How Duffers Could Save the Planet

Turfgrass ManagementThe Future of GolfSustainable Golf Course Management

Mar 17

Here’s a thought for how the golf industry might rapidly and seamlessly “go lower on the carbon scorecard” – or in other words, improve its carbon footprint:

What if every divot came with the opportunity to improve soil and sequester carbon?

The average score of an amateur golfer is about 90 strokes. Among those 90 strokes (including the occasionally careless practice swing), let’s suppose that 30 divots are created, on average. Over the course of last year, golfers played 502 million rounds in the US alone. That’s about 15 billion divots if my math serves me correctly. Each of those divots takes up about a dollar bill in surface area (with quite a lot of variability, especially for us mere mortals), and reaches a depth of somewhere around an inch or 2.5 cm. With a dollar bill’s surface area of about 100cm and an average depth of roughly 2.5cm, let’s say that each divot has a volume of 250cm3.

This means that last year in the US alone, golfers replaced (or displaced) approximately 3.25 trillion cubic centimeters of soil and turfgrass, which translates to 991 million gallons in volume, or roughly 1500 olympic-sized swimming pools.

Now, what if the traditional sand mixture with fertilizer were replaced by an organic biochar product that is already carbon negative (itself used as a form of storing carbon from wasted feedstock), and could be used to improve the “drawdown” capabilities of that turfgrass?

Might you be a greater steward of the tee-boxes and fairways if you knew that you could replace each divot with a soil that is better for both playing conditions and the planet?

Maybe us amateurs would finally be convinced to dig deep and “compress” the ball with our irons. Perhaps even the worst of us could take pride in our basketball-sized divots, knowing that with each divot replacement the probability of catastrophic climate change decreased ever so slightly.

This possible application of biochar seems a more apt fit for driving ranges in the short term, but it’s an early thought on how golf might find ways for participation and regeneration to go hand in hand.