Area Golf Courses, College Station Looking at Smarter Ways To Save Water

While homeowners are trying to limit the amount of water we use golf courses are taking extra steps to preserve every drop they can.

The Texas A&M Golf Course is watering smarter and College Station hopes to save drinking water from irrigating city parks soon.

It’s a daily balancing act keeping the Texas A&M Golf Course green and that’s Mark Haven’s full-time job as Associate Director Of Recreational Sports.

“The irrigation is only supposed to get us between rains so once we get a rain we quit watering until we have to water again,” said Haven, who is also the course superintendent.

Keeping the course lush is part art and part science with their irrigation system powered by a computer that can adjust sprinklers to water just the right amount in seconds.

Miramont Country Club is even looking at ways to cut costs looking into watering with effluent one day.

The Texas A&M Golf Course uses water being pumped in by the university. While Pebble Creek and Traditions use reclaimed water that isn’t an option here.

“Effluent is cost-prohibitive because of the infrastructure we’d have to cross to get it here. We get most of our water from a well, our irrigation lake captures runoff from about 60 percent of the golf course,” explained Haven.

Jennifer Nations is Water Resource Coordinator for CS and says they’ll be using reclaimed water at Veterans Park this fall with plans to expand it in the future.

“Maybe within the next three to five years we would start looking at ways to get the water from Carter Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant over to Stephen C. Beachy Central Park,” said Nations.

“We had ten consecutive days in July where we had some measurable precipitation on the golf course and that’s unheard of,” Haven added.

Things are still looking good even though we are getting close to the dog days of summer.

The Texas A&M Golf course averages about 32 million gallons of water a year to keep the course going while for last year’s record drought they used about 65 million.

Texas A&M pumps about 20 million gallons a day throughout the campus.

We have a link to figuring out how much water your yard needs on any given day with this story at the link: http://texaset.tamu.edu/

When using that website Texas A&M Golf Course Superintendent Mark Haven says the ET or Evapotranspiration level can be converted to minutes. If the ET is listed at .22 inches the typical lawn would need about 22 minutes of watering.

Evapotranspiration is the loss of water from the soil due to both evaporation and the transpiration of plants.