Does it cost more to spray soluble fertilizer on our golf course?

I often receive criticism from people who say that the fertilizer savings I have found from using soluble fertilizer sources and the MLSN come at a cost of higher sprayer usage. I normally tell them "nu uh" but maybe it would be better if I looked into it a bit more closely.

We used to spend upwards of $30,000 on fertilizer for our golf course. In the past few years we have averaged $6000. This is a savings of $24,000 per year on fertilizer by spraying soluble source fertilizer as required by the MLSN and my growth rate targets.

Our annual cost of ownership for our Toro Workman Multipro Spray System on Workman HDXD 4wd chassis is $22,122. This includes everything from the cost of the lease, parts, equipment maintenance labor, fuel and labor to operate the machine for the first 5 years of its service life.

Right away we can see that this strategy saves us about $2000 a year vs using granular fertilizers and other nutrient guidelines. We aren't even taking into account the cost of applying the granular fertilizer.

Even on a 9 hole course with half the fertilizer usage, it was still economical to spray soluble fertilizer.

Even if we aren't spraying our fertilizer, we still need a sprayer for other chemical applications like wetting agents, plant growth regulators, and fungicide. We almost always combine fertilizer applications with our chemical applications. There were only 2 instances in 2022 where we sprayed only fertilizer on our greens. On fairways we always combine fertilizer with wetting agent applications.

Today, if we switched back to exclusively granular fertilizers, we wouldn't save any sprayer time. Essentially the sprayer time for fertilizer use is free....or, the fertilizer savings more than cover the cost of the sprayer making the cost of all chemical applications free. We also have a much improved control over the growth rates of our turf and are able to match it to the current conditions. This drastically reduces the mowing requirements and improves the playability as we are rarely growing the grass so fast that clippings are an issue. Sure there are some spots that still grow too fast from time to time, but overall, we have few issues with excessive growth these days.

We can make it as convoluted and complicated as we want but in the end, it is simply much cheaper and precise to use soluble fertilizer sources applied through a sprayer.

AI generated picture of a fertilizer spreader

Turfgrass speedo is still my most important tool for managing turf growth after 4 years.

It wasn't the easiest year for growing grass , but the conditions were still pretty good. Almost 4 years ago exactly, I came up with the idea of comparing actual clipping yields to the "ideal" clipping yield or the clipping yield adjusted using the Growth Potential Model . Since then, it has proved to be a much more useful tool to manage growth than I originally thought . It has been almost a decade since I started making observations on plant health and playability and how it relates to the clipping yield. I have been constantly searching for ways to get the growth rate right as often as I can and this tool seems to be the best way I have seen so far, and might ultimately, be the best way going forward. To prove this point I will discuss in a future post, the success I've had with pest control in the past few years (for the most part (Not withstanding the times where I think my greens are dead but they actually aren't...thanks T)). Never needed less There are

Do you have enough?

I recently discussed how we can use fertilizer ratios to simplify how much fertilizer we apply to help us keep above the MLSN guidelines . When we get a soil test done it is a static amount of nutrients found in the soil. Even if you are above the MLSN guidelines at the time of testing, it doesn't guarantee that you will remain at or above the guidelines as the grass grows and consumes nutrients. There is math that you can use to determine exactly how much nutrient you need to apply to ensure that you remain at or above the MLSN guidelines. For many, this is much too complicated. For that reason I made a quick cheat sheet to help you determine how much of each nutrient you can expect to use each year based off a few different annual nitrogen rates. Nutrient use is based primarily on nitrogen use so the left 2 columns are a few different nitrogen rates. The columns for each nutrient are in PPM and are designed to help you look at your current soil test PPM (mehlich 3) and determin

How to quantify nutrient content in liquid fertilizer

In a recent post, I discussed how it was actually cheaper to spray soluble vs granular fertilizer. What about if we use pre-mixed liquid fertilizer? How do we even figure out how much nutrient we are applying with pre-mixed liquid fertilizer? Before I learned that you could simply dissolve soluble fertilizer in water and apply it in a sprayer, I was a big user of pre-mixed liquid fertilizers. One of the issues I initially had was figuring out exactly how much of each nutrient I was applying. The math wasn't as straightforward is it was with granular fertilizers. It turns out, it's actually not that difficult but requires an extra step. First, we need to convert the liquid volume into a mass. Many products will have the product density displayed on the label or you can look in the Safety Data Sheet (SDS) for that information as well. No SDS? Should you be using products without an SDS? Even if this information isn't included on the label it is very easy to figure out. All

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