Sustainable Golf – Question 4 Design/Construction

[Don_Mahaffey]

What design/construction processes promote sustainability?

1. Routing.  It would seem obvious that the less you disturb the less you need to repair. Routing to take advantage of natural drainage patterns and natural features vs created would seem very important if sustainability is a priority.

2. Surface drainage vs internal drainage. We know we need to move water, and we often try and move it above ground and below, but have we shifted the emphasis to below ground? Should our macro/storm drainage be above ground ditch type drainage channels that not only create wild life habitat but also golf interest? Has our technological ability to manufacture and install low cost pipe combined with our desire to “engineer” everything led us down the path to more earth moving and less sustainability? We always hear form follows function; has our ability to engineer and drain anything made us lazy routers?

3. Maintenance. What construction/design practices result in more sustainable maintenance programs?

[Mike_Young]

Don,
All these questions

the number one design element for promoting sustainability is to :
1.  knock all the trees down and
2.do not line your fairways with mounds.
3. Make it where you can mow fairway continuously from hole to hole with no rough until you reach native areas (USING TRANSPORTFRAMES)
4. design the merging of tees and fairways where  mowers can mow right to the edge of the tee surface
5. and make sure the carthpaths are at grade so you don't have to trim around paths...

I got some more later...

[Jeff_Brauer]

Don,

Tend to agree with Mike's points 1, 2 and 5.  Not sure about 3 and 4.  Does more fw cut enlarge the footprint even if you mow it quicker?

I also think we will see a push to gravel/permeable cart paths.

As to your questions, sure, routing to minimize what I call "non-discretionary" earthmoving (i.e. for vision, to flatten for playability if greater than 10% or to increase pitch for drainage) always helps reduce earthmoving, as does reduction of "discretionary" earthmoving after routing.

You will have to tell me what routing to take advantage of drainage patterns means.  If you route in valleys, which always looks and feels good, you have to deal with water.  If you route across valleys, it often helps to cut off the uphill water before it crosses greens, tees, and even fw.  

Obvioulsly, putting swales between landing zones (just in front of tee, just past 300 yards) reduces some of that need.   And, I agree that some old style Scottish Dykes in these kind of areas, or parallelling the fw would be a nice addition.  Of course, they silt in, require maintenance, and really need to be at 2% or more, whereas pipe can be at nearly 0%.  So, each has a footprint.

Also, what about all the grading regs to move water away from natural drain receptors to filter it?  Some say more grading of this type is more sustainable.

Great general question.  It seems to me the answers are very site specific.  For instance, I know you used a lot of CB's at Wolf Point.  I know you needed to!  Anything you would have done differently there, environmentally speaking?

[George Pazin]

Does more fw cut enlarge the footprint even if you mow it quicker?

Does this matter? (honest question, not trying to be difficult, trying to learn)

-----

I think more emphasis on a walkable routing would help minimize cart path nonsense construction.

[Mike_Young]

JEFF,
My point number three is for "core" courses where lack of rough can make the course move the ball laterally.  It would not work on housing development double lined fairways.  And I do think that so much maintenance has been built in over the last 30 years due to housing and there is no way to quit maintaining all the way to the lot line.

As for #4 I like it when the tees are sort of "invisible"  not always possible but it does cut maintenance IMHO...

Hope all is well...

Mike

[Mike Nuzzo]

Given the site at Wolf Point we assumed many would have handled it like the traditional flat Texas/Florida course where many lakes would be used for easy drainage.
We had a natural creek/ditch to use for our final relief.

Our goal at Wolf Point was to not use lakes as drainage crutches.
It was a 100 year record rainy season while under construction.
We did use a significant amount of drain pipe.
If we were to start over again we would try to minimize pipe use.
One drainage ditch that we dug appears natural and has created a number of habitats.
It isn't 2% all the way so there are a number of tiny pools.

The holes where we did the least amount of work were the easiest to establish and probably are still easier to maintain.

[Tom_Doak]

What design/construction processes promote sustainability?

1. Routing.  It would seem obvious that the less you disturb the less you need to repair. Routing to take advantage of natural drainage patterns and natural features vs created would seem very important if sustainability is a priority.

2. Surface drainage vs internal drainage. We know we need to move water, and we often try and move it above ground and below, but have we shifted the emphasis to below ground? Should our macro/storm drainage be above ground ditch type drainage channels that not only create wild life habitat but also golf interest? Has our technological ability to manufacture and install low cost pipe combined with our desire to “engineer” everything led us down the path to more earth moving and less sustainability? We always hear form follows function; has our ability to engineer and drain anything made us lazy routers?

I was surprised to learn that one of the things environmental people like most about our work was the way we handle drainage.  Putting run-off water straight into inlets and pipes, and straight out into waterways of any kind is a no-no for them -- that's what they call point-source pollution.  It makes them much more worried about what fertilizers and chemicals ARE being used on the course, as opposed to solutions like ditches and surface drainage, where the grass has a chance to filter the water. 

Project engineers are always trying to sort out fancy solutions which get the water away uber-fast, but those solutions usually aren't the best from a sustainable standpoint.  Indeed, in most golf communities part of the purpose of the golf course is precisely to detain water that comes from the development [again, full of nasty stuff in the run-off from paved surfaces].

Routing golf courses down the valleys [as Jeff alludes to], which became common in the housing era, is a big part of the problem.  On core golf courses, not only do you not have to do it that way, it really doesn't make sense to do it that way.  The first thing Chris Johnston said about our routing for Dismal River was shock that we didn't route the holes down the valleys.  IMO, most of this stuff still goes back to routing.

