Facility&Operations | ByMark Lucas
Economic solutions and the environmental benefits at UC-Davis
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the sports turf crew. I didn't think the state level of funding would be improving in the foreseeable future. I also realized that my customers' ex- pectations were not going to change like the value of my house. Most coaches' expectations would only continue to rise with every road trip to schools with larger budgets. The competition for recruiting athletes is impacted by our facilities. With consideration for the budget and our needs for high-qual- ity athletic facilities, I started out trying to find ways to maintain our
T ALL STARTED IN 2008 with the economic downturn. Budgets were reduced and we laid off one groundskeeper on
20 SportsTurf | May 2012
sports fields at UC-Davis with less funding. This is when I began to use organic fertilizer on our campus common turf area that we call the Quad. It is 5 acres and has very heavy traffic. Any given day we see hundreds of stu-
>> SPORTS TURF MANAGER MARK LUCAS is part of a campus- wide sustainability effort at the University of California, Davis.
dents playing Frisbee, having lunch, relaxing, enjoying live music and holding rallies. I wanted to see if we could achieve acceptable levels of
turf quality with organic materials, building the soil for a more sustainable nutrient release. By feeding micro-or- ganisms we are creating a living system in the soil that produces carbon, with an even flow of nutrients to the plant. We started using a bio-solid type (6-7-0) of fertil- izer that is a by-product of sewage treatment. The results were very positive with just two applications per year the
We started using a bio-solid type (6-7-0) of fertilizer that is a by-product of sewage treatment. The results were very positive with just two applications per year the quad had a deeper green color with good growth.
>> EVERY COLLEGE TURF MANAGER knows that facilities are very important in recruiting athletes.
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