“WE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF INNOVATION”
That the maintenance of Finca Cortesín Golf Club is exceptional is something that no one doubts. Since it opened for play in 2006, the ownership of this course has made sure that this is one of the aspects that make the difference in this golf resort that has hosted the Volvo World Match Play Championship three times.
To manage this essential and delicate task, Finca Cortesín counts on Ignacio Soto, a greenkeeper with extensive experience who had previously worked in two other great golf courses in Costa del Sol: Atalaya and Real Club de Golf de Sotogrande.
From the moment its construction is completed, a field needs a lot of constant care to keep it in optimal conditions. For Soto, one of the main efforts to be made at Finca Cortesín concerns drainage: “Here we place great emphasis on ensuring that the course is well drained, as this means that in winter our clients can play at ease because the rain doesn’t affect us too much.
On the Costa del Sol most of the courses are built on clay soil, so a lot of work has to be done on drainage, “and especially,” says Soto, “on a course like ours, which has quite a lot of movement and where more than 90 percent of the players use buggies. Our goal is to allow the buggy to be driven on the grass, because the experience is not the same as always driving it on the roads.”
Apart from drainage, which is a constant task year after year, another important maintenance task at Finca Cortesín is that which affects the tees. “We work mainly”, explains the greenkeeper, “on the ones that are used the most: we enlarge and level them and, as a priority, we also make new tees. This year, for example, we have just finished the new 10th tee and we have already worked on four or five par 3 holes, enlarging and leveling them.
Another of the periodic occupations of the greenkeeper and his team are the bunkers, “which have a life of their own, just like the whole course. There is an estimate made by the American section of golf architects -which would be very good for course owners to read- that talks about the useful life of each part of the course. They consider that the bunkers have to be renewed every six or seven years, for reasons of drainage, sand, playability. Here we have been renovating them since the Volvo Championship was announced. First we did all the greens, then we continued renovating, now we are doing the ones that have the most use in the game and we still have to renovate about thirty of the 116 bunkers on the course”.
“This year,” Soto continues, “we have already made the practice fairway bunkers with a new American drainage system called Better Billy Bunker, a revolutionary system in the United States that can work very well here as well. We have done it in the practice fairway as a test, although we know it works”.
The system is very simple and consists, after draining the soil well, of placing a layer of gravel over the entire surface of the bunker and applying a very hard resin on the gravel “which makes it look practically like a porous concrete slab, and the sand goes on top of it. With that, the drainage capacity is much greater”.
There are several new and very interesting drainage systems that are emerging, especially in the United States, “and at Finca Cortesín we are in the business of innovating”.
-It seems that it is in that country where most innovation in everything related to golf courses is taking place?
-Training is very important for us and every time we can we go to the United States for training courses and to see new materials. There are new maintenance techniques, there are new varieties of grasses that are more environmentally friendly that we can bring and see how they adapt to our area, grasses that need less maintenance and that in the United States is an absolute priority also due to climate change… This year we have been in California and there is a terrible drought there and they are reconverting the whole golfing theme. In fact, we have seen it in the last tournaments of the U.S. Tour, which are sending tournaments to more natural areas, more respectful with the environment, and they are forgetting a little bit the extreme maintenance based on water and products and so on, and that is going to arrive here, for sure. It is already arriving and we are going to have to adapt to new maintenance systems, new varieties of grass and above all respect for the environment.
-In other words, one of the keys to a good greenkeeper is a good continuous training.
-Indeed, just like the doctors. And knowing the area is also important, especially this one, which is complicated by the proximity of the Strait. Here we have everything, we have wind, we have good weather, but at the same time the good weather brings all kinds of diseases. Everyone lives here, the good bugs and the bad bugs. We have all kinds of weeds, all kinds of diseases, all kinds of insects… Here maintenance is complex and there are more and more limitations in the use of pesticides.
-What is the biggest maintenance challenge facing this field?
-Maybe weeds. There is a lot of research on both fungicides and biological insecticides, but there are no biological herbicides, so there is no choice but to eliminate those weeds by hand mowing and doing maintenance work that favors the growth of your weed and not the others. It is difficult.
-So the trend will be to change the turf on European golf courses?
-Yes, in fact we are already taking the first steps. We, without going any further, are testing new varieties in greens, we have recently made a short game area with a bermuda green, which is a grass that requires less application of products and is a grass that adapts perfectly to our climate. We also have to take into account the quality of the water we have, which is going to be of increasingly poorer quality. So what was good for golf twenty years ago is no longer good for golf and we have to adapt. In the United States most of the PGA Tour tournaments are played on Bermuda greens, and twenty years ago it was unthinkable that we would put some of that, but I think it is going to arrive and the first steps are already being taken bringing certified varieties from there and the latest reforms that are being made in the Costa del Sol are introducing new varieties that did not exist before. We are testing and for 2017, when we plan to renovate all the greens of the course, if everything goes well we will surely do it with one of these new varieties.
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