Ready for dry times

It rained often and hard in San Diego to begin 2023. Watching the 125 acres of turf his team maintains get repeatedly drenched failed to alter how Fairmont Grand Del Mar director of agronomy David Yanez views managing a golf course in Southern California. Yanez has carefully studied and implemented water-saving measures over a nearly two-decade run leading the maintenance of the resort’s Tom Fazio-designed golf course. The sensors — more on these later — aren’t leaving the ground because of one wet winter.

Through the first three months of 2023, San Diego received 10.98 inches of rain. The city averages 10 inches annually. The latter is Yanez and Fairmont Grand Del Mar’s reality. San Diego returned to its spring norms in April and May, with less than a quarter of an inch of rain accumulating during the two months. “I can’t stress enough the importance of managing your water,” Yanez says. “It really comes down to affecting the bottom line.” Two time zones and more than 1,200 miles from San Diego, TPC San Antonio director of golf course maintenance operations Roby Robertson leads the maintenance of 36 holes comprising around 400 acres of a sprawling 600-acre property within the limits of a sprawling city. He can relate to the drench-or-dry cycles Yanez experiences. April, May, September, and October are the wettest months — and among the busiest golf months. “If you don’t get any rain during those months,” Robertson says, “you’re set up for a pretty challenging situation.”

Last year epitomized the conundrum. TPC San Antonio received 11.25 inches of rain; the average annual rainfall is around 30 inches. The less it rains, the less water TPC San Antonio can draw from the Edwards Aquifer, the largest water source in the San Antonio metropolitan area. The Edwards Aquifer Authority declared Stage 4 water restrictions for a stretch last summer. “When you boil it down, the last year or two, our allocation equals about four acre-feet, which isn’t very much,” Robertson says.

Fairmont Grand Del Mar and TPC San Antonio are desirable courses to play in frequently parched places. Instead of hoping for permanent weather reversals, Yanez and Robertson are blending technology with their experiences to meet expectations and conserve water simultaneously. They are doing their industry a public relations favor by documenting the savings along the way.

On the third day of spring 2023, Yanez pops into his office to participate in a late-morning video conversation. The topic? Water. Fairway conditions? Soggy.

Yanez turns and abandons his computer for 10 seconds. He reappears clutching a black device comparable in size to an irrigation head. Yanez is holding a GX-1 Soil Sensor, an innovation being offered to the golf industry by GroundWorx. The sensor pairs with the GX-1 Weather Station. Yanez first installed a few in-ground sensors into fairways at high and low points of a course dipping through and around canyons. He has added sensors underneath flattish fairways and tees. The sensors collect 144 daily readings, giving Yanez cloud-based access to moisture, salinity and temperature data. Yanez doesn’t need to be on the course — or even on the property — to monitor the above conditions.

Fairmont Grand Del Mar rests atop heavy-clay soil. Moisture and salinity impact every maintenance decision.

“Having the information readily available with a single app on your phone, or on your own computer, is huge,” Yanez says. “I live 56 miles from the golf course. On a Saturday or Sunday, I can log on and see what’s going on. We have a little bit more of a skeleton crew on weekends, they come in early and get the golf course ready. I can always log into my irrigation computer and make changes if we need to. It’s using technology for the right reasons.”

Calculated changes yield significant resource and financial savings for Fairmont Grand Del Mar. If the data indicates it’s OK to skip a summer fairway irrigation cycle at night without hindering course conditions, the resort will save 100,000 gallons of water per night, according to Yanez.

The early 2023 rain hasn’t changed the cost of water in Southern California. Potable water costs close to $7 per 100 cubic feet, according to Yanez. The cost per 100 cubic feet was less than $2 when Yanez arrived at Fairmont Grand Del Mar in 2015. Reclaimed water prices have increased from $1.78 to $2.15 per 100 cubic feet, according to Yanez. Fairmont Grand Del Mar irrigates its golf course with a blend of reclaimed and potable water.

“The savings can be big with reclaimed water,” Yanez says, “but decreased water consumption is really where the savings are at.”

When Tim Barrier ended his nearly 30-year run as superintendent at nearby Rancho Sante Fe Golf Club in 2021, he was managing a budget with a water bill approaching $700,000, a total that would have been significantly higher had it not been for a major turf removal project in 2014 sparked by drought. As Groundworx vice president of business development, Barrier works with superintendents to determine how data obtained via soil sensors can help golf maintenance operations. Yanez was an early GX-1 Soil Sensor adopter.

