Micah Woods is an American turfgrass scientist and consultant specialising in turfgrass for golf courses and sports facilities, who now lives in Thailand with his family. He is the founder and president of the Asian Turfgrass Centre (ATC), which he established in Asia in 2006, and scientific director at PACE Turf. Woods is internationally recognised as one of the leading figures in turfgrass research and is considered a pioneer in the field of maintenance management that focuses on first-class course quality with low resource input.
Micah, I read your father was a professional, so you learned golf from him?
Woods: Yes. I was born in 1976, and that year he played the Canadian Tour. He was a club professional after that. I didn’t really start playing until I was 12 years old, but my dad would always go and play, and sometimes I would accompany him. When I started playing I quickly improved and wanted to become a professional myself. But my career peaked at about the age of 16. So I ended up working on the grounds crew at Waverley Country Club and instantly just being behind the scenes preparing the course. And sometimes we’re filling divots and making sure that’s smooth. Sometimes it’s mowing greens, sometimes it’s picking up leaves, sometimes it’s labeling the beautiful trees out there with new signs to identify this, to label the species. And you know, I’m learning about trees and watching the sunrise and seeing the ducks flying south in the autumn and, and being on a golf course and that, that was just wonderful for me.
You studied horticulture. Your target was always to work in the golf industry?
Woods: Absolutely. I could see myself working behind the scenes in the golf industry to prepare courses for play. And at the Oregon State university turfgrass management is part of the horticulture study.
About thirty years later, does turfgrass still attract you to the same degree?
Woods: Maybe more. The more I learn, the more interesting it gets. What I love about golf courses is the fact that it’s a perennial, and we try to manage it to make it as good as it can be each season. The work we do this year will also affect the playing surface next year . We can constantly try to improve it, not by replacing it, but by adjusting the way that we do the work. I’m not a musician. I don’t know anything about conducting a symphony or anything, but it just feels like as a turf grass manager. You have so many tools at your disposal and you just have to adjust things to make it better or consistent at a certain level. That is fascinating.
When you started working in the in U.S. golf industry, sustainability wasn’t really a topic.
Woods: No, I hadn’t even heard the word.
Now we see that because of regulations and the effects of climate change, sustainability is a major topic in golf. How much do you think the industry will have to change in the next 20 years, as the pressure on golf courses because of weather extremes becomes so big?
Woods: Let’s talk about the example of Japan. People there often ask the question, when do you think it will be too hot for bentgrass to be used on greens here? And it’s hard to answer that question, but it’s borderline right now. When we have a very hot summer, the creeping bentgrass just doesn’t survive well. So I often give seminars about either alternatives to that or techniques that you can use to help the bentgrass survive.
Do golfers or the golf industry already realize that temperatures might become a real problem for the future?
Woods: If we talk about Japan specifically, I think everybody in the country realizes that it’s really hot and they would understand that there could be some challenges with some of the grass. Other than that, you have to realize, that countries in Asia are all really different.
You founded the Asian Turfgrass Centre, and you are now based in Thailand. Asia is
the fastest-growing golf market in the world. Is that a big advantage for new golf clubs, because they can learn from others? Would you say that younger markets have the chance to become more sustainable from the beginning?
Woods: That’s not been my experience. The United States has a lot of influence in golf also in Asia; American designers are working there; American grass breeding programs influence projects in Asia; the USGA method or recommendations for putting green construction might be chosen. People follow American tournaments on television and so on. So if you put all of that together, you will see that very often the people developing golf courses in Indonesia or the Philippines or Vietnam or Thailand are trying to work with American products, even though the climate is slightly different. The golf industry in Asia was using native grasses up to about 1990, and then they had the big economic golf boom in Asia. So in Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, they built so many courses and they used all bermudagrass, because it worked in Florida and it was supposed to be state of the art.
All the courses before that were zoysia and carpetgrass, grasses that are well adapted there. So the new grasses very quickly failed or it got weed infested because of the climate is not suitable for bermudagrass. Then a lot of the courses switched to seashore paspalum. Now they’re all switching to Zoysia.
You are well known for your international experience and for your low-input-theories. When you developed your strategies about turf grass management, what were your expectations?
Woods: I think I’ve always been a little bit optimistic that people would make use of these techniques and ideas more rapidly than they actually do. Now I realize people will do these techniques in time, but it always takes five or 10 or 15 years longer than I expect.
