CSI golf greens

Robert Oppold, who lives on a quiet suburban street outside Kansas City, Missouri, remembers every last detail of the call. It came from John Cunningham, the assistant general manager and director of agronomy at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis at the time. It didn’t arrive in the middle of the night. The urgency on the other end of the line only made it seem that way.

“This was back in the summer of 2016,” Oppold tells me, some eight years later. “He said, ‘Bob, I don’t care what you do. Get on a commercial flight if you have to, but I need you here tomorrow morning.’ I was on the road at 6 a.m. the next morning, across I-70 to St. Louis.”

In 1994, before Oppold founded the New Mix Laboratories, he had joined the International Sports Turf Research Center, headquartered in Lenexa, Kansas. ISTRC handles soil physical analysis for, among other clients, superintendents maintaining sand-based greens challenged by infiltration, bulk density and other soil-related isues — those of the physical nature. Oppold is a soil scientist, not a chemist. His expertise is soil physics.

“It’s hard to find a bigger cheerleader for the USGA greens specifications than myself,” Oppold says. “The physics of it: That’s infiltration, total porosity, bulk density and what contributes to that balance.”

What Oppold found at Bellerive that morning in 2016 reminded him of something he’d seen the year before at Bear Lakes in West Palm Beach, Florida, at the request of the superintendent there, Dave Troiano. Oppold had seen the same thing at Hawks Nest in Vero Beach, following a call from superintendent Carlos Arraya, who left to become the head golf course superintendent at Bellerive, where he’s now the general manager. In the summer of 2016, Arraya and Cunningham, both CGCS, were prepping to host the PGA Championship in August 2018.

“I do forensics. That’s the job,” Oppold says, sounding like a character from the hypothetical CSI: Kansas City by way of The X Files. “And what we saw at Bellerive was organic layering on the gravel level: that boggy darkness — a goo. That’s what reduction iron looks like. In the presence of oxygen, you get oxidation. But when the soil goes toxic, or septic, you get this black look as well.

“Carlos was telling me, ‘It’s like déjà vu.’ He’d just loaded the greens with water, but they were going septic by the Fourth of July. They were too doggone weak to withstand the summer stress, and Carlos didn’t want a re-run of what happened at Hawks Next.”

And what exactly happened at Hawks Nest? “Well, the architect had gone around and seen the top four inches of those putting surfaces loaded with the same goo. They were all bewildered by this. The club was like, ‘These were built 10 years ago by a top construction company!’

“Well, the architect told them to just strip it off: reshape, regrass, and get on with it. This was a perfectly logical thing to do at the time. But the drainage beneath had failed and they didn’t know it. We were brought in because 15 of those greens eventually died.”

Aliens did not kill the greens at Hawks Nest, and Bellerive hosted the 2018 PGA without incident. But these episodes did crystalize — for Oppold, for his chemist colleague Dr. David York, for water and soil scientist Todd Eden — the severity of a soil crisis playing out beneath many U.S. golf courses and agricultural properties. It ultimately led to the development of The Legacy Test Methods, a water, soil and available-nutrition testing collaborative initiated in 2021 and launched in 2022.

Nearly 300 courses across the nation have since deployed The Legacy Test Methods, because the goo and/or cementation lurking beneath those greens didn’t result from the absence of iron or any other soil nutrient. As Oppold explains, they went all gooey on account of a massive build-up of bacteria, bio-toxins, bio-matter and bio-wastes from a host of accumulated inputs — fertilizers, surfactants and fungicides. Traditional soil-testing was not exhibiting evidence of these accumulated inputs, which often lead to cemented soil, reducing permeability. More important, these nutrients weren’t getting to the intended destination: the plant.

LTM is a testing regimen whose remedies — delivered through chemigation — are formulated to make water a more beneficial, healthy product, while converting and liberating accumulated fertilizer in soils to available nutrition. They’re also designed to detoxify sodium, overcome bio wastes and organic matter, while adding dissolved oxygen, improving pore space and infiltration rates/depth, according to Eden, whose Scottsdale, Arizona-based firm, HCT LLC, markets these treatments under the brand name WaterSOLV.

