Sensitive soil

A soil-monitoring system not only helps by gathering information, but also provides the superintendent a way to track moisture trends over time.
A soil-monitoring system tracks its mood swings for you.

While preparing for the U.S. Amateur in 2005, Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pa. was not getting any help from the weather. Irregular patterns kept the course’s overall conditioning wavering as the date closed in.

Both members and staff were nervous, wanting their club to play ideally for the USGA and the players and to not look bad to the on-course fans and a television audience.

Several individuals, including golf course superintendent Matt Shaffer, got to talking about a new soil monitoring system that could help: UgMO, which measures soil, its changes and the durations of those changes.

“UgMO has patented and proprietary reporting and alerting features that notify the superintendent when conditions exist,” said Carmen Magro, vice president of agronomy for UgMO Technologies in King of Prussia, Pa., “and the superintendent can define exactly what he or she wants to know.”

For instance, UgMO has a moisture-temperature stress index that combines the effects of moisture and temperature to indicate an overall stress on the turf. The user defines this stress scale and chooses to be notified by phone when a stress condition is developing. Cultural practices can easily be assessed as to how they affect these stresses over time – what works, what doesn’t, when to do it and when not to.

Shaffer was in favor; the system’s purchase wasn’t a tough sell to membership or the operations side of the club. “That year everyone was very nervous, so if we thought it would give us any kind of edge we were willing to try it,” he says. “The club trusted my judgment and we were able to explain the advantages. We were one of the first clubs to try it. Desert Mountain was the other.”

The installation of the system went rather smoothly, with only a few hiccups along the way.

“Originally, we only had a few sensors but now we have over 65 units in the ground,” says Shaffer. “Like anything else that is the first time you ever have done it, it takes a little time. UgMO sent support staff to help us get started, and once you get rolling it moves pretty quickly.”

Setup of the equipment feels like guesswork, but it’s more about finding the best available places to gather information.

“Just putting the sensors in the ground is improvising, making sure they are in the spots you need to monitor to get value,” says Magro. “We never compromise the placement or data from a sensor. It devalues the entire program. The terrain at Merion is a challenge for radio communications at times, simply due to the lack of power on the course for the routers, which are receivers for the sensors in the ground. But we worked within the boundaries of the course to get multiple applicable measurements to give Matt value.”

Sensors give superintendents a view into what’s going on in the turf: “I now know what the grass is going to do before it does,” says Shaffer.“We have had several generations of sensors, so we have grown with the company,” says Shaffer. “Initially, we had a few challenges because we don’t have a typical golf course with field controllers. We have our controllers in vandal-proof buildings that are tucked away. Historically, you go to field controllers to mount a low voltage antenna to pick up and bounce the signal. We had to do some creative thinking to locate the antennas where they would be functional but concealed or unnoticeable.”

“Matt is a stand out superintendent, one who is seasoned in experience, has learned much from many failures (not all his own) and learned to adapt those changes always knowing that a further adjustment is likely going to be necessary to get the job done,” says Magro. “That is his philosophy -- just get the job done and find a way to do it successfully. He teaches his staff this and runs a tight program where everyone is always learning.”

He added, “Matt approaches information, whether he gathered it or he gains it from technology, like what he learns from the (soil-monitoring) system, with great skepticism until he proves or it is proven to him that it has value and validity to his program. He doesn’t grow grass, he produces a venue for a great game of golf and that doesn’t always mean green grass. This was a hard thing to teach when I was at Penn State trying to instruct students on the real challenges of the game. Grass is at its best when it is truly on the edge of decline. Matt knows he can use UgMO sensor technology to find that edge and walk it tightly to produce the finest conditions possible.”

Shaffer continually adapts the system to get the desired results for his course.

“It is very valuable to our operation,” says Shaffer. “I like to look for trends and the software program is great. I can set thresholds for each sensor and then have it alert us to when that particular area is out of the realm that we deemed desirable.”

Shaffer has even added sensors to areas that he had no intention of monitoring in the beginning. He initially reserved opinions on the system until he determined its overall effectiveness.

“I am not sure what I thought when I put it in,” he says. “But what I discovered was that I now know what the grass is going to do before it does. I know when it is going to wilt before it manifests that on top. I know when I get oversaturated conditions and the temps get real high I better vent or I will lose grass. I knew all that before and now I know it sooner. Losing grass sometimes is about hours, so gaining minutes is critical.”

