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Showing posts from November, 2017

Herd Immunity and Disease Spread

Just remember… #herdimmunity — Brandon Horvath (@UTTurfPath) November 30, 2017 This tweet started an interesting discussion on twitter today. It centered around herd immunity and turfgrass disease trials and knock out control plots. For those of you who don't know what herd immunity is check out the following tweet. It’s where in a herd of vaccinated animals (like us) the unvaccinated don’t get disease b/c they’re protected by the herd. — Brandon Horvath (@UTTurfPath) November 30, 2017 So essentially Pat might have a clean check plot because all the turf surrounding the plot is treated for disease and this prevents the spread of disease onto the check plot. The discussion then goes on to talk about how there might be better value to have fewer large plots vs many smaller plots to try and account for this apparent phenomenon. Exactly. @luke1utk was @UTturfgrass intern w/Pat this summer and I had him do an independent study on this topic. Jeff, his conclusion was it might be more

The evolution of precision fertilizer application.

Listening to @PenderSuper at @golfimoso in Iceland this morning. pic.twitter.com/4nGILz3uN1 — Edwin Roald (@EdwinRoald) November 17, 2017 I recently returned from an amazing trip to Ireland and Iceland. There's nothing that teaches me more about greenkeeping than going to see other greenkeepers and learn how they grow grass. This trip was no exception and in my discussions with other seriously deep thinking greenkeepers it got me thinking about how the way I fertilize my grass has changed over the years and helped me understand that basically what I have been doing is trying to reduce the amount of guesswork and luck and resources required to grow good grass. For the most part my experience with fertilizing grass has gone like this; Guess at how much fertilizer to apply based on generalized guidelines, Adjust rates based on observations Guess again.... For the most part we are guessing because fertilizing grass is extremely difficult compared to other crops. Unlike agriculture,