Here is an article in the most recent Southampton Press concerning SGC.
After more than a year of review, the Southampton Town Planning Board this week gave the green light to Michael Pascucci’s proposal to build a world-class all-organic golf course at the site of the former Bayberry Land retreat in Shinnecock Hills.
On Thursday, August 26, the board approved Mr. Pascucci’s and his family’s application to build the Sebonack Golf Club on a portion of the 298-acre former union retreat on the north side of Sebonack Road and Cold Spring Point Road that Mr. Pascucci purchased for $45 million three years ago.
Now, as the summer sun sets, the real work on the course begins. The club’s newly appointed crew will toil every day this fall and through next year to construct the waterfront course and prepare for its grand opening in the spring of 2006.
According to Mr. Pascucci, a car leasing magnate and the owner of Channel 55 in Melville, the overall appearance of the course, which is being co-designed by championship golfer Jack Nicklaus and Tom Doak of Renaissance Golf, will be traditional in nature, having the natural and rugged look of the original Scottish courses.
“It’ll be a combination of links and parkland,” he said, adding that the layout will be strategic in nature, offering a number of putting options.
But what will make the course absolutely unique, he said, is its fully integrated, organic system of maintenance.
The future 18-hole private course is being touted as the nation’s first fully organic golf course.
But there is some debate as to what that means—and whether it can be done.
As any golf course manager will tell you, turf maintenance is a complicated task, with golf traffic, climate conditions, maintenance practices, disease, insects, and more, all threatening to damage the grounds.
And tantamount to maintaining a healthy, aesthetic course is the purpose of cultivating greens for the sport of golf. Cut the grass too short and it dies, too tall and it doesn’t play well. Water too much and the grass is soft, too little and the greens can burn.
With all this delicate manipulation, is it possible to organically maintain a successful golf course?
Sebonack Golf Club has promised to try.
“They actually want to demonstrate that golf course construction and operation does not have to be detrimental to the environment,” said Planning Board Chairman Dennis Finnerty. “They’ve bent over backwards to be sensitive to our concerns about groundwater recharge.”
According to environmental consultant Bob Grover of Greenman-Pederson, who has spent three years helping to plan the Sebonack project, modern golf courses pose a great threat to the environment because they use chemical-based treatments to kill disease in plants.
“They put down pesticides and herbicides on a pro-active basis to prevent disease without necessarily any knowledge that it would occur,” he said, noting that such toxins kill natural soil bacteria as well as contaminate groundwater.
“The environmental costs of chemicals are very high,” he continued, noting the carcinogenic effects of pesticides. “Many old golf course superintendents have died of cancer and it’s not a coincidence. There’s already a movement toward significant reduction of chemical use because of that.”
Sebonack’s course managers, Mr. Grover said, will use natural methods to promote healthy vegetation that is more resistant to disease and pests, instead of relying on chemical treatments, which strip turf of its natural defenses.
Turf samples, he said, are already being tested to determine Sebonack’s soil composition. Once the soil is profiled, missing microorganisms will then be added to achieve the proper levels—a process called “soil inoculation.”
“The turf should maintain its own health if you maintain the appropriate balance,” he said.
Despite these organic efforts, some members of the golf industry believe plant disease is inevitable and claim that chemical treatment is a necessary tool for turf maintenance.
According to Dr. Joseph Vargas, a plant pathologist at Michigan State University, organic maintenance cannot prevent plant disease caused by environmental conditions, such as high humidity and temperature.
“We can do things to reduce the severity and help prevent,” he said, “but if the environmental conditions are right, there will be disease. It needs to be treated with some sort of chemical.”
Dr. Vargas also stated that some fungi, such as Pythium, Dollar Spots and Brown Patch, prey on healthy grass and require immediate chemical treatment.
“Under certain conditions, fungi can be devastating,” added Matthew Burrows, assistant superintendent of National Golf Links of America, naming Pythium as an example. “If untreated, you can lose substantial turfgrass in 24 hours.”
“Those things may happen,” conceded Mr. Grover, “and we may have to use a product.”
For those “emergency situations,” Mr. Grover said, all 18 greens will have an underground liner to collect toxins and prevent them from entering the environment, while fairways will use a water collection device called a lysimeter to monitor groundwater seepage in those areas.
The water will be recirculated, preventing it from polluting groundwater under the course.
According to Dr. Frank Rossi, a turfgrass specialist and professor at Cornell University, and who has also consulted on the Sebonack project, while Sebonack’s course managers will occasionally need to spray pesticides, they will avoid severe chemicals.
“To their credit,” he said, “they will be choosing the least toxic materials.”
Although Dr. Rossi commended Mr. Pascucci’s “progressive” efforts at organic maintenance, he said it is simply not possible to naturally maintain a golf course in this region.
“We just don’t have the technology for them to go completely organic,” he said. “The completely organic golf courses that I’m aware of are in climates where the severe pests that we struggle with are not a problem.”
Dr. Rossi also said that total reliance on organic protocols at some international courses negatively affects the playability of putting greens.
“They don’t provide the kinds of conditioning that most people who join or play here would tolerate,” he said.
According to Superintendent Bill Shuford, who uses some organic methods at Laurel Links Country Club on the North Fork, standard golf turf maintenance practices, such as cutting grass down to an eighth of an inch, weaken its natural resistance to disease.
“Grass wants to be around three to four inches,” he said. “When you stress it with maintenance equipment, it is more susceptible.”
Mr. Grover said Sebonack will rely heavily upon monitoring the grounds, citing its plan to use a Global Positioning System to record incidence of disease as well as an on-site laboratory to train staff and keep them informed of advances in organic maintenance.
“The increased level of vigilance and data-keeping will be a huge help,” he said.
While Sebonack may never be fully organic, Mr. Pascucci said he is willing to make it as organic as possible and hopes to establish an environmental standard for other courses.
“We’d like to show that with all the technology now,” he said, “there’s no reason to use an enormous amount of pesticides.”