The distributor and the category-buster: A fairy ring tale

Michael Bailey recognizes that most people think of him as a mere salesman. For 22 years, he worked as a golf course superintendent. Today all that experience is to be taken with a grain of salt — or so the conventional wisdom would have many in the turf business believe.

It’s obvious the situation takes him slightly aback, but you’d be hard pressed to find in his voice a trace of aggravation. Neither does it stop him from letting friends, customers and colleagues, who are legion, know his opinions, which are similarly legion — and which he prefers to convey once he has prefaced them with a series of disarming analogies.

“I consider myself a consultant as opposed to a salesman — actually, I’m more like a pharmacist,” says Bailey, technically a rep for the turf distributor Winfield United, a division of Land O’Lakes. “We are a huge company – bigger than Purina. But we do business like CVS does business. We manufacture our own fertilizer, for example, our own chemicals. But we’re also a national distributor for Bayer, Syngenta and Ecologel. So we’re like CVS and I’m like the pharmacist there: When I sell a jug of Hydretain, I don’t make any more or less money.

“When I walk up to the pharmacist with a question and they tell me what aisle to go down, they don’t make any money off that advice either. He might suggest Excedrin for pain and Aleve for muscle ache. That’s the way the way CVS does business. That’s the way I do business.”

Bailey has touched on one of the turf industry’s most vexing issues — namely, the way distributors are generally obliged to finesse the whole issue of brand and the various product categories where those brands may or may not compete with each other, or perhaps where they compete with something Winfield itself manufactures. Some distributor reps might find this awkward. But not Bailey, and here’s where all those years in the business come back into the equation. Bailey feels strongly that all that experience allows him a peculiar sort of freedom.

“What’s the best product for pythium? Segway is the best for pythium control — and we don’t make it,” Bailey says. “There are other companies that make pythium products and each one believes they make the best product. But I pretend I’m the pharmacist because I have my own view. You learn from so many people. Here in Florida, I deal with croquet courts, football fields, resorts like Mar-a-Lago and golf courses. I have learned from all these guys — folks who talk about the science of horticulture: what they know.

“Maybe things are just different for us here at Winfield. But we share all that knowledge, or I do. Wetting agents, for example. We sell five or six of them. They’re all great. We make our own, too. It competes very well with the name brands. It’s been proven better than those other products, legitimately. It’s been validated by university testing. It sells a couple dollars less expensive because we make it. But even there, I don’t sell someone off Aquatrols if they want to buy that product. It’s a great product. Why argue with customers? They’re the chefs. They know what they want!”

But what happens when a product doesn’t have competitors? One might imagine that makes life simpler — for the pharmacist, at least. But Bailey believes it actually makes the consult and the sale more complicated,

In Florida, every superintendent lives in fear of fairy ring, for example. Bailey is convinced – and his superintendent and sports field customers are convinced – that the only way to fight it is deft deployment of your favorite wetting agent (which moves water evenly through the profile) in concert with the moisture manager Hydretain, which binds moisture in Florida’s sandy soil to the root hairs themselves.

“But here’s the thing: Hydretain is different because it doesn’t have competitors,” Bailey says. “There is so much overkill in this industry within any category, but not here. Hydretain is Hydretain. It’s been a patent for a long time and it’s one of the few products that really doesn’t have competitors. But that gets in the way! I was recently talking to a city government about a project and, in situations like that, you need three bids. But there aren’t two more products that do what Hydretain does. But that makes me sounds even more like a snake-oil salesman!

“Hydretain is just a very, very unique concept. Not everyone sells it because it takes some time to explain how it works. That might take an extra half hour, or maybe another trip or two to see a guy. A lot of guys won’t do that. But I will.”

One customer with whom Bailey has spent that extra time is Matt Lean, golf course superintendent at Monterey Yacht & Country Club in Stuart, Florida. Steady winds off the Atlantic Ocean have traditionally dried out Lean’s putting surfaces, resulting in serial fairy ring issues. Lean arrived 10 years ago. The club redid all the greens seven years ago and despite the pristine soil profiles, the dreaded fairy ring started reappearing almost immediately.

