KEY POINTS:
The time is coming when golfers will have to choose - pay more to cover the increasing cost of oil or play on scruffier courses with longer grass?
That's the conundrum posed by the New Zealand Sports Turf Institute in the latest New Zealand Golf Update. Their fact sheet reinforces that golf, more than any other sport, will have to make significant adjustments.
Maintenance and grooming of grassed properties at least 40ha, means machinery fuel, fertilisers, pesticides and other chemicals, many of which are oil-based.
The Sports Turf Institute has taken a pragmatic view. Firstly, it asks if all the course, especially areas not intended for play, really need to be mowed and maintained. It suggests some areas off the fairway, well away from where you're supposed to hit the ball, could be re-vegetated with cluster planting of native species requiring no further maintenance. It may make the course more difficult to play - but is that a bad thing?
A more contentious suggestion involves the type of grass. Because golfers want the best quality surfaces for putting and hitting shots from the fairway, poa annua has become the dominant grass in New Zealand. At its best, it provides beautifully smooth, grain-free greens. But poa needs lots of work, water, topdressing and mowing.
The STI suggests golf courses would make significant savings by using slower growing and coarser browntop grasses.
Browntop needs around 170kg of nitrogen fertiliser per hectare a year compared to 220kg for poa. In the upper North Island, poa annua needs a monthly fungicide and insecticide. Browntop needs it once every two months.
Because it grows slower and requires less work, the fuel costs for browntop are between 10-20 per cent lower than for poa annua.
But you can't change grass variety overnight and would players be satisfied with a possibly inferior playing surface?
According to Akarana's 2007 annual report, the club spent $70,000 on chemicals, fertiliser, seed and fuel.
The numbers for the June 2008 year are expected to top $80,000. Much of the spending was done before the price of oil started surging past US$120 a barrel. The figure could be close to $100,000 in the current financial year.
This is pain which will be felt by golf clubs all over the country. Rising prices and stagnant revenues are a fact of life.
But the Sports Turf Institute is doing the game a favour with this document. It's asking some pretty hard questions of golfers. Are we prepared to have slower greens that are cut less often? Do we need our fairways and rough fertilised so they need to be mowed twice a week?
The days of cheap oil are gone. Golfers, like everybody else, must think about a not-too-distant future where life will not be as convenient and greens not as smooth.
