..... continued......
For T & C, a different approach to fertility and different types of fertilizer resulted in a longer time between mowing. Instead of mowing every 4 days we were able to stretch it to every 6 days which translated into about 40 hours less mowing in 2014 versus previous years.
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| Hours Spent Mowing Tee's |
The only real way, I think, to keep this up is to start spraying with a growth regulator but at KGC's HOC and grass species I would have to take a real hard look to see if there was any savings.
The other area I thought we could do better was the amount of time and money spent mowing fairways. Different mowing patterns, different fertilizer sources and release patterns, and different growth rates on certain fairways were some the approaches we took when trying to increase efficiencies.
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| Hours Spent Mowing Fwys |
A quiet tee sheet in the very early a.m. and limiting mowing to 4 hrs/day regardless of how long the fairways appeared were the two biggest reasons the total hours spent mowing decreased. Skipping a fairway because it was a slow grower helped but this is only applicable to some of the back fairways. I believe the extra time we gained in very early mowing with only 1 group teeing off between 7 and 8 o'clock created less interference between player and equipment which allowed us to keep up with the turf. The new/used mower we bought this fall is slightly wider but I suspect the increase in fuel costs (bigger engine in this unit) will off-set any gains received by cutting a wider swath. Really, the biggest decrease in time and money spent on fairways occurred after 2010 when we began to use a single mower on a regular basis. Looking to the future, I'm having trouble seeing ways to decrease costs associated with mowing fairways. Shutting off water during the summer is the only thing we could do to see a dramatic change but without tee to green cart paths to control cart traffic it wouldn't take long for more than a few of the fairways to turn to dirt.
To be continued......
