Looking for New Ways to Increase Golf Club Revenue?

 

When I search the internet for "Increasing Golf Course Revenue", or Adding new services to Golf Clubs, ect., I saw the same list over and over; 5 Golf Marketing Ideas to Drive Revenue, 27 ways to increase revenue, Best Practices, Suggestions on How to advertise to gain revenue, and not to be outdone, 33 WAYS to BOOST CLUB INCOME.  I even typed in "How do I come up with a Title for an ARTICLE that can Help Golf Clubs Increase their Revenue" but got the same list of search results.

The Fly Over

Let's take a Drone Ride over your course and every other course for that fact.  Drones are supposed to be a new way to increase revenue by offering the virtual tour to make golfers want to visit your course.  For most courses, however, they are better presented in still photography and some are better off with a detour sign routing traffic off the highway to their course! If you were to watch 100 promotional flyovers of golf courses, at the end of the movie premiere you should come away with one understanding, all course are "virtually" the same!

You all charge greens fees, you have memberships, some of you have a bar and restaurant, some even have hotels attached and other rent out the homes along the course for week-long stays. Most are renting out to parties, weddings, and reunions but golf course owners are not focusing on a gold courses greatest resource, the grass!

Grass2Cash

A courses most prized asset a golf course has, is the playing surface; the fairways, approaches, tees, and the greens. Back in my home state of Nebraska  before the second World War there was a pasture owned by the Lauritsen family that was so lush due to unseasonably heavey rains, the idea to build a golf course was born.  Fairways were mowed into the pasture grass and a makeshift golf course with sand greens was constructed for the upcoming July 4th Weekend.  Of course, the cows were taken off the pasture, but over the years cable fences and even the bottom half of a grain bin was built around the greens to prevent hoof divets.  This tournament attracts golfer from all over the nation.  It's called the Annual Bull Pen Open at the Dannebrog Country Club every August, located 12 miles Northwest of Grand Island as the crow flies. FYI: Grand Island is also where the BioPac'r is being built, thanks to Chief Industries.

This pasture was first intended to feed cattle and was adapted into this beautiful country club.  BioPac'r is proposing that golf course owners now do what a Dannebrog rancher did in reverse, adapt your management practices and begin feeding cattle with your waste grass clippings. YCC will even help you in marketing and selling your newly created feed.

An 18-hole course's putting greens produce 2,000 pounds of grass clippings every week or 26 tons a season from the arid Rocky Mountain golf courses and much more along the East Coast.  The average 18-hole course has 100 acres of maintained turf but where some of the most famous courses have an excess of 150 acres of pristine maintained turf, they could collect 1,500 tons of Grass Clipping Silage™ that could generate as much as $150,000 in new revenue. Even more is times of drought and hay prices are sky-high. This practice also reclaims irrigation water and would create a golf course that would become one of the most sustainable golf courses in the world.  There's a Marketing Idea!

What's the possible Hangup?

Most private golf course owners have shut-down labor charges. Golf courses have spent twice the money on mowers that leave the grass clipping lie and on the wet mornings, your ball becomes a grass clipping snowball.  Recycling the clippings back to the turf is not always the answer.

When your fairways have a leaf disease and the spores are developing on the grass blades, why would you want to reseed the disease back into the turf to infect the neighboring plants?.    Also, if your Superintendent believes that leaving clippings lie are saving the course a few thousand in nitrogen cost, think again.  Read The New Facts about Grass Recycling.  If you could gain $150,000 in newly discovered revenue right under your feet, isn't it worth your attention to run the numbers?

The fermentation process called ensiling that degrades pesticides due to the low pH that this process creates and the acid forming bacteria that produces lactic acid out of the grass juices.  This pickling effects from the lactic acid give grass clipping silage a 5-year shelf life.

Residual pesticides are a concern and composting doesn't degrade pesticides and this process allows pesticides to infiltrate into the soil to contaminate groundwater.  The California Integrated Waste Management Board has published the results of a study titled, Persistence and Degradation of Pesticides in Composting.  This newly publicized fact should scare the hell out of those with composting piles!

To generate $150K from your fairways you will need to invest in a "portable grass handling packaging and ensiling system" (BioPac'r) and some baskets for your mowers or a vacuum, maybe a two axle trailer with turf tires.  Now if you happen to employ a smart, sustainable Superintendent, they will see the value in this practice.  This extra revenue could allow them to add another staff member or buy that new equipment that the budget has no room for.  This biomass will be brokered by my commodities division to your local livestock people.  All your maintenance department has to do is package the clippingd and we arrange for transportation between the course and a farmer.  We will also lock in a 3-year contract for all the clippings you can package.  Some courses are going out of their way to acquire more clippings not associated with the course itself just to increase their biomass tonnage.

Zero Waste Certification

As a Golf Course Owner, you call the shots, it's your investment, your money, and your RISK.  It seems if there are really 33 different ways to increase golf club revenue, you wouldn't be reading this article.

Sustainability is the new marketing draw, look at TCP Scottsdale and Waste Management Phoenix Open.  They are collecting all the Kudos for the entire golf industry for ZERO WASTE.  During this tournament they diverted 100% of the waste food scraps, water bottles and paper products from the 563,008 fans in attendance from their local landfill including.

Turfgrass Will Feed the World

Your golf course is a 21st-century crop, NASA Satellites have confirmed that turfgrass is the number one irrigated crop in America, there is More irrigated acres of turf than Corn!  There are enough grass clippings harvested and thrown away to feed an extra 2 billion head of livestock.  Currently with all our best efforts to grow cool varieties of crops, investing in robotic tractors, GPS and GMO's, farmers have only figured out how to feed 95 million head annually and there are only 1 billion head on the planet.  What this means is that the turfgrass clippings from lawns, golf courses and parks could create enough meat protein and dairy products to more than double food production by 2050.

The 19th Hole

Your golf course can make a difference to the environment and more importantly, to your bottom line.   This new feed product will improve the lives of 1,000,000 small farmers, all needing a sustainable, highly nutritious feed to become profitable.  In my opinion, this concept may be the only idea to keep the small family farm afloat or the only workable idea that would allow young farmers to enter animal agriculture in the first place; Future Farmers of America, Meet the New Animal Agriculture Paradigm.

Until Next Time,

Keep Your Feet in the Stirrups!