65 Percent water saving from first hydroponic tee box

CapillaryFlow’s revolutionary new Hydroponic Turf System is delivering outstanding results a year into its first major test installation, at the Hawk’s Landing Golf Club in Orlando, Florida.

Last September/October, CapillaryFlow built a new tee box at Hawk’s Landing, incorporating the Hydroponic Turf System, along with superintendent Josh Kelley’s team and contractor DoubleEagle Golf Works. The system divides the tee box into two areas, with a layer of CapillaryFlow material under the rootzone. All irrigation is applied subsurface, and the system creates a moving water table, using capillary action to move water out of one zone and into another. The water pushes the heavier carbon dioxide molecules out of the rootzone and sucks in oxygen to replace them. It is a far more successful method of gas exchange in the rootzone than conventional methods of aeration.

Kelley says: “We have been working with CapillaryFlow on our bunkers since 2016, and they first mentioned the Hydroponic System to us in summer 2018. We said we were keen to try it, and so we began building the test tee in late September. It was completed and grassed in early October.Now, a typical tee box is obviously just a pile of dirt that you shape up. As you get to the higher end, you might put drainage under it, or even use a special rootzone. The process here was that we laid out the rectangular box, cored down twelve inches, and then installed two inches of CapillaryFlow before filling up with sand, levelling and sodding. It was not a difficult project.”

“It is a trial site; we aren’t doing anything special to it,” Kelley continues. “We have run no overhead irrigation at all, except to water in two applications of herbicide. The tee itself has performed superbly; zero hotspots, no disease issues, no wet areas.”

CapillaryFlow inventor and CEO Martin Sternberg says: “We are grateful to Josh and Hawk’s Landing for the ability to test the Hydroponic Turf System close to our Orlando base. When we installed the tee, we put a flow meter on the irrigation so we could measure exactly how much water was being used. After almost a year, we can say that it has used 65 per cent less water than a similar sized, conventionally irrigated tee box, and we think that we can tweak the system to get that figure to 85 per cent.”

Sternberg adds: “I started experimenting with tees five years ago in Sweden, primarily as a subsurface irrigation project. But the addition of a moving water table–which we can do because of the strength and capillary properties of our product–is what makes this a game changer. We know we are getting up to 6,000 per cent more gas exchange in the rootzone in comparison to convention methods of aeration, and it is obvious that will have a massive impact on turf health.This is akin to what happens naturally in a seaside links environment, where you typically have a very low water table–but critically, it moves with the tide. That promotes a gas exchange. The only way to promote gas exchange is to push it–which is what we can do using CapillaryFlow. The hydroponic industry is 25-30 years ahead of us in the turfgrass industry in terms of understanding how plants behave, but hasn't been physically possible to build large outdoor structures for hydroponics without a product that performs as CapillaryFlow does. If you compare the cost of building, to use the Hydroponic Turf System is slightly more expensive than building a push-up or California tee, but cheaper than USGA specification construction.”

Josh Kelley says: “I really think in markets where water is scarce or expensive, this will change the way we do things in the golf business, and I’m delighted that we at Hawk’s Landing were the first to get to try it out.”