Spring 2011 - Northwest Indiana Business Quarterly Magazine

eNVirONMeNT
Eco-Friendly Golfing
Northwest Indiana courses maintained with the planet in mind.
by Steve Kaelble
The golf course is
such a place of
beauty and tranquility—it’s
a bit surprising to
imagine that a golf course
has the potential to have
a negative impact on the
environment. It’s comforting,
then, to learn of the
committed environmental
stewards who are watching
over Northwest Indiana golf
courses, and their painstaking
efforts to maintain their
properties with the health
of the planet in mind.
Their mindset is summed up by
Erwin McKone, director of golf operations
at Briar Ridge Country Club in
Schererville. “We are sitting on some
valuable green space for our community,”
he says. “We’re examining
how to make golf go hand-in-hand
with solid environmental practices, to
make the most of these green spaces.”
Perhaps the most obvious potential
environmental concern involves the
chemicals needed to keep the course’s
turf in top shape. As any homeowner
knows, it’s hard to maintain golfcourse-quality
grass without the help
of some herbicides and insecticides,
but the days of simply blanketing the
course with chemicals are long gone.
Today’s turf-management experts
know that doing so is not only
unnecessary, it’s expensive and it’s
not in the best interests of the environment.
“Golf courses are more
aware than they were 20 or 30 years
ago,” notes Bill Burford, golf course
superintendent at The Course at
Aberdeen in Valparaiso.
“We’re looking at ways we can
reduce the chemicals we put in
the environment,” McKone agrees.
“We’re looking to the future and to
the days when more pesticide bans
are taking place.”
CERTIFIABLY GREEN GREENS Sand Creek Country Club
in Chesterton announced in January that it has retained its
designation as a Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary,
a recognition of environmental excellence.
“We have a strong management
program,” Burford explains. That
doesn’t mean all fertilizers and fungicides
are out, but it does mean the
chemicals used today have evolved
into safer varieties. But even more
important, says Burford, “We hold
off spraying until we have to.”
It’s all part of a concept known
as integrated pest management, or
IPM. The basic idea is that there
are numerous ways to deal with
pests—plant or insect—and chemicals
represent just one approach.
IPM involves creating a course-specific
plan based on local situations
and conditions. One of the key elements
is establishing measurable
thresholds of damage, and basing
the response on just how bad the
problem is. For example, a course
won’t apply fungicide to an affected
area unless the problem exceeds the
established threshold.
Even if the threshold of damage
has been met, there may be an
option with a lower environmental
impact. Beyond chemicals, golf
course superintendents may turn to
biological solutions, such as predators
or parasites, or cultural fixes
such as habitat modification. There
may be a physical answer, such as
soil aeration or increased air move-
ment. A typical IPM plan
will emphasize the use of
non-chemical solutions first.
The concept sounds sensible,
though it’s anything
but simple. For one thing,
it requires painstaking and
sophisticated monitoring.
“We do daily monitoring of
rainfall amounts and evaporation
rates,” Burford notes.
What does that have to
do with controlling fungal
foes and other unwanted
growth? “When it comes to
fungus that attack plants,
one big key is to keep everything
a little on the dry side,” says Brian
Yeager, golf course superintendent
at White Hawk Country Club in
Crown Point. “It’s a balancing act,”
he adds. On one hand, it makes
sense to water heavily when it’s hot
and dry to keep the grass green. On
the other hand, water too much at
the wrong time and you might exacerbate
fungal growth.
The bottom line is that taking care
of a golf course in an eco-friendly
way involves a lot of science. Burford
and other Northwest Indiana
golf course superintendents stay on
top of the latest research from institutions
such as Purdue University.
And many do their own research
as well. “We have installed some different
test plots out here,” McKone
says of Briar Ridge. “We do a fair
amount of research to get a better
handle on our problem areas.”
For example, “we’re inter-seeding
more disease-tolerant grasses
and evaluating the methods we use
to establish it, and see what does
better than others,” he says. The
more disease-tolerant the grasses are
to begin with, the less likely they’ll
need chemical help to stay healthy.
This kind of golf course environmentalism
is not just good for the
28 NORTHWEST INDIANA BUSINESS QUARTERLY SpRINg–SUmmER 2011