“I’ve been lucky to be able to trial and error a bunch of products here,” says Lean, CGCS. “I’d spray half the green with one product and the other half with another — and Mike would come out and try to tell what was what. Well, eventually Mike recommended the Hydretain and I tried it. Been using it for years now. No localized dry spot, no fairy ring since … well, since I can’t tell you when.”

Lean agrees with Bailey regarding the sui generis nature of Hydretain. He believes that fact should make it popular with hundreds of his fellow superintendents in Florida. Instead, he believes that when a product lacks competitors, that fact and the nature of distributor sales actually work against it.

“There are so many salesmen in Florida. They carry the popular items and if they don’t sell it, you won’t get it. We’ve all seen that. And if you don’t carry Hydretain, you sell people something else — maybe a wetting agent they say will do what Hydretain does. But nothing really does what Hydretain does. 

“I get it: Distributors don’t want a product to sit on the shelves. You can’t sell everything. There’s a yin and a yang to their business. But dry spot is so prevalent here and I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to deal with it.

“Ed Lamour down in Miami,” — Lamour is the director of grounds at the Dolphins Training Camp in Davie, home of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins — “has Bermuda 419. He feels the same way about Hydretain. I’ve known Ed a long time and with him, it’s all about what works. And he’s dealing with a lot more money than I am here. He’s dealing with a multi-million dollar franchise; the players are worth millions more.  It tells me a lot when he’s using the product. If it didn’t work, he wouldn’t be using it.”

Understanding fairy ring

Fairy ring can develop anywhere but it is most readily associated with Florida, where sandy soils predominate and, for that reason, soils have difficulty holding moisture. According to the NC State Extension, “The symptoms appear in patches, rings or arcs that are initially one foot or less in diameter, but expand in size year after year, reaching up to several hundred feet in diameter in old turf stands. Most fairy ring fungi do not infect or parasitize the turf. Instead, growth of these fungi in the soil can indirectly affect, or even kill, the turfgrass above.” Many superintendents do, in fact, treat fairy ring with fungicides, but it’s the dryness that first kills or otherwise compromises to the turf plant, especially on putting surfaces.

Even in a USGA green with its perfectly apportioned 12 to 14 inches of soil mixture, the sand in that mixture dries out before anything else does. What’s more, greens feature contour, highs and lows, front-to-back pitches and vice versa. That varies the way water flows from surface to root — in ways you don’t see on more level fairways and tees. Over time, even the perfect profile will become compromised: Organics get mucky and pockets of poor flow develop. Portions of the profile can also become hydrophobic, meaning they are wet but deflect further moisture from traveling to specific root-zone areas.

All these factors keep water dropped on the putting surface from traveling straight down to the roots, where it’s needed.

“When it rains or turf is irrigated, water goes in but does not flow straight down to where the drop has landed,” says Bailey, gearing up for an analogy. “It goes a bit left or right, not straight down. It disperses. Think of the way water drains down a screen — it tends to channel into miniature riverbeds. When you have a dry spot and run the water through, the water does not want to run to that dry spot. It wants to repel and adhere to the left or right. Water goes to water, not to dry sand. You can see that on a tabletop: Water droplets want to team up and combine.”

Wetting agents break that water tension and make it flow more evenly and consistently through a soil profile. In the views of Bailey and Lean, wetting agents represent 75 percent of the battle when combating fairy ring on putting surfaces in Florida.

Many superintendents stop there and are frustrated when the symptoms persist. But the issue is dryness in the soil. It has always been dryness. Fungicides may address the symptoms of dryness after the fact, but the core of the matter remains unchanged.

Every turf manager in Florida understands the cycle of stress: By 2 to 3 p.m., the hottest part of the day, the plant is getting crispy — not just above the surface but below the surface as well. But you can’t always water during that time, because the golf course or the athletic field is being used.

