web/tech

Analyzing the tweets and the accounts of the turf industry on Twitter.

The temperature-based turfgrass growth potential (GP) is a utility function that rescales the temperatures that the grass is growing in. Rather than the temperature scale, the GP is a unitless scale from 0 to 1 (or from 0 to 100%) that expresses how close the average air temperature is to the optimum temperature for shoot growth.

For the sixth year in a row, I’ve taken a look at “turfgrass Twitter” to find some of the most influential and active accounts from the previous year. I cast a broad net to find the industry accounts, and I minimize manual intervention of account addition and removal.

I’ve shared the posts from 2022 that got the most views. Then there are these 10 that got the fewest. Part of the reason for few views may be a lack of interest in the topic.

These posts had the most views in 2022. As in past years, technical topics related to turfgrass management dominate this list.1 Four of the top ten posts in 2022 were about soil organic matter or soil organic material; two were about fertilizer or turfgrass nutrition; and two were about irrigation or soil water content.

If you haven’t listened to Joe Gulotti’s The Talking Greenkeeper yet, I recommend starting with Episode 1 from Season 5, with Frank Rossi as the guest. I’ve been wanting to listen to that conversation for a few years.

In autumn of 2021 I started The ATC Doublecut with Micah Woods, a show where I talk about turfgrass topics that I’ve found interesting enough to write about. ATC Doublecut podcast website ATC Doublecut video playlist It’s been 9 months and 50 episodes now.

The ATC Doublecut podcast has listeners from more than 50 countries around the world. I checked the stats for episode downloads for the past 136 days, from April 1 through August 15, 2022.

I’ve recently acquired the PACE Turf information service from its founders, Drs. Wendy Gelernter and Larry Stowell. We’ve shared details of this in the Announcements section of the PACE Turf website, and this article by John Reitman at TurfNet has additional information.

I’ve been curious about which types of content are most preferred by those who follow ATC. So I asked, in a survey last week. I first sent the survey directly to the subscribers of the ATC blog by email list.