“This really is the first time we’re looking at the soil in totality — the physics, the chemistry and the biology,” Oppold says. “That’s what’s really new about this.”

Adds Eden: “From a testing data perspective, we can actually identify the totality of the culprits to take corrective action and see the change not just in the turf and soil, but also in the data.”

In short, The Legacy Test Methods treat irrigation water that, in turn, with more chemistry, remediates the soil. According to Eden, it’s a testing regimen that takes the next step: prescription by diagnosis, followed by baseline data and ongoing accountability.

“The process is entirely predicated on assessing the particulars of water, water bacteria, total soil properties and what becomes available for the plant to drink,” says Eden, who is blunt about the cause: inadequate testing methods. “Something misled all those superintendents into adding more fertilizer on top of an excess of existing fertilizer in the soil. In actuality, there is typically way more fertilizer in the soil than the superintendent thought — often 10 to 100 times more than the plant needed — and yet is not available to the plant! Mind you, this was a plant that, from all appearances and data, was nutrient deficient.”

Beyond the testing question, what made the pore space and infiltration so poor?

“More often than not,” Eden says, “the answer is accumulated fertilizer, septic water in the soil, biological wastes and toxins. That’s how it starts. Soils are a filter, filters get dirty, plants become what they can drink.”

Iron from years of fertilizer applications is just one input that significantly builds up in soils over time. In yet another vicious cycle, superintendents typically compensate for salts — in water, in soils — by irrigating 15 to 30 percent more. They further compensate via core aerification, primarily, but soils quickly become contaminated by the stagnation of water and fertilizer build-up in soils. The salts and toxins surrounding the sand-filled holes just stay there, getting more calcified. Water in the soil turns septic, bacteria grows more colonies. The resulting waste proliferates, perpetuating disease and algae. “All this,” Eden adds, “hinders infiltration, pore space and the availability of nutrition and oxygen from root uptake.”

This was another scenario that Oppold, separate from Eden, had begun to see in soil profiles more and more as the millennium turned: gravel layers completely locked up, soil so compacted he’d have to hammer the soil probe into the ground — or soil so soggy/saturated, he’d almost lose the tool in the ground.

“Yet the top inch at Bellerive, for example — after we took off the grass and thatch — they were lean and mean. Still, they could not move the doggone water!” Oppold recalls. “I mean, there was something going on that I could not explain structurally, and nothing the super was doing explained it. The conventional testing methods were not showing anything. These greens should have been peeing water past 3 inches, but they were not.”

And here’s where the chemistry entered the Legacy equation, from a scientific process and business perspective: Oppold frequently summoned York of Valencia, Pennsylvania-based Tournament Turf Laboratories to assess these non-structural issues in locked-up soils. The soil scientist knew there was excess iron and carbonates down there. He was pretty sure there were bicarbonates, too, and York was proficient tackling those issues with traditional tests.

“We’d run a camera snake down the main drainage line and we could see the slits were crusted up with carbonate salts,” Oppold says. “So we’d blast an acid solution in there to blow open the doggone slits — and the discharge started flowing out milky white, right away. I’ve got video of it.

“I had talked with a friend on the agronomic side who had gone with a very strong acid digest. All of a sudden, now we see the masses of calcium, magnesium, iron, aluminum, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sulfate, even zinc and copper in these soils. Off the charts! We learned that a very strong acid digest breaks down everything to the nth degree. It will readily break down calcitic crystals that sulfuric acid could not.

“With that, it started making sense.”

It’s important to be clear about the breakthrough here. Oppold likes to frame it by using the example of Riverway Golf Course north of Vancouver, British Columbia, one of the first test cases. Peter Sorokovsky — “a very good agronomist who’s still the superintendent there,” Oppold says — got the ball rolling by pulling a cup-cutting from his seventh green.

