Coming Soon: A practical option for mapping fairway soil moisture at your golf course By Dr. Chase Straw and Dr. Brian Horgan University of Minnesota Turfgrass Scientists
Golf course superintendents often irrigate fairways based on feel. Despite sometimes adjusting percent run-times of individual heads to account for perceived dry and wet areas, “blanket” applications are typical. Using objective data to create soil moisture maps of your golf course’s fairways, as well as taking advantage of valvein-head control, could significantly reduce water consumption by programming your irrigation system to match soil moisture variability. This would involve assigning each irrigation head to a soil moisture class, as a result of their surrounding soil moisture values, and then creating a program for each class to irrigate together. “Dry” classes would get irrigated more frequently, “wet” classes would get irrigated less frequently, and an entire fairway will almost never get completely irrigated during one
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irrigation session. This process fits under the concept of “site-specific irrigation” or “precision irrigation.” In an effort to entice the utilization of soil moisture maps for improved irrigation decisions, and to allow for hands-on experience with mapping technologies, the University of Minnesota and MGCSA are collaborating to develop a practical strategy for golf course superintendents and staff members to map fairway soil moisture themselves. The University of Minnesota has prepared a detailed protocol outlining step-by-step instructions to collect georeferenced soil moisture data with a FieldScout TDR 350, which can then be used to create fairway soil moisture maps with free software (Figures 1 A, B, C, D). The protocol is estimated to take one person 2-3 days to complete an entire golf course. Meanwhile,