Fusariummy

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...

Organic is seen by most (by most I mean the uneducated public) as the best way to manage a golf course. Over the years I've tried to go down that road but found that there were too many problems with going "organic." Long story short, I think we can do better than organic. Putting labels on things has always bothered me. Committing to organic or vegetarianism or veganism or low carb is too limiting for me. Yes, they are probably good targets to work towards but if you commit to these ways of thinking you can hide yourself from other ideas that might actually be better than these restricting ideologies require. The environmental impact of my golf course operation is one of my main concerns as a golf course superintendent. I don't want to do things that negatively impact the environment and will look for ways to reduce this impact in any way I can. Of course in the back of my mind there are costs to be aware of and course conditions to maintain as well (who am I kidding...

We have never spent less controlling pests on our golf course as we did in 2017. With a lot of hard work, determination, and luck with the weather and predicting the future , I was able to continue the downward trend of pesticide use on the golf course for another season. This year we spent 24% less than last year and 41% less than the last 8 year average despite the prolonged and sometimes record breaking wet weather. I used to believe that it was the wet weather that made disease management such a challenge. I am learning that it has more to do with me than the environment which is a tough pill to swallow but also fills me with optimism for future learning and improvement. The table below outlines the total cost of pest control products used on my golf course per year. The table says greens, and yes, this is the only place that pest control products (of any kind including ISR SAR and organic) are used. I have used a bit of iron sulfate on approaches and tees for the last few years fo...

On the West Coast of Canada we are now well into the time of year where fusarium is the dominant disease on turf. Reflecting on the summer of 2016 I can't help but feel somewhat defeated by turf disease. I required a traditional fungicide for dollar spot for the first time in 4 years on my greens. While this has left me feeling down about my disease management plan this year a closer reflection shows that while I lost the battle to dollar spot, I won the battle with every other turf disease on my course this summer. Looking back at the data, the battles I have had in previous years, what other courses in my area were dealing with I can feel really good about my disease management this past year. To recap the requirement of traditional fungicide on my course this year so far is rather easy. The last fungicide application of the winter was on Feb 22. From that time I was able to keep disease levels at acceptable levels until Sept 4 when I needed to take action against dollar spot. Th...

And this is where everyone laughs at me. "No one uses EIQ you dummy," is what you're probably thinking. Well yeah, the too good to be true way to quantify pesticide toxicity is just that, too good to be true. It really is too bad because having an easy-to-use way to assign pesticides a toxicity was very convenient and promised to be a very powerful decision making tool. For those of you who are concerned about quantifying pesticide toxicity it is helpful to learn why the EIQ doesn't work and what, if anything, we can use to quantify our pesticide use going forward. Basically, the reason that that EIQ is flawed is that it relies way too heavily on application rate. The higher the application rate the higher the EIQ would be. The impact on rate was so high that a weed scientist, Andrew Kniss , assigned random values to the EIQ toxicity parameters  73,000,000 times and found that the random values "provided the same recommendation as the EIQ about 88% of the time....