Golf course auditing: Preventive medicine and info mining

A golf course audit, as it applies to our side of the industry, doesn’t involve ranks of bean-counters.  Our audit might be, for example, an exhaustive investigation and report on a golf course’s irrigation system and practices. It could be a whole course assessment of playing quality – the speed, smoothness and firmness of greens, the quality of the fairway lie, the overall quality of the turf  – and areas such as levels of organic matter, root depths, water retention, drainage rate, and more.

An audit, in fact, is conducted around whatever the golf course or property owner wants to learn about some sector of their landscape.  It’s  preventive maintenance, a benchmarking, a proactive means of assessing health, strengths and weaknesses, and a way of identifying trends early.

Regular audits of golf course quality will provide the course with benchmarked trends. Quality losses can be spotted and addressed early, before it becomes an issue for players.  An audit may identify a need for change within the golf club, but it shows the positive side of the ledger, too – the areas of strength and good performance.

Golf course quality auditing services employ a wide range of objective scientific measurements to evaluate the condition of a course… obtaining the real-time/real-world knowledge that helps set realistic quality standards for individual courses. It can also be an education to players about realistic course conditioning expectations or the requirement for renovation.

This link has an excellent, detailed article on an irrigation audit of a golf course.  A good and easy read.