THIS SAYS SO MUCH ABOUT the last 22 years for golf

[Mike_Young]

I took this photo of hole #16 at Cypress Point in February of 1991.  They were mowing the green with a Jacobsen triplex and they used a Willy's Jeep to pull a Jake gang mower....

[Jeff_Brauer]

Not showing up for me, but I did see it on your Facebook page.  Yes, emphasis on equipment has changed from mass production mowing to quality of cut (lightweight, etc.)  My prediction is that the next gen of equipment evolves into the bigger stuff, but incorporating all the lightweight characteristics to get some of both.  Yankee ingenuity at its best, evolving to meet current need.

Hovercraft mowers, here we come!

[Mike_Young]

Can someone post this photo...I still screw it up somehow...
http://s258.photobucket.com/user/mydgolf/media/cypress.jpg.html

[Mike_Young]

Not showing up for me, but I did see it on your Facebook page.  Yes, emphasis on equipment has changed from mass production mowing to quality of cut (lightweight, etc.)  My prediction is that the next gen of equipment evolves into the bigger stuff, but incorporating all the lightweight characteristics to get some of both.  Yankee ingenuity at its best, evolving to meet current need.

Hovercraft mowers, here we come!

Jeff,
Happy Father's Day...Andrew is a nice young man...
AND...I say we have bigger but robotic..controlled by GPS...   and not far away...

[Joe Bausch]

[Mike_Young]

Thanks Joe.  Sorry I missed you.  I had been told you were coming out to T Paul's for dinner one night...

[Garland Bayley]

.

[Bill Brightly]

Mike,

I agree that many clubs have switched to smaller and lighter weight equipment, but is this a bad thing? If yes, why?

[Mike_Young]

Mike,

I agree that many clubs have switched to smaller and lighter weight equipment, but is this a bad thing? If yes, why?

Bill,
Nothing wrong with it except this photo shows that even the best courses were able to maintain at an acceptable level with less money.  The lighter weight mowers require much more care than the mowers pictured...

[Bill Brightly]

More costly because of man hours on he mower? Cost of the equipment? Maintaining the equipment? All of the above?


22 years is right, because  I remember when we switched from the large fairway mowers at my club to triplex mowers, and the positive effects were immediate.

[Ian Larson]

So what do you do with that? How do you raise the units? And if you can't raise the units then you just do circles inside the fairway. Turning radius? Very likely crappy or too much and damaging. I'd love to hear the context in which this was taken because I can only imagine its a joke or at best a very temporary emergency solution. I don't think it says anything at all about the last 22 years.

[Ricardo Ramirez Calvo]

I don't think it is a joke. You can find very similar images (although not with a Willys Jeep) today in many courses in other parts of the world as the only means to mowe fairways or roughs. In fact, in one of my home clubs we use exactly that thing (I don't know how you call it in English) to cut the rough.

[Mike_Young]

So what do you do with that? How do you raise the units? And if you can't raise the units then you just do circles inside the fairway. Turning radius? Very likely crappy or too much and damaging. I'd love to hear the context in which this was taken because I can only imagine its a joke or at best a very temporary emergency solution. I don't think it says anything at all about the last 22 years.

It's not a joke.  It tells you how much we have increased maintenance budgets in order to obtain conditions well beyond what was produced with this set up...the real problem is that the younger guys don't think you can maintain like this...AND it was not an emergency situation....

[Randy Thompson]

I don't think it is a joke. You can find very similar images (although not with a Willys Jeep) today in many courses in other parts of the world as the only means to mowe fairways or roughs. In fact, in one of my home clubs we use exactly that thing (I don't know how you call it in English) to cut the rough.

pull behind gang mower

[Matthew Rose]

That's about the same time that my muni course changed. In the mid-80s, when I started playing, they towed a five-ganger behind a tractor. Then they used one of those giant 15-foot wide Jacobsen things to cut fairways on par-fours and par-fives and started doing par-threes and approaches with the triplex. They used the same mower to cut the athletic fields at my schools.

Then around 1991-92, the specialized fairway mowers showed up. And you went from the upgrain/downgrain half/half pattern on the fairways to stripes. That was pretty in vogue. Now all the USGA venues are going back to upgrain/downgrain.

[Ian Larson]

So what do you do with that? How do you raise the units? And if you can't raise the units then you just do circles inside the fairway. Turning radius? Very likely crappy or too much and damaging. I'd love to hear the context in which this was taken because I can only imagine its a joke or at best a very temporary emergency solution. I don't think it says anything at all about the last 22 years.

It's not a joke.  It tells you how much we have increased maintenance budgets in order to obtain conditions well beyond what was produced with this set up...the real problem is that the younger guys don't think you can maintain like this...AND it was not an emergency situation....

Courses were also built by donkey and scrape Mike. So what does that say about your courses being built by $300,000 bulldozers?

[Anthony_Nysse]

Mike,

I agree that many clubs have switched to smaller and lighter weight equipment, but is this a bad thing? If yes, why?

Bill,
Nothing wrong with it except this photo shows that even the best courses were able to maintain at an acceptable level with less money.  The lighter weight mowers require much more care than the mowers pictured...

Acceptable at that time, yes. Acceptable now? Not a chance. There wasn't really anything better equipment, so that's what was used. Maybe this was a one time pic or maybe it was after some cultural practices. In 1991, lightweight mowers were hitting the market and most courses of the caliber of CP were walk mowing greens, also.

