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Protecting paradise
Water shortage, pesky pigs challenge Arizona superintendents.
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Photo courtesy of Oakcreek CC |
Nestled in the heart of Arizona’s red rock country, golfers at Oakcreek Country Club in Sedona experience magnificent vistas at every turn. Designed by the famous father-and-son team of Robert Trent Jones Sr. and Robert Trent Jones Jr., the 18-hole, par 72 championship-caliber golf course, with its breathtaking scenery, is considered a work of art.
“This is truly God’s country,” says Cord Ozment, CGCS, a native Texan who has been managing the course since 2001. In this high desert climate, Ozment doesn’t need to worry about disease infecting his beautiful bentgrass greens.
“We really don’t have a fungus problem up here,” the 14-year GCSAA member says. “It’s a dream job. It’s heaven. It makes our jobs very easy.”
On the other hand, the arid conditions put stress on turfgrass, which requires the 145-acre layout to maintain a constant irrigation level of 0.12 to 0.24 inch of water, depending on the time of year, in a state where water is in short supply.
“The plants are always under stress,” Ozment explains. “We use weather stations to monitor the evapotranspiration (ET) rate so we know how much water the plant uses up during the day.”
Conserving water
While the state continues to designate Active Management Areas to control Arizona’s dwindling water supplies, Oakcreek CC has not yet been restricted in the amount of water it can use. Nonetheless, one quarter of the water the course uses for irrigation comes from effluent from the community’s sewage treatment plant. “That’s part of our environmental program,” says Ozment. “We buy it from the Village of Oak Creek.”
However, since three quarters of the irrigation water comes from wells that draw from the Verde Valley Aquifer, Ozment and his staff already know which areas they will “take from turf” should the state begin to restrict the amount of well water they can use.
“In Phoenix, golf courses are restricted to 90 acres of turf,” says Ozment. “We have 130 acres of turf here. We’re taking steps now to show that we are doing the best we can to conserve water.”
Using reclaimed water is Oakcreek’s way of demonstrating that the course is committed to preserving and protecting the environment. “We are growing a product where it’s not supposed to be green,” explains Ozment. “So we try to manage our resources the best we can to provide for the future.”
The wildlife inhabiting the course is another concern for Ozment, who limits the amount of chemicals he applies in order to protect them. “The best part of the golf experience is the wildlife,” explains Ozment who says the course is home to deer, rabbits, squirrels, snakes, coyotes, bobcats and desert quail that live in the many natural areas dotting the course.
Controlling grubs
To that end, the only chemicals applied preventively are those used to control white grubs and crabgrass. To control white grubs — in this case Japanese beetle larvae — in the fairways, tees and roughs, assistant superintendent Dustin G. Lowman Jr. applies Merit insecticide (imidacloprid) — a granular formulation — in two applications of 30 pounds per acre, for a total of 60 pounds.
“We used to make a single application of 60 pounds per acre early in the season,” explains Lowman, “but we found that we were having an outbreak of white grubs in the late fall. Now we split the application, putting half of it down early in May and the other half late in July and we haven’t had a grub out there.”
Ozment believes that splitting the applications also provides an extra measure of safety for golfers. “We apply it below the maximum label rate of 80 pounds,” he explains. “Our objective is not to kill all the grubs, but to maintain a tolerable threshold level.”
In another nod to golfer safety, Lowman makes his insecticide applications in the evening, allowing the small particles to sit on the turf canopy until they are watered in by the irrigation system the following morning.
Keeping the grubs under control prevents turf damage by another, larger pest — the javelina — which will dig up the turf to get to the grubs, says Ozment. The javelina, a wild pig-like animal native to the Arizona desert, uses its razor-sharp tusks to dig for grubs, destroying acres of valuable turf in the process.
“I’ve seen them tear up a good acre of fairway,” says Ozment. “But ever since we got rid of the grubs, we don’t have problems with the javelinas anymore.”
Wild for grubs
Oakcreek isn’t the only Arizona course to battle javelinas. When the animals destroyed several acres of turf at Desert Mountain, an 8,000-acre resort in Scottsdale, Director of Agronomy Shawn Emerson, a 14-year member of GCSAA who oversees the six Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses on the property, was taken by surprise.
“We didn’t even know we had grubs because there weren’t enough of them to cause turf damage,” says Emerson. “But, somehow, the javelinas would detect them and dig down into the turf to eat them.”
After several years of drought, the golf courses, which are located on the edge of Tonto National Forest in the foothills of northeast Scottsdale, had become an oasis for all sorts of wildlife because of the irrigation and the lakes, says Emerson. “The javelinas were destroying turf mostly in the rough — the higher cut — which is similar to the native desert around us.
“We started mapping out what they were destroying, and it was mostly in the shaded areas underneath trees and low areas that retain extra water. We figured we’d start controlling the grubs, hoping that the javelinas wouldn’t go after them if we did.”
However, by the time the damage was discovered, the grubs were too large to be easily controlled. “The damage occurred late in the summer and early fall,” says Rick Brandenburg, Ph.D., professor of entomology at North Carolina State University, who Emerson called in to help solve the problem. “But, when they are treated late in the year like that, the grubs are so large that it’s difficult to control them.”
After identifying the grubs as the larvae of masked chafer beetles, Brandenburg targeted what he believed to be high-risk areas on five of the six golf courses and recommended that Desert Mountain spray these areas with the full rate of a preventive insecticide (Merit 75 WP) during the first week in June.
The result was a dramatic reduction in the amount of turf damage caused by javelinas last summer. By controlling the grubs in the high-risk areas, Desert Mountain was able to reduce the damaged areas from 16 acres the first year to less than 200 square feet last year.
Through the use of light traps, Brandenburg hopes to be able to more accurately gauge the life cycle of this species of masked chafer beetle in order to better time the insecticide applications. “One of the disadvantages is that not much research has been done on these particular species in the Southwest,” explains Brandenburg. “The masked chafer grubs in the Southwest are different from the Southern masked chafer grubs in the Southeast.”
What concerns Brandenberg is the activity of another masked chafer beetle that may have a different peak of activity. “There may be two different peaks — some fly in June and some fly in August or September,” he says. “We’re trying to figure out whether that second species is all that important.”
Editor’s note: A related article by Rick Brandenburg, Ph.D., about scouting for pests on the golf course was published in the August 2003 issue of GCM, pp. 96-99.
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