“We allowed it to dry. You could see the rust in it!” Oppold tells me. “That bottom four- to eight-inch layer: You could see the rust! You could see the blackness, too. Once it had dried, it was so hard that I had to take a metal bar with a plastic tip to break it apart before Dr. York could test it.”

York first tested the soil for iron using a traditional weak paste. It showed the presence of iron at 1.37 ppm. So, if a superintendent tested the soil in this fashion — as many course managers do — it would show only that trace amount of iron in the soil.

Then the same soil was assessed using a weak acid, one that effectively dropped the pH. Suddenly 79 ppm were shown to be present in the soil. Still a trace amount. Thereafter, York and Oppold deployed a stronger Mehlich-3 test, the standard for using hydrochloric acid as an extraction: 419 ppm. This was revealing of the test itself, as a variable, yet still a pittance.

But then: York used a very strong acid/oxidizer digest that showed iron present in Sorokovsky’s soil at 13,740 ppm — 10,000 times more iron than conventional paste testing revealed. Yes, you read that right. York and Oppold were gobsmacked, because it wasn’t just iron that finally revealed itself in this way. Calcium jumped from 452 ppm to nearly 3,800. Magnesium went from 99 to 5,900.

“This was all fertilizer available to the plant — if you could make it soluble,” Oppold explains, adding that this reality was just one of two major deductions to be made. Sorokovsky’s soil had plenty of iron, magnesium and calcium. In fact, it had way too much. This excess of undetected minerals was clogging up that soil — preventing the plant’s nutrient uptake necessities, but also causing the waterlogged soils to turn septic from bacteria and their exudates, or wastes.

“All water wants to do is attach itself to a mineral, to be balanced,” Oppold says. “This is why we have lime in our water. Even good water is balanced out with minerals like sodium chloride and bicarbonates. Soil is a filter. So everything that goes in there, water and its buddy, the mineral, are penetrating the soil filter system, be it a sand-based rootzone or any other soil. What doesn’t drain out is still sitting there, typically starting at about six inches down. That’s what’s was going on, from site to site, test to test, comparison to comparison.”

Soil physics in its simplest form is the balance of oxygen and water in the soil. Anything else living in that profile is effectively competing for oxygen. The object of all that competition is oxygen and the byproduct, through respiration, is CO₂ and water. When an environment turns anaerobic, the bacteria produces CO₂, methane and often hydrogen sulfide. Those gases are highly toxic in low-oxygen environments. There are bacteria that feed on iron, manganese, sulfur, sulfate and phosphate. Bacteria can also multiply exponentially about every 15 minutes and produce toxins. In a sealed room, Oppold is fond of saying, humans would eventually use up all the available oxygen and die: “Same for the plant.”

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“What I found,” Eden says, “was that nobody was looking at the total picture or the bacteria (or their waste products) in the water. They were looking at the available soil nutrition, but not seeing what was in the soil already. A small percentage of the fertilizer added was accumulating in the soil, thereby reducing pore space, infiltration and leading toward septic soils. It was turning the soil into drywall with calcium sulfate — also known as gypsum — and with no sustainable solution to bacteria or sodium and chloride.

“All of our work on the agricultural side had already led to more water into the ground, less water onto the ground, and more healthy water — with more nutrients available to the vegetation. It also led to a reduction in the percentage of toxins, meaning sodium and bio-toxins, and more nutritional uptake leading to higher yield. There are other real benefits: increased pest resistance, less water demand, less disease. All this was achieved sustainably, at a lower operational expense.”

Turfgrass management is different from commercial agriculture, of course — but not that different from a water and soil standpoint. Eden eventually met and started working with Ryan Kauffman, the superintendent at Wild Horse Golf Club in Denton, Texas. Kauffman had been working with the agronomic consultants at Turf Dietitian. After seeing several new soil samples from Wild Horse, a TD rep called Kauffman directly. He wanted to understand how all his numbers had changed so beneficially.

