Sustainable Excellence at Kingsbarns Golf Links
“We never thought about sustainability, but when the topic came up, we realised: We already are.” While agronomist Paul Miller thinks aloud about sustainability at Kingsbarns Golf Links, Innes Knight, Course and Facility Manager, stands in his office and points to an old photo on the wall from the course’s construction, which opened for the British Open in 2000. Tractors created a natural dune landscape on the 89-hectare site, which was primarily pastureland. The approach of Kingsbarns founder Mark Parsinen, as explained by Knight and Miller, has always been to first model as naturally a landscape as possible and then to find the right golf holes within it. Course designer Kyle Phillips agreed with his approach and the result was stunning. Over the past 25 years, Kingsbarns has established a reputation as a first-class modern links course that resembles an old Scottish classic. The conversion of the pasture landscape has made it more attractive for a greater variety of plants and animals. Hedgerow structures and classic woodland can be found alongside wide rough areas with lean Festuca grasses. If you’re lucky, you might spot an otter by the small stream that meanders through some of the holes. The course has a tranquil feel, although every day, for nine months, from first light to sunset, one foursome flight after another passes over the course.
Top quality despite 30,000 rounds The number of rounds in nine months is upwards of 20.000, the green fee has reached 448 pounds in the high season and business is booming. Kingsbarns Golf Links, GEO certified, is a privately owned commercial course. The real challenge when it comes to sustainability is combining this with extremely high levels of stress. With well over 200 rounds a day, how does a golf course manage to produce top-quality golf with minimal use of chemicals and pesticides to justify the high green fee? A classic management task that Innes Knight tackles in three ways: smart deployment of sufficient staff, first-class equipment in the machinery, and annual investment in improvements during winter. The latter includes the solar system on the machine building, which has been generating 20,000 kilowatt-hours per year since 2024 and has now increased the self-sufficiency rate for electricity. The carts are electric anyway, and new machines are increasingly being purchased in the electric version. The current owner, Art Dunkley, supports the scheme of constant innovation, because this is the only way to establish top quality over the decades.
Economical use of water The critical issue of water, which is at the forefront of the sustainability debate in golf, has now also caught up with Scotland. More than 30 days without rain in spring 2025 led to brown fairways early in the year, which otherwise make up the typical summer look. How much brown can the customer tolerate when paying a top green fee? How much irrigation is justifiable when you know that groundwater is an important resource? With the concentration on the greens and a few other playing areas, the high proportion of fescue grasses and irrigation monitoring at a technically high level, the annual consumption for the course corresponds to half of what some US courses use for one fairway per year. On Scottish links courses, the consumption of resources is traditionally low and the demands on the color design of the courses are completely different. A landscape in shades of brown and light green is far more suitable here than lush dark green.
If you watch the course being prepared for the arriving guests at five o’clock in the morning, you will notice the two groups of four systematically making their way across the fairways. Innes Knight calls his pensioners divotologists with a smile. For four hours a day, the eight men are busy sanding and reseeding the divots from the previous day. “Better than ironing at home,” one of them says with a laugh. The labour-intensive divot maintenance is one of the most essential basics for keeping the quality of the fairways high on such a busy course without using a lot of fertiliser and water. Polytunnel with own vegetables Sustainability projects are often not recognisable to the golfer. This also applies to the polytunnel behind the machinery building in Kingsbarns, where herbs, tomatoes and vegetables of all kinds are neatly lined up in rows. Hugh Barnier, another member of the greenkeeping team, has been working here for years to grow the vegetable supplies for the club’s catering. No, he never really planned this job. “But Innes said at some point that I should give it a try.” Since then, he has discovered his passion for kitchen gardening. At half past nine in the evening, the very last flights are just coming into the clubhouse, lettuce leaves and tomatoes land on one of the burgers ordered by a group of Americans to round off a successful day. No, they don’t know anything about the polytunnel, the solar system, the dune protection on hole 12 or the attempt to reduce plastic consumption on the course. What counts for the customer on one of the top 100 courses in the world is first and foremost a high-quality golf experience. If this can be achieved sustainably, then the goal has been reached.
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Image: Ralf Kistowski