Bradley,
While your description is fairly accurate, I think you must have had a really bad construction experience up there! On my projects, golf course stockpiles are kept on each hole to reduce haul distances, and thus aren't built up as much as you describe. And, I have never seen a sheeps foot roller used on topsoil piles on my projects. That does seem counter productive. At least you didn't have a bad contractor who tried to convince owners that you really don't need to strip it, and just bury it.
Moving topsoil and breaking it up would seem to be a compaction reducer among other things. And when you take the grass and roots, you actually add organic, providing you leave is stockpiled long enough for those to break up.
While you are right that moonscapes do increase surface area by about 10%, if topsoil is stripped out of lakes, and deeper than 6' wherever found, there should be enough to cover critical areas, perhaps shorting the far roughs.
However, why, as someone in the golf industry, would you advocate that the government stop topsoil handling specifically for golf courses? I don't think we need another layer of government regulations. If we need some best practices guides, then we can develop them ourselves.
And do you think golf courses treat soil worse than housing/other developers?
Dave,
Other than Bradley above and yourself, I have never heard anyone in the industry worry about the soil structure to the degree you do. As you and Don M note, it is usually possible to take soil tests and make recommendations to restore organics, fertility, PH, etc. On a recent project, our agronomist (Terry Buchen, who sometimes comes on here) argued hard and successfully that cutting certain aspects of his soil ammendment program to cut $40K from the budget was penny wise and pound foolish, avoiding that cut back, so I agree there is that pressure.
I would love to see for my own information - in either a shortened version of your 10K word thesis
or through a web link to yours or other writing on the subject - some scientific info on what detrimental effect moving topsoil around twice actually does to its structure, that is can't be repaired/replaced if necessary.
Like environmental complaints about what disasters golf courses are, where the same three incidents over four decades keep popping up, it seems common sense that since 14,900 of the 15,000 USA golf courses probably stripped topsoil and replaced it somewhere, that we would have heard of these problems in some industry journal somewhere by now. Then again, I don't read them all, so I may have missed something!
Besides my own use, I would hate to have this be another "mantra" or accepted fact on this board if it ain't substantially true. Thanks in advance.