Kauffman and Turf Dietitian didn’t quite know what was happening, or why, Eden said, but they saw the results: Infiltration was vastly improved, standing water was dissipating. Even the conventional testing data was showing some of it.

Yet some of that data was lost in translation. Laboratories typically express the amounts of these nutrients as parts per million. Superintendents are accustomed to applying fertilizer based on pounds per acre. When Eden changed the frame, another light came on: “When we incorporated the pounds per acre conversion into the data, people understood that they had 117,000 pounds of iron or 60,000 pounds of calcium, 20,000 pounds magnesium and potassium phosphate per acre — per six-inch sample, not even per acre foot,” Eden says. “Everything started adding up and making sense.”

Whether growers had good water, hard water, nutrient-deficient water, reclaimed water or septic ponds/soils, Eden would find these problems saturating the soils and hindering essential nutrients from root-zone uptake. “And that was when yet another light came on,” he says. “That’s to say: We realized we’re really in the business of fixing soils through the treatment of water, making the water a better solvent and a better medicine to deal with these two segments: cementation from all these accumulated inputs, and the biological septicism of water in soils. With our data — with our understanding of the ratios, the timing, the layers in the soil, and the constituents in the soil that cause these layers — we were able to write these prescriptions with the proper timing and fix these situations.

“What we produce is a healthy drink for the plant, within the soil,” Eden continues. “Over time, we see the mass amounts of nutrients in the soil reduce. We see the soil no longer holding water, but providing infiltration rate, depth and pore space. Gradually, we end up reducing the amount of medicine we inject into the water because now the soils are operating on all cylinders. And you should see the looks on these superintendents’ faces when we tell them that. They’re not used to vendors telling them to use less of anything, much less the product they’re selling.”

Other acids use urea to buffer corrosive action. Of course, urea is also a source of nitrogen that can produce flushes of growth. However, to hear Oppold tell it, overuse of urea products can also effectively oversaturate the soil with harmful levels of nitrogen.

“Todd’s chemistries don’t do that,” he says. “And here’s the other part: Evapotranspiration sucks the water up, so long as the water column remains unbroken. Folks had always speculated on whether a perched water table would migrate to the surface and help the plant. Dr. Ed McCoy proved that. However deep, the water and its mineral buddy will be sucked back to the surface. The water turns to gas — but minerals get left behind on the surface. They start forming into crystalline structures: white crusting for salts and black crusting for sodium.

“In the top four inches there was too much what I call ‘noise’ going on. I couldn’t really see the accumulation of these elements [via conventional testing], but they were there. This Legacy Testing Method was the first time we were able to measure the weight of these structures. The bulk density was 1.72; after the five applications in 12 days, it was 1.54. The infiltration rate went from 3.46 inches per hour to almost 20 inches. … But another thing happened: the soil’s EC” — electric conductivity — “went up! Then we had confirmation. All these metals, they better conducted electricity — because the chemical additives put them into solution and cleared out the black layer.”

Oppold has a real gift for clarity and candor. Eden noticed this about the soil scientist right away, when he first shared his data. No one, Eden says, had been so scientific about what it showed, and what it didn’t show.

There is still a great deal Oppold doesn’t understand or cannot yet prove. That’s why the EC evidence made such a big impression.

“That’s how we proved these nutrients weren’t locked up anymore and were now available to the plant,” he says. “The other thing I have not really seen — as a chemist might see, in researching this — is the sequestration of the minerals in context of the treated soil. Todd likes to use that word and that very well may be the bigger part of what’s going, in terms of physical properties. I am coming from a different angle, on the physical side. But what I do see is just a huge difference in the treated soils, visible in the data. It’s like, shazam!”

Hal Phillips is a journalist, an author and managing director of Mandarin Media, Inc. The former editor of Golf Course News.