[Bradley Anderson]

Speaking form my experience on Midwestern clay soils I have noticed that in the areas where significant earth moving has been done to enhance surface drainage, there is a tendency for rainfall to move off too fast and the water doesn't have enough time to soak and replenish soil moisture. Those are the first areas to dry out and pop weeds.

If a site is designed with minimum disturbance of the ground it will require less inputs to maintain. But it may also require more internal drainage to keep it playable.

The course I am working at now was originally a dairy farm with a hundred acres of crop and a hundred acres of wooded pasture. The wooded pasture area requires half the inputs as the crop land side. The reason why? Because they didn't want to hurt the trees on the wooded section and they left the grades and soils alone. But on the crop side they striped all the topsoil, moonscaped the golf holes with mounds all over the place and then respread the topsoil.

The moonscaping movement of the 80's and 90's was, in my opinion, bad for the environment. And the irony is those mounds were needed to meet the environmental guidelines and requirements for development - what else were you to do with all the earth that was generated to make wetlands and compensatory storage of housing development water?

[Jeff_Brauer]

Bradley,

Yes, it is always a compromise.  The flip side to not disturbing soils in the fw areas is that 75 years from now, all those fw will have a washboard effect....at least all the old courses (even those built up to about 1960) built on farm land I work on have it!  No reason to believe there won't be some settlement issues down the line on current courses either. Compaction and earthmoving do help that, but I too have seen compacted soils require much more inputs.

In some ways, I always wondered if it was stripping only 6" (or 4") rather than 8-9".

I agree that moonscapes are not the best way to go - water and inputs run off steep hills faster than flat ground, and given they are at the edges, they need a lot more irrigation, or another row or two of sprinklers.  And, its all "discretionary" - we moved the earth to mounding because we thought the earth sculpture looked good (and it can look good)  IMHO, mounds still have their place to screen stuff (immediate impact over growing trees) but as a basic design theme, their days are probably over.

[Grant Saunders]

In my experience, one of the big crimes I have seen is how topsoil is handled and re spread.

Working soil while wet and using heavy machinery simply creates compaction which can take a long time to re develop a structure suitable for good air and water movement.

I appreciate that time constraints dictate the pace of a project but things like haul roads in the middle of holes and people driving unnecessarily on soiled areas just make life more difficult in the future.

I was involved in a renovation project where all soil re spread was carried out by excavator and then prepped with just a sandpro. There was no need for ripping or rotovating of the soil to establish a tilth and counter the compaction. The strike of the seed and subsequent grow in was  one of the best I have seen.

Naturally, the scale of this project made this process feasible.  I feel that if the whole picture is assessed in terms of processes and cost vs long term, it could be viable on a bigger scale.

[Bill_McBride]

What design/construction processes promote sustainability?

1. Routing.  It would seem obvious that the less you disturb the less you need to repair. Routing to take advantage of natural drainage patterns and natural features vs created would seem very important if sustainability is a priority.

2. Surface drainage vs internal drainage. We know we need to move water, and we often try and move it above ground and below, but have we shifted the emphasis to below ground? Should our macro/storm drainage be above ground ditch type drainage channels that not only create wild life habitat but also golf interest? Has our technological ability to manufacture and install low cost pipe combined with our desire to “engineer” everything led us down the path to more earth moving and less sustainability? We always hear form follows function; has our ability to engineer and drain anything made us lazy routers?

I was surprised to learn that one of the things environmental people like most about our work was the way we handle drainage.  Putting run-off water straight into inlets and pipes, and straight out into waterways of any kind is a no-no for them -- that's what they call point-source pollution.  It makes them much more worried about what fertilizers and chemicals ARE being used on the course, as opposed to solutions like ditches and surface drainage, where the grass has a chance to filter the water. 

Project engineers are always trying to sort out fancy solutions which get the water away uber-fast, but those solutions usually aren't the best from a sustainable standpoint.  Indeed, in most golf communities part of the purpose of the golf course is precisely to detain water that comes from the development [again, full of nasty stuff in the run-off from paved surfaces].

Routing golf courses down the valleys [as Jeff alludes to], which became common in the housing era, is a big part of the problem.  On core golf courses, not only do you not have to do it that way, it really doesn't make sense to do it that way.  The first thing Chris Johnston said about our routing for Dismal River was shock that we didn't route the holes down the valleys.  IMO, most of this stuff still goes back to routing.

Those pesky little ditches at Oakmont make more sense after reading the above.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Grant,

Yes, we never handle topsoil wet. Not worth whatever time it saves.

As to haul roads the emphasis on saving natives sometimes makes haul roads inside the disturbed area (ie fw) unavoidable, no?  But we do try to chiesel it up.  I do hear contractors talk about not chieseling too deep because it take more effort to smooth out.

Everything is a tradeoff.  While its easy to say things have been done wrong for the last few decades, its not like its all wrong.  Or that topsoil stripping should never occur, because its necessary on some sites.   I also think some of the "dull stuff" that all those construction conventions of the post war era will make a comeback as very practical, very sustainable.

In fact, if I think we slipped anywhere, its in the little details like, as Mike Y says, not really getting the cart path edges smooth and tied in.  Or a lot of things that were aimed more at "great design" rather than basic practicality, like not letting any drainage come over the top of a bunker.

[Tom_Doak]

Grant:

I'll second what Jeff says above. 

If you are going to haul dirt, where else are you going to haul it?  Tearing up native areas between holes?  Or at the edges of the fairways where you will inevitably creep outside the lines?  No.  It's more practical to go right down the middle ... and then do a very good job of sifting through the haul roads and relieving all the compaction.  That's a pretty hefty line item in itself, and you'd better have planned on it from the start, because golf contractors aren't used to doing it at the level it ought to be done.

Of course, the better approach is not to be hauling dirt all over the place to begin with.