For me personally, the things that I work on and the type of information that I share, aren’t the most popular set of ideas, but the interest is growing. The people get good results with my grass selection and advice about the amount of fertilizer to use as well as the type of measurements that are useful. Managing grass can be very site specific and very effective in producing good playing conditions in a sustainable way.
Today we are sitting here in Denmark to talk about turf grass management. The Danish golf clubs had to adapt to very strict state regulations regarding pesticides. Does the golf industry need laws and legislations to become more sustainable?
Woods: That might be the easiest way to reduce inputs. I don’t think we will see inputs reduced by the golf industry just for the sake of reducing inputs, because the mainstream approach is to do what is necessary to optimize playing conditions or in some cases optimizing the visual appearance of courses. Those are the driving forces: aesthetics and playing conditions. And where does sustainability fit into that? It probably isn’t a big factor, but it suddenly becomes a big issue if government regulation is involved. But I have to add here, that I don’t think of myself so much as an advocate for sustainability for sustainability’s sake. I think of myself more as a scientist who is trying to develop information that can be used by turfgrass managers or golf courses to produce the best possible playing surfaces with what turns out to be the most efficient use of resources. That, it turns out, is very often also more sustainable.
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How does the ideal golf course of the future look for you?
Woods: Regarding the future, I think we would use grasses that can be more resistant to heat and drought. And I would like us as an industry to be more tolerant of colour variation in the turfgrass across the property. Because I don’t like doing things just for colour. I was at a tournament recently, and the fairways had been treated with a colouring agent, because the tournament was held in October and the grass should still be green, I’d expect, naturally, at that time of year. To me, that extra application of a colouring product, just for the sake of colour, seems not what we should be doing.
Because it is a waste of money?
Woods: Yes, and I just don’t care about colour. We don’t play by the colour. Golf course design is a bit of an art. I guess that there can be varying tastes in art, but my particular taste in golf is something that’s a little bit natural. And so if it’s a dry year, I like the course to look like it’s been a dry year. I just want the playability to be good and I want the grass to persist as a perennial. That’s what I’m looking for.
So in 2050, what I would like major tournament course to look like would be to have more like an Open Championship type of approach. At Open Championships we always take what we get. If it’s a dry year, it’s dry. If it’s a wet year, that’s not ideal for the playability, but it’s green. And I would like that to be all over the world. But I see in a lot of places golf is supposed to be green and then people put so much water on the course. And to me, that makes the playability worse.
What do you think a turf manager needs in the future to be successful?
Woods: I think that people will have to be more concerned about managing diseases with limited pesticides, and they’ll have to be more careful about how much water they’re using, and hopefully be more aware about carbon emissions.
As an example, at the present time in the golf industry, it’s so common to use a lot, really a lot, of sand in golf course construction and maintenance. So the way that I look at it is not so much from a sustainability-first perspective. I look at it as I want to play golf on grass. I don’t want to play golf on a surface that’s just had sand spread all over it. Then I also point out, oh, and by the way, look how much carbon it takes to move that sand from wherever it’s coming from to here. Is that the best use of your money to bring all that sand here, disrupt the play? For what purpose are we doing this?
How do your customers react to sustainability topics?
Woods: There was a time 15 or 20 years ago where I took more of a sustainability first approach. I would have communicated some things as being desirable like using less water for its own sake, or using less diesel for its own sake, but that’s not how golf course superintendents are incentivized, so the message would often fall flat, or perhaps even be counterproductive. I’ve realized through many conversations and thinking about it, that talking about it in terms of playability, is the easier way to spread the message.
Give us an example.
Woods: Sure: If you put less fertilizer on the course, you will get healthier grass. And if you have healthier grass, you get better playing conditions, you’ll have less disease, you’ll have better resistance against insects, you’ll have better drought tolerance, you can use less water. And by the way, if you put less fertilizer, it has all kinds of compounding benefits: Less mowing, less carbon emissions from mowing, lower water use, and good side effects.
You are collecting turfgrass data from courses all over the world to compare the results. If you would have just three courses or events left, which courses or tournaments would you choose?
Woods: I should go to the Australian Open this year at Royal Melbourne. That would be a good one, because those greens are about as firm as I have ever seen. I want to do more with bermudagrass. So I think, something like a Walker Cup at Seminole would be good. And I would like to go to South Africa and measure some of the conditions down there. I have never been there.
