81Bill Murray’s performance
as Carl Spackler in Caddyshack
was over the top in just about
every respect—except the
part where he’s manually twisting a
valve to water the fairways and greens
of Bushwood. Conniving gophers aside,
that’s the way it was: As Carl himself
might put it, “In the immortal words of
Jean Paul Sartre...limited control.”
Today, course irrigation has evolved to
satellite or hardwire controls, allowing
superintendents to sit in their office or
truck and manage the system. Which is
nice...but hardly the end of the evolution.
In this era of Big Data, irrigation systems
are getting smart.
“It’s all moving in the direction of
artificial intelligence, where you have
sensors out on the golf course, and that
data will interface with the irrigation
system itself, and decisions can be made
on a sprinkler by sprinkler basis,” says
Beau Welling, whose eponymous firm is
designing one of the two courses at the
PGA of America’s new headquarters in
Frisco, Texas. “It allows for more efficient
use of water and better control of what’s
going on in the sub-environment where a
particular spot on a golf hole might be.”
Among the entities leading the charge
are Toro and the USGA. The two are
ham-and-egging a joint study designed
to balance optimal course conditions
with optimal water use by looking at
various factors affecting turf health,
including temperature, soil moisture and
composition, exposure to sunlight, and
evapotranspiration.Toro is plenty busy on its own, too.
Its Lynx mobile apps let supers control
irrigation systems via smartphones and
tablets using map- and number-based
interfaces. The company continues to
improve irrigation precision and minimize
water use, and it expects to lead a
transformation from time of watering
(now tunable down to the second) to
amount of water as the controlling factor.
This is being made possible primarily
by advancements in central-control-
system software that’s capable of
processing several variables, such as arc
and pressure and nozzle performance,
to calculate the exact amount of water
being delivered at the sprinkler. Toro
is also looking to add air power to its
arsenal: Last year, it became a minority
investor in GreenSight Agronomics, a
Boston-based company that employsautonomous drone technology for turf
management, involving aerial imagery,
custom sensors and machine learning–
based data analytics.
“These capabilities—versus when I
began 25 years ago—are like science
fiction,” says Welling.
For its part, the USGA spent years
building an app that helps course
owners manage their water wisely by
digital modeling and heat-mapping
golfer pathways through the course
via pocket-size GPS trackers. Called
the USGA Facility Tool, it’s sexier than
the name suggests. The app chews up a
ton of data—topographic, geotargeted
weather patterns, area water costs,
and so on—and spits out a number that
shows how much money the facility can
save by simple changes to maintenance
practices that require less water,
fertilizer, nutrients and manpower. Last
year, Florida’s Crandon Park, a former
PGA Tour Champions host site, spent
$1.1 million on water alone. Now, after
taking the Facility Tool app onboard, it
will save $300,000 annually just on H 2 O
by downsizing the existing turf area
from 130 acres to 88.
And get this: The app can also track
pace of play, helping to find ways to
move golfers along faster—a truly
mouthwatering prospect.GOLF/Technology 2019GPS-generated heat maps supplied by the USGA helped South Florida’s
Crandon Golf Key Biscayne save $300,000 on its annual water bill.TECH WE LOVE:
VOICE CADDIE
If you want quick, convenient and accurate yardages to
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to get all the info you need. Available in black or white.
$129.99.voicecaddie.comLe
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