SALT LAKE CITY — Golfers will see some changes to local golf courses as efforts to save water are underway.
Matt Kammeyer, director of golf with the Salt Lake City Corporation, said water conservation is top-of-mind. He said they can replace areas where golfers don’t go with plants that don’t need water.
Related: Department of the Interior announces funding for water conservation efforts
One way they are achieving this is by using GPS technology to help determine areas of turf they can remove.
“You attach a GPS device, knowingly, to one of the golfers. And as they play their round, it’s tracked to where each shot goes,” Kammeyer said. “What that does is it gives us a heat map of a golf course to see, ‘okay, where is the play going?’ So that’s kind of one of the first steps of identifying areas that we’re irrigating that could be removed.”
Rose Park Golf Course is the first to utilize the technology. But first, they need to figure out how much turf they can remove.
“I think our early estimates are somewhere around 25% of the existing irrigated turf [which] would be replaced with grass that does not need to be irrigated,” Kammeyer said.
In addition to turf reduction, Salt Lake City golf courses are experimenting with different kinds of drought-tolerant plants they can replace the turf with. They won’t water those areas, but golfers will be able to hit their balls out of there.
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