How Green is Your Golf Course?

August 17, 2010 3:07 AM

One more thing to ease our collective guilt: Organic Golf. "Opened eight years ago, the club is thought to be the only completely organic golf course in the United States, its 18 holes groomed without the use of a single synthetic pesticide, fertilizer, herbicide or other artificial chemical treatment."
posted by Xurando (8 comments total)

I just scored a holier-than-thou in one.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:12 AM on August 17, 2010 [3 favorites]

The green has changed...but the same douche bags are playing golf...so meh.
posted by hal_c_on at 3:28 AM on August 17, 2010

Pretty neat, given that gold courses are going to exist and that despite their verdant natures are environmentally not great. Aren't British courses more typically set up like this, with much more "casual" grounds maintenance?

(Out here we have a bit of a quandary as one of the local courses closed, but the local golf-course neighborhood's sewage treatment plant is required by law to use the course as the ultimate destination of its treated waste water. So what used to be an irrigated 18-hole golf community is now an irrigated 18-very-long-and-narrow meadows community. Which I would rather live on, if I had to choose...)
posted by maxwelton at 3:31 AM on August 17, 2010

Can't speak to 'typically', but the course near where my family lives in south-west England is actually just greens dotted around a bit of ancient common land that belongs to the National Trust and is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The NT graze rare breeds of cattle there to keep the grassland in a state that provides a habitat for rare wild flowers and the cows wander cheerfully across the unfenced greens - all the rough and fairways are just part of the open-access common land.
posted by Abiezer at 3:51 AM on August 17, 2010

...yet somehow the organic golf course is proving less popular than investers hoped...
posted by seanyboy at 4:58 AM on August 17, 2010

Until they're composting golfers, they're not doing enough.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:13 AM on August 17, 2010

To prevent fungal disease, crews go out daily at dawn using a long, whip-like device that whisks condensation off the grass throughout the course’s 69 acres.

*laughs*

That's insane.

Oh, and Treehugger wrote about an Australian organic golf course 6 years ago, fwiw.
posted by mediareport at 6:49 AM on August 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

How much water does it use?
posted by kenko at 12:02 PM on August 17, 2010