Fusariummy

Putting down an application of phosphite and primo in mid December 2014 before it gets dark! It has now been almost an entire year since I started tracking my pesticide use in a meaningful way. Last year I discussed different ways we can measure our pesticide use on the golf course and discussed how the cost and EIQ (Environmental Impact Quotient) were the only real metrics that mattered. You can read all about this in my post: Sustainable Pesticide Use: Tracking Pesticide Cost and Environmental Impact By mid year 2014 I was seeing a lot of success with my tracking and goal setting. I claimed that I was ahead of my goals for pesticide cost and just about right on track with my EIQ goals. Now that the year has come to an end I can look back and see how I did. Did I achieve my goals? The answer is yes and no. Here are the numbers: Sustainability Metric YTD Total Cost Goal Percent of Goal Used Cost Fusarium $4,401.56 $5,000.00 88.03% Cost Dollar Spot $312.17 $400.00 78.04% Total Cost $4,7...

We all know that maintaining a golf course requires a lot of labor, and the cost of this labor makes up a big portion of our budgets. Last year I was coming off a very difficult year labor-wise and was facing further budget restrictions. In order to meet my budget restrictions it was obvious that I needed to do something to maximize my labor efficiency. I needed to do more with less. Following a detailed analysis  it became obvious that we had a lot of room for improvement. There is nothing better than having a lot of room for improvement when working to reduce a budget. I needed a plan. I started out by setting a few goals to guide me; Staff do majority of mowing before golfers teed off No overtime All essential jobs covered during regular hours by my staff, not me. Reduce the extra hours for me...I needed to balance my work/family life Reduce or maintain current labor budget. I was not scheduled for any regular maintenance practices, as I am the mechanic, irrigation tech, and eve...

For the past few years I have been keeping very detailed records of most parts of my operation. The reason for these records are to analyze what we have done, and come up with solutions for improvement. Currently I have employees fill out a Google form after each time they operate a mower on the course. I collect the following data: operator name equipment name area of course which holes? hour meter reading amount of grass collected when cutting greens This gives me a ton of info that I can analyze to really see what is happening out there on my course. I can even compare employees to each other to see who is more efficient at each job. This combined with each person's wage gives me a very good idea of what the actual cost of each mowing task really is. Even though I am the most efficient operator at my course, my higher salary make it much more expensive to the club for me to operate a mower. Equipment Use Efficiency One of the biggest costs for golf course maintenance is mowing ...

It has been a while since my last post. In my defense I have been a bit busy. In September my wife and I welcomed our second son, Avery, into the world. I was also busy working towards my search and rescue Rope Team Leader certification. This involved years of training and a test that lasted 20 hours! It's that time of the year where things are slow and I begin to look back at my records, reflect, and make changes to better my operation for the next season. The first thing I have looked at is my fertilizer records. I have made great strides to reduce the amount of fertilizer applied, the cost of the fertilizer and the time taken to apply this fertilizer. Last year I started using the MLSN guidelines and was amazed with the huge impact this made. This year the impact was less dramatic but I still saw reductions in almost all categories. For those that don't know. We have 0.4ha of poa greens, 0.3 ha of bent/rye tees and 4.5ha of rye/bluegrass fw. Here is the raw data: Total Pro...