“The best superintendents adopt technology earlier,” Barrier says. “David is at a very high-end, daily-fee, resort setup. He has a lot of competition for destination golfers. He has to be at the top of his game. One of the things I tell these early adopters is that you can’t manage it if you don’t measure it. This is all a measuring tool.”

With each measurement, courses are positioning golf to solidify its perception in Southern California, where despite hearty snowpacks caused by the winter rain, the politics of golf and water will continue to intersect.

“Had we not gotten all those rains, I think this would have been a brutal year,” Yanez says. “Out here they even have signs on the freeway asking you to decrease water use because you’re in a drought. Instead of a message about an accident, it’s talking about the drought. That’s how serious it was getting here.”

Adds Barrier: “This technology really gives a voice to our industry to say we are taking that resource of water and electricity and using it in a way that’s really, really responsible. Maybe before we could talk about what we were doing, but now we can show what we are doing through data.”

A 43-year industry veteran, Robertson reverts to his golf maintenance beginnings to help others understand the advances in water management. Robertson started his career as a teenager in Kansas watering greens at night, a nearly extinct task in 2023 because of irrigation advances. “It was the best job I have had,” he says.

Learning how to keep surfaces alive and playable without sensors, data or computers prepared Robertson to eventually handle the precision and politics of water he has encountered during superintendent and director stints in Kansas, Oklahoma, Florida, Arizona, and Texas.

“You really learned how to manage, because you didn’t have the ability to go in and say, ‘I’m going to water greens tonight,’ and click one button and it’s done for you,” he says. “When we started getting automatic irrigation, it was just the most incredible thing in the world. It wasn’t efficient. Back then, our pump stations were mainly a clay valve and an air bubble. Nowadays we are able to dial it in.

“Forty years ago, 30 years ago, the impact on water wasn’t really that big of a deal. We had plenty of water in most places. You built golf courses where you had water. Now you’re building golf courses where the next question is, ‘What are we going to do for water?’”

Developers asked that question when plotting TPC San Antonio, which debuted the Oaks and Canyons courses in 2010. The Oaks hosts the PGA Tour’s Valero Texas Open. The courses were first clay-capped, then sand-capped, and designed with a closed-loop irrigation to ensure water entering the property can be reused on the property. Water drains into a series of ponds. Each pond features a sump pump that allows water to move into two main ponds attached to the main-line irrigation system.

TPC San Antonio’s irrigated golf footprint is 150 acres — 75 acres per course. The water stored in the main ponds can be used without fear of contaminating existing water.

The closed-loop system decreases the volume of water TPC San Antonio draws from the Edwards Aquifer. Robertson works closely with a San Antonio Water System environmental specialist on the club’s water conservation program. Soil moisture meters tied to weather stations help determine irrigation, with decisions being made “strictly by ET percentage and rate,” Robertson says.

Robertson and his team record hourly readings, documenting how much water is pumped in and out of the irrigation system. Daily usage and ET data are placed into monthly reports; irrigation audits are performed annually. Thirteen years after its unveiling, TPC San Antonio remains one of the world’s most sophisticated golf irrigation operations.

“I know of no other course that operates under these types of conditions,” Robertson says. “Is it possible to do so? Absolutely. We have been doing it here for a little over 13 years now.”

Before returning to the Great Plains for the TPC San Antonio job in 2018, Robertson led the golf maintenance efforts at TPC Scottsdale, another high-profile, 36-hole facility in a dry place. He says the cost of water in south Texas — at least for now — isn’t approaching rates encountered by courses in Western states. Water quality presented another challenge he faced at TPC Scottsdale that doesn’t exist at TPC San Antonio. “The quality of water that comes out of the Edwards Aquifer is fantastic,” he says.

Every time Robertson stares at the periphery of the courses his team maintains, he’s reminded that more people are dependent upon the same robust water. The population of the San Antonio metropolitan area, home to around 2.5 million residents, has doubled in less than 30 years.

“The success of TPC San Antonio has been that there was a need for this type of facility to begin with,” he says. “San Antonio is one of the fastest-growing cities. In my time here, the area around this golf course has doubled in development. We’re highly focused on water use and how we manage it, and I do think that it adds to our success. If we’re doing things the right way and efficiently, the golf course is going to perform top-notch.”

Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry's editor-in-chief.