 |
|
What’s in your greens mix?
An industry supplier creates a test to stop what it calls “bait-and-switch” practices.
|
Randy Dufault usually is a soft-spoken, subdued person. He still has “sales manager” on his business card, even though he is co-owner of the Grand Forks, N.D.-based Dakota Peat & Equipment. No need for fancy titles.
But since February’s Golf Industry Show in Anaheim, Dufault has been much more vocal, much more animated.
Peat suppliers are stealing money out of his pocket, he says, and he wants to put an end to it.
According to Dufault, golf course managers who are expecting to get peat from his company or other peat suppliers for greens mix are getting cheaper materials substituted at the blending stage, saving the supplier thousands of dollars and costing his company millions. Because jobs are being underbid, Dufault says, companies find themselves forced to cut corners, and swapping peat is easy to do because it can’t be discovered with the naked eye, and in some cases it can’t be detected by soil testing — that is, he says, until now.
“The first time we noticed it was five years ago, when people would call in, because we guarantee our greens,” Dufault says. “They’d call in and say, ‘This Dakota peat just isn’t performing like we think it should. It’s really not that good of stuff.’ And we ask them where they’re from, and we look up in our records, and we’ve never shipped any peat close to them. We don’t have a dealer there. And yet they were spec’d Dakota peat, so they assume it was Dakota peat.”
Because of this, Dakota started working on what the company calls product verification testing (PVT) to “level the playing field.” Dakota put three years of research and nearly $500,000 into creating the PVT system — launched at this year’s GIS — which Dufault says can identify any organic matter in greens mix, from its peat to a competitor’s peat to composted tree bark, for $500.
Dufault says other tests simply confirm that greens mix has a certain percentage of organic matter, and that’s not specific enough.
“They’d spec 0.7 organic content. So, people would put anything they want in there, then have it tested at a lab. They say, ‘OK, you’re good, you’re right at 0.7.’ The superintendent thinks, ‘I got my 0.7, and everything is good,’” Dufault says. “But you can grind up two-by-fours and get 0.7 organic. A two-by-four will meet your organic specs, but it won’t do anything for your greens.”
In the mix
How widespread is the problem, or is it even really a problem? It’s hard to say. But Dufault claims that 50 percent of jobs specified for Dakota peat are being what he calls “bait-switched.” Others in the industry deny this happens at all.
“I don’t know how frequently it happens,” says a consultant in the Rocky Mountain region who asked not to be identified. “I was involved in a case where something wasn’t quite right. By doing something as simple as taking a 90/10 Dakota mix and stirring it in water, and then taking what was in the green and doing the same, it was definitely different. And that’s what tipped me off.”
The consultant, a GCSAA member and a CGCS, says the prospect of a company not delivering what it had promised — and what had been paid for — had never occurred to him until he was working on a softball field complex with a fellow superintendent. That superintendent was the one who asked, “How do we know we’re getting what we paid for?”
“I think you might see some more quality control programs when you’re blending your mix,” the consultant says. “Seeing the bags, a packing slip, when the blending occurred… If you’re going to cheat, there’s still ways around it. I do think this will get people talking about it more.”
|
Darren Flanagan, managing partner of Modern Golf, a golf project management and consulting company based in Colorado, says he also was involved in a project in which Dakota peat was specified, but the client received some-thing else.
“The way I think about it, it’s no different than PGA merchandise that’s fake, or fake Callaway golf balls,” Flanagan says. “I’m not saying that you should use Dakota. You can throw whole chickens in your greens mix if you want to — there are a whole lot of alternatives that can be utilized in specifying greens mix. But how do I look as an owner’s representative if I sign a purchase order for a product that isn’t what they say it is?”
Flanagan says he and his team had numerous meetings about the situation in which they found themselves, despite having every 500 yards of material tested by two USGA-approved labs. After informing all parties involved, including the owners and suppliers, the principals decided to continue the project with the material they were getting.
“We got a guarantee from the supplier that if the product failed, he’d financially guarantee it,” Flanagan says. “We kept the project moving with the product supplied — it was still an agronomically sound mix with the required particle specification. Plus, we wanted to stay on schedule.”
Anthony Williams, CGCS at Stone Mountain (Ga.) Golf Club, says he’s never heard of a company not delivering what was promised for greens mix, but the thought of it was terrifying.
“If you want to just be there for six months, put whatever you want to in the greens mix,” he says. “But if you want to stick around that job for 16 years, you better be sure the greens mix is right.”
‘Conspiracy theory’
Jim Snow, national director of the USGA Green Section, said Dakota’s assertion of the need for its PVT system came as quite a surprise.