“So what do you do to keep the moisture in the soil?” Bailey asks, rhetorically. “Put in a sponge? No. You need a moisture manager. That’s what Ecologel calls Hydretain — but technically it’s a humectant” — the sort of compound used to maintain moisture in products like gum or toothpaste — “It is not a wetting agent. It will literally keep available moisture in the soil. Not spongy wet. It does not do that. It simply helps the moisture that’s there in the soil to last longer. So if I have moisture in the morning, rather than evaporating or draining away by 2 to 3 p.m., Hydretain allows the moisture on those grains of sand to adhere and stick around for the afternoon. It’s an almost invisible concept but it’s real.”

Caution: Serious Analogy Alert approaching.

“Imagine your arm hanging out of a car window while you’re driving. It gets dry and crusty. But your right arm, the one in the car, feels very different. That’s because the conditions in the car, like the conditions in the rootzone, are different. The moisture on that skin lasts longer, in the car, where it’s available to the organism. Hydretain does that in the rootzone. It absorbs what moisture is there in the soil and makes it available to the organism — so roots don’t curl up and die at 2 p.m. It’s not a fire hydrant. It only works with the water you’ve got in the soil that morning.

“Here’s something people have a hard time understanding: There is soil moisture humidity. We all understand the rough ratios of a soil mix: 50 percent soil, 25 percent air and 25 percent water. But you have to take the next mental step in order to understand what a moisture manager is doing. If you were an ant crawling through the sand, it’s not so thick like concrete. Think of those ball pits at McDonald’s. What if all those balls were moist and wet — no water dripping down on the floor beneath, just wet enough that kids get out and they are moist and wet to the touch. A moisture manager maintains those moist conditions, in soil.

“Now imagine there was no moisture in there at all. Those balls are the grains of sand in a soil profile at 3 in the afternoon. One playground is clammy and wet, while the other is bone dry. Which one do you want at 2 p.m. in Florida? With a moisture manager down there, the plant continues to grow completely unaffected by conditions above ground because the humectant holds the moisture down there where the roots can live all afternoon.”

Lean is a believer: “I honestly haven’t hand-syringed for I can’t tell you how long. Basically, I use 80 ounces, less than a gallon, every three weeks. I slow feed it in with the fertilizer package — then water it in the next day, when the water kicks on. Doesn’t burn and I know it’s there; I know it pulls moisture into the rootzone. That’s what makes it different from other products. When I pull a soil sample, it’s moist. Not clumpy or anything, but moist.

“I’ve been using it for years now: No dry spots, no fairy ring, pretty much disease-free except for nematodes — which has nothing to do with this. Too bad the fairways can’t be that simple. I’ve had areas where I’ve kicked the nozzle off a little early — so maybe I’ve missed a spot. I noticed I started getting fairy ring there. So I put it out, right over that spot, and it was gone.”

Because Bailey spent 22 years as a golf course superintendent, he pleads with his customers to be proactive about the dryness so endemic to sandy soils in Florida. That dryness can result in all sorts of problems, including fairy ring. And yet, all too often that dryness is treated, after the fact, as a fungus problem.

“But that’s a secondary problem. You need to focus on the primary problem. Even if you get rid of the fairy ring, you still have problems at the core. And that problem is dryness. A moisture manager does not cure fairy ring, because fairy ring is a caused by dry soil. It’s part of a course of action, to avoid fairy ring from starting up or, if it’s already present, to get you back to normal.”

So far as Bailey and Lean are concerned, it all comes back to high volume of sand in Florida soil. Every superintendent must have strategies for keeping those individual grains — the balls in the pit, if you will — moist. If you don’t, they ultimately become hydrophobic, fairy ring emerges, and getting “back to normal” is a far more daunting enterprise.

“The grains of sand become hydrophobic when roots die and decay,” Bailey says. “Where does that decayed organic matter go? It clings to the sand grains like plaque clings to teeth. Those grains become acid-wrapped and inert, like little metal BBs. And you can’t grow turf in BBs. That’s where the orange color we associate with fairy ring comes from: hydrophobic inert sand. It’s why roots weaken, the crown starts to slough off and ultimately die.

“What does Hydretain do, together with a wetting agent? When sprayed in good soil, that combination never allows those BBs to develop. To explain all this to someone is hard to do, but if you understand the analogies, it all makes sense.”