|
It’s a chilly but sunny mid-March morning when I pull into the North Road parking lot across the way from Sagamore Golf Club in North Hampton, New Hampshire. Though none would be safe in saying spring had arrived, the half-melted snow about the course’s far-reaching greens imparts something more than a simple glimmer of hope.
Still, while co-owner Tyler Sanborn and superintendent Dave Burgquist know that warmer temperatures will soon mean more customers for the public golf course, today the two are as excited about uncovering a different kind of green—that of a golf course as dedicated to sustainable, eco-friendly methods—as they are about continuing their successful golfing legacy.
Ever since the save-the-environment movement started to gain recognizable steam in the 1970s, a few industries have reaped their fair share of the greater green scorn: oil companies, logging outfits, factory farms, auto manufacturers. And golf courses? Though not the subject of scorn to the degree seen by the previously listed, environmentalists have long seen golf courses as antithetical to their core values. They are big, expansive, chemical-dependent, and change the nature and course of the ecosystems in and around them. But while much of that criticism remains palpable and relevant, Sagamore Golf Club is doing its part to change the way you think about the links.
Founded in 1929 by R.E. Luff in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, Sagamore Springs Golf Club opened as one of New England’s first public golf courses. After 33 years, R.E.’s son Peter Luff opened a second location in North Hampton, New Hampshire, in 1962. Right off the bat, the younger Luff’s intention was to design and build a golf course using as few chemicals and hazardous materials as possible. According to his son and now owner Richard Luff, Peter’s motivation wasn’t so much rooted in environmentalism, per se, as it was in recognition of the often hazardous realities of post-World War II approaches to golf course maintenance.
“Before the war, in the 1920s and 1930s, using natural methods to maintain courses was pretty much the norm,” Richard Luff explains. “But in his teenage and college years, [my grandfather] would regularly be handling raw mercury and other really nasty stuff they were using at the time. Eventually he just started asking himself, ‘Why am I feeling nauseous at the end of every day?’ He knew there had to be a better way.”
Inspired in part by J.R. Rodale’s Organic Farming and Gardening magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, Peter Luff began applying many of the author’s principles to the family’s charge. Luff was convinced that, while anyone could simply “maintain” a golf course using traditional methods, it took a special, dedicated effort to do it “the right way”—meaning safely, with minimal use of chemicals.
First and foremost, that meant feeding the soil and not the plant. Doing so—and doing so properly—meant that you could guarantee strong, beautiful, and healthy grass and turf that was as natural as possible, without taking away from a course’s competitiveness. While Luff is quick to point out that, in some instances, the use of chemicals is necessary in order to achieve that competitive edge, for the folks at Sagamore, such methods are used only as a last resort.
In the decades since, the Luffs have stayed true to Peter’s vision, making use of all natural alternatives including soy bean meal, granite dust, kelp, fish emulsion, seaweed, and turkey manure. They will steep some of these products in water to make a liquid solution, which is then filtered through a compost brewer tasked with filtering out all the solids. The resulting “compost tea” is then run through a spray rig on various parts of the course grounds. This process serves the dual purpose of both feeding the greens and multiplying existing, natural bacteria to help stave off harmful fungi. Because the active sugars and other ingredients in the compost tea are much more highly concentrated than standard composts, it means a lot less hauling, as well as leaving behind a smaller carbon footprint. The resulting mixture is generally allowed to stand for 24 hours, at which point the tea is noticeably warm to the touch.
According to head groundskeeper Dave Burgquist, the rest of the industry is finally catching catch up with Sagamore–Hampton’s long-standing ideal, providing more natural alternatives in the form of spreadable fertilizers.
“We’re starting to see a lot more courses explore these alternatives,” explains Burgquist, who typically arrives to work between four and four thirty in the morning. “It’s a lot of hard work, but at the end of the day it’s the right thing to do.”
In utilizing this unique method of maintenance, Sagamore–Hampton partnered with York-based Purely Organic, a lawn care company that boasts some of the most effective green products on the market. Not only does Purely Organic supply much of the organic fertilizers and other materials for the course; they also struck up a deal to render one hole completely green, using absolutely no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides.
While Luff knew about the impressive track record of Purely Organic and owner Jim Reinertson, the Sagamore owner was at first skeptical about the partnership. “We were definitely more conservative at first, more so because this is something we’d been doing for decades,” Luff says. “But he just kept coming out with products that were workable for golf course conditions. So it was a real coup for us.”
After rendering the second hole—a Par 3 rife with sand traps—completely green, Tyler Sanborn expects the green guinea pig to serve as the standard going forward.
“We wanted to start with a hole that didn’t have as much in the way of delicate greens, just to make sure the methods worked,” Sanborn recalls. “But we’ve been really happy with how [hole #2] has turned out, so hopefully we can use it as sort of a template for the future.”
Now in the third generation of family ownership, the Sagamore helm is in as sturdy a pair of hands as ever. On top of Sagamore’s flagship Lynnfield and North Hampton locations, the company now also boasts a driving range, a mini golf course, and a one-hole practice center just down the road in North Hampton. And in an effort to further bolster their ever-greening credentials, in July Sagamore joined the Green Alliance, a Seacoast-based “green business union” and discount member co-op, which helps raise the profile of green businesses throughout the region.
This past November, Sagamore successfully installed and put online a 3.7 kilowatt wind turbine. The roughly 50 foot high structure—situated about a sand wedge shot from the clubhouse and in between the first and tenth fairways—is expected to supply some portion of the course clubhouse’s energy needs in the coming years.To assure that his family’s legacy continues, Richard Luff is determined to carry on his father’s nearly five decade legacy.
In 2002 he co-authored a book with Paul Sachs, Ecological Golf Course Management. According to Luff, the idea of writing a book about Sagamore’s philosophy and approach to golf course management was always on his father’s radar screen. But with long workdays the norm for most of his adult life, the elder Luff never quite found the time. The last chapter of the book— titled “Taking Responsibility”—was dedicated to Peter’s Luff’s vision.
“We basically tried to sum up in three pages where he was coming from,” Luff says. “At the end of the day, we’re just trying to carry on the family legacy he began and to embrace his attitude and approach to all of these things.”
|
