As a golf course maintenance professional, your priority is to provide golfers durable and high-performing greens and fairways with smooth and uniform playability. At the same time, you must keep the maintenance costs at bay, optimize irrigation and fertilizers, and consume water sustainably. In fact, water and irrigation are substantial operational costs for golf courses. The world’s 40,000 golf courses use 9.5 billion liters (4.5 billion gallons) water daily.
But how can you maximize turf quality while reducing costs and meeting sustainability requirements?
It's almost impossible to maintain turf in a perfect shape if you don't have accurate soil data. How to get accurate information about the soil conditions at the root-zone where the growth happens? How long does the soil retain water in various fairways and greens? And how to collect this data efficiently across the entire course?
Collecting soil moisture data with a hand-held instrument doesn’t provide consistent results, and covering all fairways and greens manually takes a long time. Evapotranspiration (ET) models, on the other hand, provide too broad information. Consequently, you cannot see the soil moisture variations between different parts of fairways and greens.
In general, above-the-ground observation methods correlate poorly with soil moisture levels at the root-zone. It is hard to adjust and schedule irrigation and other turf maintenance practices correctly. As a result, you cannot improve turf quality efficiently. Instead, water is wasted, and repetitive maintenance activities increase your costs.
Tap into the underground soil data to optimize your turf maintenance! You can place wireless soil sensors into the ground, at the root-zone, in the fairways and greens to continuously monitor soil moisture, salinity, and temperature below the turf.
The sensors transmit this data to the Soil Scout server. A web dashboard allows you to check the current soil moisture status in any fairway or green and so that you can make informed decisions regarding irrigation and other maintenance activities.
You can also track long-term trends, compare different areas, and optimize all your turf maintenance activities proactively based on accurate data.
Why Meadow Club in California uses soil sensors? Read the superintendent's list of 10 benefits.
Underground soil monitoring provides accurate and actionable information about soil conditions at the root-zone, where grass growth happens. With this data available in real-time, you can carry out high-precision, timely turf maintenance practices, whether it’s controlling irrigation, planning inputs, etc.
The data-driven golf course maintenance saves you operational costs, reduces water consumption, improves turf quality, and maintains optimal playing conditions!.
Having in ground sensors from Soil Scout helps us become more efficient and tells when and where we need the water most at critical times.
Kevin Hauschel
Superintendent, Meadow Club