Being able to rely on that information and past trends to decipher sensor data is one of the biggest benefits of the system, says Magro.

“Superintendents react to what they see and make decisions based off of what they know or what they have experienced,” says Magro. “Once trust is given to the system, which doesn’t take long with just a little time using the system, information is available that the superintendent has never had before: That is, what is actually happening before, during and after irrigation, fertilization or weather events, among other things.”

Soil moisture, of course, impacts everything in turfgrass management, he says: “Most importantly, surface resilience and recuperative capacity, soil moisture-to-air relationships, energy storage to withstand higher stress levels, disease development from pathogenic fungi and the delivery of salts to the turfgrass root system, to name a few.

“Soil in every part of the course has an optimum level of moisture that aids strong turf and root growth with high stress tolerance. There are many factors in the soil that affect how it reacts to moisture... how much it can hold, how fast it moves through the soil, whether it even penetrates the soil, whether it moves up, down and/or sideways in the soil and other ways water impacts the soil environment.

“More importantly, these conditions never stay static. They are always changing in every part of the course and every part of the profile. Understanding how last night’s irrigation event reacted in the soil and tracking how irrigation cycles change over time allows the superintendent to make adjustments without guessing how it will affect the course tomorrow.”

From a disease perspective, pathogenic fungi use water to facilitate their growth and reproduction. Finding and maintaining the optimum level of moisture for playability without having any excess water available for disease development is of great concern to every superintendent.

“Control the moisture and you will control disease outbreaks more times than not,” says Magro. “While it won’t solve every disease problem, it will prevent the most common ones when you control the water availability.”

Knowing not only how the surface moisture is changing, but how subsurface conditions change allows greater management control. For instance, Magro says, if moisture levels are slowly rising just beneath the surface even when irrigation practices are being backed off, measuring deeper in the profile and seeing that moisture rise at a higher pace tells the user that a drainage problem is developing and deep aeration or venting is likely needed to remove excess water from the shallow surface.

“We want to manage what we can see,” says Magro. “UgMO allows one to see what’s going on and takes the guesswork out of the assessment by offering canned and user-defined reports and alerts that pull in multiple soil variables as well as ambient variables (with an optional weather station), calculates them instantaneously and delivers results to the user quickly and easily so that decisions can be made without hesitation.”

The system’s sensors are what give it, and superintendents, an edge, Magro says.

“UgMO owns and uses patented wireless and sensor technology that no one else utilizes,” says Magro. ”The patented sensor and controller technology simply does not allow irrigation systems to water when there is adequate moisture in the ground.”

The sensors can manage water use effectively enough to cut it by 70 percent in some cases, with an average savings of between 40 and 60 percent, says Magro.

“If you are purchasing water you will be amazed how fast you will recover your investment,” says Shaffer. “It is going to become expensive to pump water with the rising cost of electricity. If you really pay attention to the sensors and get a trust level with them, you will save big bucks on chemicals. You pay a lot for water and electricity and the payback is fairly quick and can be much less than a year in some cases.”

Even before the sensor system, Shaffer ran his course dry. Without the data he now has available, finding the right moisture point was guesswork.

“But now I know what percentage is the breaking point,” says Shaffer. “I would venture to guess there isn’t one single [superintendent] out there that has had disease on their greens when there was no dew on their greens and yet there is a heavy dew everywhere else. Perhaps [other superintendents] have never gotten their greens that dry before. If you have sensors you can, and guess what disease has a real problem developing in super dry soils.”

However, he adds, turf quality is also always on the mind of the superintendent and members.

“Every client has a reason for using (a soil-monitoring system) and they vary,” says Magro, “but the common thread between all of them is that they want to maximize their playing conditions, save money by preventing turf decline and realize a savings of water and power as a result of doing the best thing they can for the turf. That is managing it to that fine line when too much water is unacceptable even for a moment.”

“There is no doubt that this is the way of the future,” says Shaffer. “There will be a time when everyone will have sensors. It will be as common as automated irrigation. If you have to manage more than one course you can do it via sensors. I am not advocating that you maintain your golf course from your office. What I am saying is stand on the course and look at the data that is under the ground. Stan Zontek, a very good friend and our USGA Agronomist, always says the grass is talking to you. Well, now the soil is talking to you. The soil tells the grass what to do.”

By John Torsiello