research

A project that investigated soil nutrient levels of good-performing turf all over the world.

After the Masters Tournament, I made the drive up to Knoxville for a visit to the University of Tennessee. I met with students, attended seminars, visited a golf course, and got a tour of the research farm with Dr.

Turfgrass nutrition (and related) research The slides as a 2.9 MB pdf file are available for download here. These links have information related to our discussions: Turner & Waddington’s 1978 article: Survey of soil testing programs for turfgrass Xu et al.

A lot of turfgrass nutrition research gets done with fixed rates of fertilizer applied on a fixed time schedule. It always seemed normal for me to fertilize this way. Here are a few examples.

Andrew McGuire, an agronomist with Washington State University, wrote that bio-products are “risky because decades of experience and research have found these products fail, or fail inconsistently, or have small benefits that don’t cover their cost.

One of the reasons I didn’t pay attention to clipping volume numbers in my youth was my failure to realize that the volume of clippings is related to the dry weight of clippings.

The usual way of thinking about soil nutrients and turf quality is something like this: when the amount of a soil nutrient is low, the turf quality won’t be as good as it would be if that nutrient were more abundant in the soil.

Remember the experiment I wrote about that evaluated a lot of different fertilizer “programs”? The control treatment in that experiment was urea, monoammonium phosphate, potassium sulfate, and ferrous sulfate. That urea-based treatment, which Dr.

The Green Section Record (Volume 62, Issue 4) has an interesting article by Chris Neff making a case for year-round soil nutrient analysis. Specifically, he wrote that: To adequately make decisions regarding these crucial fertilizer applications, it is imperative to conduct soil sampling throughout the year to assess soil properties and current nutrient levels, which play a pivotal role in the overall health and performance of the course.

Here are direct quotes from books and articles over the past 50 years. Do you notice a trend here? Actually, trend might not be the correct word. I’ll rephrase it like this: do you notice the persistence of an unsolved problem?