"...the real problem is that the younger guys don't think you can maintain like this...AND it was not an emergency situation...."

 Come on, Mike. 95% of American golfer won’t accept or want fairways mowed above 1/2" and laid over. I do not think that you would have a quality bentgrass fairway with a gang mower. There would also be more times than not you couldn't mow fairways because of the weight of the machines. The quality of cuts are much better with hydraulic mowers, the number of blades per reel is higher.
  Some of the mom and pop courses in the world still mow with gang mowers, if they can find parts or maybe do not do any maintenance on them. There are even a few courses that were designed to be mowed with a gang mower-Longshadow and Diamond Springs. Don’t for a second think that the quality is not 100x better than it once was.
  And I have to agree with Ian…your courses are built with $150k dozers, $250k off road dumptrucks, $200k excavators and $750k scapers. It would not be acceptable if you didn't build that way.

[Brent Hutto]

Let's say the economic shakeup continues for a couple more decades Japan-in-the-90's style...

Would 95% of USA golfers rather not play the game at all than play it on courses groomed to a 70's/80's standard? Including 1/2" fairway cuts and all that?

Or do we have a "path dependency" paradox here (colloquially known as the "Once they've seen the big city you can't keep them down on the farm" problem)? When everyone was used to playing those gang-mower-cut fairways it was all good. Now after a couple decades of playing on fields groomed daily with a couple million bucks worth of high-tech mowing machines perhaps you can't go back to a regime of lower capital budgets, lower labor budgets and the quality of cut that was acceptable two generations prior.

It's entirely possible to create a culture in which the path runs one way. You can go from "pretty good' to "we've never had it so good" when the money is flowing freely but you can't retrace that path back to "pretty good" when the teat goes dry.

[Ian Larson]

Maybe you guys could start up a company and invest in old jeeps and gang mowers and start knocking on Superintendents doors to see if they'd like to demo your great fairway mowing machine. Make sure to get back to us and let us know how many units are flying off the shelves.

[Brent Hutto]

So what does a course do when its maintenance budget shrinks to 10-20% of what it was circa 1999? If there's no money to maintain or replace the new expensive grass-cutting equipment and no money to pay a large staff to drive it, do they just quit mowing the grass and close up? I'm pretty sure they do.

If there were a such thing as gang mowers available today would it actually be cheaper to acquire, maintain and operate than the high-tech hydraulic stuff?

[Anthony_Nysse]

Maybe you guys could start up a company and invest in old jeeps and gang mowers and start knocking on Superintendents doors to see if they'd like to demo your great fairway mowing machine. Make sure to get back to us and let us know how many units are flying off the shelves.

I literally laughed outloud when I read this, thinking of a vendor walking in the office door and his sales pitch. 95% of the courses in American already have lightweight fairways mowers. If strapped for cash, theyre not going out to buy gang units and stock parts. When budgets get tighter, numerous things are done to cut back before the grass is stopped being cut.
  It all starts from the top. Every course is trying to get better. Look at all the attention that Merion just got with their maintenance. 100 volunteers. Augusta gets the same. Virtually everything gets mowed 2x a day. So many things are do by hand-greens, tees, approaches, bunkers, raking rough, backpack blowing....

[Brent Hutto]

Tony,

You keep talking about courses that spend enough on maintenance in the month of June to keep my club's 27-holer going for 12 months with money left over for a great Christmas bash for the crew. There are thousands of golf courses barely keeping the wolf from the door and I assure you that "getting better" in terms of out-greening the Augusta Nationals of the world is far, far from their thoughts at present.

Obviously I don't really think that any course is going to scrap their expensive late-model hydraulic mowers and go buy gang mowers. That is the "path dependency" of which I speak...

[JMEvensky]

So what does a course do when its maintenance budget shrinks to 10-20% of what it was circa 1999? If there's no money to maintain or replace the new expensive grass-cutting equipment and no money to pay a large staff to drive it, do they just quit mowing the grass and close up? I'm pretty sure they do.

If there were a such thing as gang mowers available today would it actually be cheaper to acquire, maintain and operate than the high-tech hydraulic stuff?

This is a topic worth discussing.

If a maintenance budget gets reduced 10%-20%,aren't the only options: A) maintain less golf course,or B) maintain the same amount of golf course "worse"?

[Ally Mcintosh]

I like the cut of Brent's jib here.

Cart is getting put before the horse in a few posts above.

[Ian Larson]

Improvements in machinery happen for a reason. Not just to be too expensive. They are solutions to problems. If you just want to revert back to primal technology just because you're in to old timey things, you're going to run into the same problems supers ran into back then. Is there anything wrong with a gang mower? Absolutely not. Could you use one in any situation? Absolutely not. Is there something wrong with using jeeps to mow your golf course? There's ALL kinds of wrong with that!

Is it too technologically advanced for you guys to improve turning radius and mowing efficiency by taking your gang mowers and constructing them on to the frame of that old jeep? Is it too technologically advanced to throw on a some hydraulic cylinders to raise and lower the units so you can transport with ease and speed around the course and not bang up the units while doing it?

I found this old Jacobsen F-10 at a course in Maryland I was doing a project at recently. It's the evolution of technology from the gang mower to what we have today. It's the result of solving problems and improving mowing practices. It's just your jeep with the units mounted on the frame to improve turning radius and transport.





We just went through a bad recession. If courses don't have to revert to jeeps and gang mowers now then I don't think they will ever have to. If a course just cannot support maintaining itself then it should close up shop.