Water, chemicals and what British courses changed
Irrigation is the biggest environmental cost and the one greenkeepers worked hardest on. The links everybody admires are brown by August on purpose.
Golf uses land, water and chemicals, and the industry has spent twenty years being told so. What has actually changed on British courses is more interesting than either the criticism or the defence, and most of it is visible on the courses you already play.
Where the water goes
Irrigation is the largest environmental cost of a golf course and the one greenkeepers have worked hardest on. The visible signs are fairways going brown at the edges in July, rough left unwatered, and sprinklers set to a sector rather than a full circle. A course green from fence to fence in a dry summer is watering ground nobody plays from.
Hosepipe bans and abstraction licences have moved this along faster than any statement of intent: clubs in the south and east have had to demonstrate they could cut usage, and they did.
Brown is not neglect
Firm, tan fairways run further, drain better and need less water and less fungicide. To an eye trained on television they look like a course in trouble. Members who complain about the colour are one of the real obstacles to reduced water use, and it is worth remembering that the links courses everybody admires are brown by August on purpose.
Chemicals: less, and more precisely
Spraying has moved from the calendar to targeted application based on weather and disease pressure, and the range of approved products has narrowed considerably under UK and European regulation. Greens are still treated because a lost green closes a hole for a season; fairways and rough increasingly are not.
The land that is not in play
An eighteen-hole course has a third or more of its area out of play, and that is where the ecological value sits: unmown rough, gorse and heather, wooded corridors, ponds left alone. The GEO Foundation, which is based in Scotland, certifies courses internationally on this basis, and the R&A has made sustainable course management a formal part of its work.
What a player can do
Not much, but not nothing. Repairing your pitch mark keeps a green healthy without chemicals. Keeping trolleys and buggies off wet ground reduces compaction, which is the reason for half the hollow-tining people complain about. And not grumbling at a brown fairway in July is a genuine contribution.
The honest limits
A golf course is not a nature reserve, and a parkland course built on drained water meadow does not become sustainable because it recycles its irrigation. The useful question is not whether golf is good for the environment but whether a given course is better managed this year than last.
Worth asking at your club
- Where does the irrigation water come from, and has usage fallen?
- What proportion of the property is out of play and managed extensively?
- Is the course working towards GEO certification or a county scheme?
The answers tell you more about how a club is run than any brochure.