Each year, Green Section and Dakota staff have a breakfast meeting at the GIS. At this year’s meeting, Dakota officials told the Green Section representatives that they’d be unveiling PVT at the show.
“It was a complete surprise — they were emphatic this was going on,” Snow says. “Jim Moore (USGA director of construction education) was there, along with four or five of our staff. Jim took them to task, told them he’d never even heard of this, and how can this be that significant?”
Snow says that if suppliers are switching out products, something needs to be done about it, but neither the USGA nor other accredited labs have noted a problem.
“To convince us, Dakota needs to identify specific courses where this has been a problem,” he says, and that false products ought to show up in accredited USGA soil tests.
“If it’s composted tree bark, chances are it won’t make it through our guidelines at the laboratory,” Snow says. “(Dakota) says they have the technology (to tell what the organic matter consists of), and that’s fine; they should use it. If golf courses are asking for their product to use in the root-zone mix, it’s up to the golf course to send samples to an accredited soil testing lab and make sure it is what it is supposed to be.”
Jeffrey Stein, owner of Shapemasters in Southport, N.C., says that in his 20 years of experience building golf courses, he’s never heard of a problem with customers not getting what they paid for, and would not be using the PVT system.
“There’s a joke in our industry that if you send the same soil sample to three different labs, you’ll get back three different results,” Stein says. “There are only eight USGA-accredited labs in the U.S., and we’ve mandated to go to them. We use Norm Hummel, Thomas Turf Services and Tifton Physical Soil Testing Laboratory almost exclusively. They’re the most consistent; they have the most validity.”
|
Stein says soil samples he gets back from those three services come with an organic count, weight and volume, all for around $340.
“The USGA (specifications) are our guidelines, and if your testing is in accordance with the USGA guidelines, you shouldn’t have any problems,” Stein says.
“I think the superintendent, or the person who does the quality control work — he needs to send samples off to make sure they’re mixed to spec,” Snow says. “If it’s not delivered as spec’d, then that provider should be responsible for replacing it with a mix that is. If the supplier knew they would be responsible for replacing it, it wouldn’t ever happen. The first time they are caught, that’s the end of their business — no one would ever use them again.
“You would have thought by now, if there was a conspiracy, somebody would have uncovered it.”
Live and learn
Dufault says it’s hard to get those who have been victims of a bait-and-switch to speak up about these tactics for fear of the damage to a course’s reputation.
“They can’t afford the (negative) publicity on the golf course,” Dufault says. “That’s why they don’t want to step up and say, ‘Hey, I got (cheated)’. Then everybody thinks it’s a $30 million pristine golf course with (bad) greens because they got bait-switched.”
Flanagan echoes Dufault’s reasoning. “This was something that at first, I wasn’t going to talk about,” he notes. “But I don’t see a problem if I don’t mention names or locations. Maybe someone will want to do a ‘Sopranos’ on me and whack me and throw me in a ditch… that person has too much time on their hands.”
So if Dakota is continuously losing business, why not take the guilty party or parties to court?
“We didn’t want to go that route,” Dufault says. “We want to test up front. We understand in our business why they’re doing the bait-switch — because they don’t have a choice. They wouldn’t have a job if they didn’t cut corners somewhere. If I sued everybody who was bait-switching us, we wouldn’t have any friends in the industry.”
According to Dufault, it’s not just friends they’d have to sue, but also “family.”
“We’ve been finding out that most of the time we’re getting bait-switched from our own people — our own dealers. That’s why we don’t want to get mad at them; we know how it goes, we know why they have to do it.”
Dufault hopes that courses will want to include the PVT test as part of the contract on the job. That way, he says, bidders would know that testing will expose any such misdeeds.
“For $500, they can make sure they get what they paid for,” Dufault says. “For a $20 million golf course, that’s
pretty cheap.”
Dakota has created a DVD that explains the bait-and-switch situation. Anyone interested in the DVD can contact Dufault.
He’s also hoping that PVT will help restore the company’s image in the eyes of some consumers who may be faulting Dakota for the performance of something that wasn’t its product.
“That’s why we took it so seriously, because it was hurting our reputation so badly,” he says. “If it wasn’t so serious, we wouldn’t have spent a half million dollars buying equipment and hiring a scientist and (wouldn’t have) spent three years gathering samples.”
Flanagan says he’s learned from his experience with unscrupulous players in the industry.
“It definitely opened my eyes up,” he says. “It’s important to business to keep genuine parts genuine parts. This was one instance where it happened… and it made me a better manager.”
RECENT issues
 |
 |
April |
March |