placements, a maintenance crew member presses a hole-cutting tool into the green and removes a cylindrical plug. These days, superintendents are installing wireless sensors into the root-zone areas, replacing the turf plug and monitoring what the sensors report on their desktop computers. Armed with real-time measurements of moisture, temperature and salinity, course superintendents can replace a carpet-bombing approach to irrigation, fertilization and pesticide use with precision strikes.

“Scioto Country Club [in Columbus, Ohio] had major soil problems on four or five greens, and the superintendent kept warning members about what might go wrong under certain conditions,” Hurdzan recounts. “They didn’t put much stock in it, until he installed the sensors and showed them the readouts following a major rainstorm. They looked at those numbers and took immediate action to rebuild.”

Daily fee course owners, who aren’t pressured by memberships to undertake major rebuilding projects, make their own decisions about when to invest the money. However, high-tech tools like soil sensors can help them schedule rebuild work more precisely.

SOIL SENSORS, MOBILE. Don’t brag too loudly about your in-ground soil sensors, lest the course owner beside you turn out to use mower-mounted sensors. According to Dana Lonn, director of the Center for Advanced Turf Technologies at The Toro Company, mower-mounted sensors will likely come to market within the decade. These sensors can take a snapshot of the grass being cut and evaluate it using NDVI, or “normalized differential vegetative index.”

In layman’s terms, this means a plant receives red light in relation to the amount of infrared light it is exposed to, and the resulting ratio indicates its “photosynthetic vigor.” This information, Lonn says, can be plotted on a digital graph and used to minimize applications of water, fertilizer and protectants.

Aided by the same GPS technology that tells golfers they’re facing a 162-yard shot to a back pin, the superintendent’s desktop monitor indicates which locations on the course need more or less irrigation or chemicals. Being mobile is good because it allows superintendents to monitor fairways, “and fairways are where you’re going to save water because there’s 15 times as much fairway acreage as green acreage,” Lonn notes.

GENETICALLY ENGINEERED GRASSES. This innovation takes place in laboratories at seed companies and works its way into local golf markets, but it’s too important not to mention. “Gene mapping of turfgrass started out crudely 10 or so years ago,” Hurdzan says. “Now, it’s sophisticated. Someone isolates a gene, inserts it in a cytoplasm, and suddenly you’ve got a new strain of turf—resistant to selected diseases and ideal for a particular climate and playing characteristics.”

A design patent recently filed by Monsanto described a genetic modification (called a trait) capable of generating golf turfgrass that is both herbicide-tolerant (including glyphosates) and a dwarf variety. Dwarf strains of turfgrass have always been desirable for their reduced maintenance costs and non-invasiveness, but without biotech enhancements they’re too easily crowded out. The Monsanto invention, if successful in the field, would address that deficiency. (See “Creeping Along” on page 49 for more information about Roundup Ready creeping bentgrass.)

The glyphosate-tolerance factor, also highly significant to course managers, has already been proven in plants such as corn. Unlike corn, however, grass is a plant that disperses its seeds widely and prolifically. That means a modified cultivar is difficult to confine to a site, which raises biological and environmental concerns for owners of neighboring properties. These worries have contributed, in part, to the slow approval process.

EQUIPMENT POWERED BY FUEL CELLS.  Given the growing concern over carbon emissions, the image of a motor vehicle with a tailpipe that emits nothing but a few drops of water is enticing. Applying this technology to cars is impractical, however, based on the need for thousands of refueling stations dispensing hydrogen. Golf courses, on the other hand, are practical application sites.

“The golf course environment is a very attractive target market for fuel cell-powered products,” notes Mike Flenniken, director of engineering at John Deere’s Southeast Engineering Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. In particular, the fact that most turf vehicles return to the same maintenance shed each day makes them a more viable option than fuel cell-powered automobiles.

“But, the market is also price-sensitive and may not be able to absorb the costs that fuel cell-powered equipment bears for the short term [three to five years],” Flenniken adds. “In the longer term, golf equipment may be viable for fuel-cell power, especially if the costs are eliminated or reduced.”

While the widespread application of fuel-cell technology is years off, a number of manufacturers have gotten serious about producing more energy-efficient machinery. John Deere, for instance, deployed a fleet of four Gator vehicles powered by fuel cells in August 2006, as part of Toronto’s Hydrogen Village “Hydrogen Early Adopters” (h2EA) Program. The demonstration vehicles are designed to illustrate the performance and attributes of the latest fuel-cell technology available today. Meanwhile, Toro demonstrated a hydrogen fuel cell-powered utility vehicle in summer 2007 that was developed with the help of a $380,000 grant from the state of New York, which is ordering production models of the 10-foot long vehicle.

NON-MECHANICAL AERATION. This is an incremental but still dramatic innovation. Moving away from the use of large, deep-bore tines that leave cores which litter greens for days—and holes that remain even longer—superintendents are increasingly turning to equipment that produces smaller, more surgical extractions that are easily filled with the appropriate “medium.” In fact, some systems can aerate, amend and topdress in one operation, allowing play within an hour of treatment. Even more efficient than water-jet aeration, this process combines air and water and deposits narrow columns of permeable sand three to six inches deep into the root zone. Now that course-review Web sites are giving out so much information on aeration work (and steering play away from recently aerated courses through blog reports), the importance of completing the task and quickly restoring your surface of play is even greater.

IRRIGATION CONTROL STATIONS. Virtually all “modern” golf courses are lined with double-row irrigation pipe and thousands of valves and nozzles, not to mention sensors and meters that tell the story of how thirsty or sated each square foot of turfgrass might be. One of the more interesting components of some systems is a rain sensor, an irrigation shutoff device that prevents an automatic sprinkler from turning on during or after a rainstorm. Given the savings in electricity and water volume, combined with the improved turf hardiness, many operators find the returns worth the investment.

LASER MOWING SYSTEMS. If the surface of the human cornea can be safely altered by laser beams, surely a small expanse of bentgrass can take a laser trim, right? That’s the idea many turf experts began to consider when word of a laser mower floated out of Germany in 2005. Although there was significant interest when the technology was touted, there’s been little to no follow-up in subsequent years—but it’s still an intriguing concept.

The most obvious obstacle to a laser greens mower is that lasers trim and shape things by burning them, and grass is predominantly made of water. In place of the steel blade’s clipping action, a form of distillation would have to take place. The water in the grass would have to be heated and vaporized, which would require large amounts of energy. Ironically, the laser’s advantage in eye surgery—avoiding contact of a solid object with human tissue—is a disadvantage in greens maintenance.

“The mowing process is very much about standing the grass blade up first, then cutting,” Lonn says. “Any new technology would have to address that part of the equation.”

Will golf course superintendents take to wearing spandex suits and jet-packs as they preside over this 21st-century version of what was once an overalls-only occupation? It’s not that far-fetched a notion—although somewhere in a back room they’ll still have a rake, and surely some occasion to use it.

David Gould is a Connecticut-based freelance writer.