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Photo Stories March 1, 2002 - Al Festaiuti of Organic Lawn and Garden Supply Company in Western New York has been studying organic golf greens in Buffalo, NY since 1999. The purpose of his study is to show that organic alternatives can take the place of conventional pesticides in a golf course setting. The sucess of the study has encouraged the city of Buffalo to go organic on some of its golf courses. The following pictures show the change in the organic golf course green over the past three years. For more information on the Organic Lawn and Garden Supply Company, visit their company page on the Safety Source.
Readers' Comments Posted by Jack
Barbash, U.S. Geological Survey*. (3/4/02) For those of
you who are interested in the topic of pesticide use on golf courses and
other turfgrass settings, some valuable information about pesticide-free
approaches to turfgrass maintenance in such settings has just been posted
at the following website: www.beyondpesticides.org. My sole intent in
passing this information along is to illustrate the fact that the production
and maintenance of healthy turfgrass does not necessarily require the
use of pesticides. This point is of considerable environmental significance
because of the intensity with which pesticides are often used for the
maintenance of turfgrass in most locations. (For a discussion of this
topic, see Chapters 3 and 7 of Barbash and Resek [1996], "Pesticides
in Ground Water - Distribution, Trends, and Governing Factors," Ann
Arbor Press, Inc., Chelsea, Mich., 588 p. http://water.wr.usgs.gov/pnsp/pest.rep/src2.html]). Posted by Dave Majewski, Vice President, Western NY Society for Organic Horticulture. (3/1/02) That golf course is actually a pilot project of ours in Buffalo. In addition, we regularly maintain landscapes with zero pesticides by utilizing organic Plant Health Care. These practices work - they are not perfect - but they work nonetheless. Otherwise, we would be cast as frauds and all be bankrupt! Our goal is to educate! We provide many no-cost organic horticulture programs to the public to do this education. All of us in our organization own our own horticulture businesses and practice organic plant health care without the use of ANY synthetic products. In newsletters that I publish, I have often covered articles about how healthy soils and healthy plants are natural repellants to pests and diseases. This practice works and we subscribe to it. To write your own comments about this Photo Story, send an email to Beyond Pesticides. Beyond Pesticides launched Photo Stories on March 1, 2002. The photos are updated on a weekly basis. Read the instructions on how to get your photo story featured. |
