Episode 130: Micah Woods

Welcome to Episode 130 of the Reel Turf Techs Podcast!

Today, we’re joined by Micah Woods from the Asian Turfgrass Center and PACE Turf. Since establishing the Asian Turfgrass Center in 2006, Micah has been a leading source of turfgrass research and insights for the golf and sports turf industry.

In this episode, Trent and Micah discuss how technology—especially autonomous tech—could be a game-changer for attracting new talent to the field and elevating operator training. Micah dives into the science behind clipping yield and clipping volume, sharing why it’s crucial to understand these metrics and how his own interest in the topic developed. The conversation also covers the evolution of Micah’s teachings on sand and organic matter, emphasizing the importance of using all available resources and testing. They talk shop on cutting unit setup, the significance of accurate terminology, and why a well-equipped workspace is essential for meeting club standards.

Micah even turns the tables, asking Trent about the daily realities of maintaining equipment on the course. Tune in for a fresh perspective on turfgrass management, science, and the practicalities of course upkeep!

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Transcript

Trent Manning: 0:56

Welcome to the reel turf techs podcast for the technician that wants to get reel follow along. As we talk to industry professionals and address hot topics that we all face along the way we'll learn tips and tricks. I'm your host, Trent. Manning let's have some Welcome to the real turf text podcast, episode one 30. Today, we're talking to Micah woods. With Asian turf grass center and paste turf. Micah established the Asian turf grass center in 2006 to develop and provide turf grass information. For the golf and sports turf industry. Let's talk to Micah. Welcome Micah to the RealTurf Text Podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Micah Woods: 1:42

Thank you, Trent. It is a pleasure to be here.

Trent Manning: 1:45

That is, I'm so excited. I don't, and now that we're recording video for our podcast, for all the listeners, make sure you check it out on YouTube. Yeah, you can see me smile. I don't do that very often and I don't get excited very often, but I'm pretty excited about this interview we got going here. So thank you so much for being here. It's 7 PM in the Eastern time zone. What time is it in your time zone?

Micah Woods: 2:11

It is six o'clock in the morning, a day earlier than you in southern Thailand.

Trent Manning: 2:18

All right. Awesome. Very cool. Tell us how you got into the turf industry. Okay.

Micah Woods: 2:36

growing trees and growing flowers and vegetables and stuff like that. And I never realized, and I enjoyed mowing the lawn and stuff like that too. But I never realized that there was a job taking care of golf courses. I just played golf. And I remember. The question that I had was, how do they decide when it's time to mow fairways again? I'm like how can they, it's such a big area on the golf course. I thought like there must be a chart or a big blackboard or something in the maintenance shop where they kept track of, okay, this fairway has been mown and this one's not mown yet. I I have that kind of thought. And. I was just playing golf. And then I finished high school and tried an office job for a while. And I was like, wow, I really don't like that. I had this idea that I was going to be a business person somehow. And that, that once you get out of school, you go work in an office and that's somehow fun. And it was not fun at all. I was matching. Purchase requests to work orders and bills of lading and stuff like that. And it was, it was not very exciting. so I went to work on a golf courses as a caddy and I'd caddied for a few months. This was at Waverly country club in Portland, Oregon. And then in the autumn, that was through the summer. And then in the autumn, I heard through the internal grapevine at the golf course that there was a. Position open on maintenance. And here's something that was such a natural fit for me, but I. Never realized that was something that matched with things that I enjoyed doing because I played golf without any thought of how you take care of the golf course. And so anyway, I talked to my dad and he said, yeah, that would be good working for Richard Schwabauer. He's a famous superintendent. He's a nice guy. That would be a great thing for you to do. And maybe. That's going to be something that's going to give you something that you'd enjoy doing in your life as a, as work. And so I moved from being a caddy to going to work at the maintenance shop. And that was just like, yeah, within the very first day, you know, fixing divots on teas picking up leaves, um, eventually getting into mowing. That it was just something that I really enjoyed.

Trent Manning: 5:02

That's so cool. And I think there's so many people in this industry that started just like that. And I know me personally, that's how I started. Yeah, I started working at the golf course, doing what people do on their first days at the golf course, using a backpack blower, raking bunkers, you know, all those things.

Micah Woods: 5:24

and I think it's so cool some of the initiatives now with FFA and with um, with those type of outreach and awareness programs of letting kids know that this is a safe space. And there are good opportunities to have a job that a lot of people enjoy. And, you know, it's not for everyone, but it certainly was for me and a lot of my friends and you. And then it's something that we get to work with our hands. We get to be outdoors. We can, sometimes we're indoors. It changes with the season and, um, and there's a real reward that we get from seeing. The efforts of the team that, um, all work together to produce the good results. There's some real satisfaction that can come from seeing that as a team, we've achieved some good results. And I know where you are in Atlanta, that's not an easy place to produce good turf conditions. There's a lot of weed pressure. There's dormant grass that gets traffic on it. Then there's sometimes of the year where the grass is growing so fast, you know, it's, I don't know how we keep up with the mowing. I worked at all Bermuda course at old Waverly in Mississippi and West Point, Mississippi. I worked there in the summer of 1996 and man, I don't know how we kept up with all the mowing, with all that Bermuda grass. Cause yeah. So, so sometimes you're just like working so hard on one thing and then other times you're working hard on, on something else. But then you achieve the results and there is a huge satisfaction that comes from that.

Trent Manning: 7:02

Well, that reminds me. So when I first started, we had, so it was a really nice course that I worked at and it was setting down Creek golf club. And it was before Ainsley bought setting down Creek. And it was a small membership, less than 200 members, but it was, you know, an exclusive club and really nice conditions. But we had a small budget and we had a small crew and the things that we were able to accomplish and have the course present itself so well and play so well and So in the mid nineties, in 95, we had the Nike tour championship and in 96, we had the Nike tour championship and you know, with a small crew and making a really good product. I mean, it was just super rewarding and you're talking about that kind of reminds me of that story and how much pride we took in what we did. And, you know, I was a young kid, but. We took it serious and we had a lot of fun to goofing off, you know, and doing things that teenagers do. Um, and I would recommend it to any teenager. And like you're saying, maybe it's not for everybody, but spend one summer at the golf course and see if you like it or not. And who knows what's like, that's going to lead to.

Micah Woods: 8:28

Yeah. I look back on it and I'm like, how did I never realize that this is something that you can do as a profession. And it's not just like you're only landscape worker. That's just running a backpack blower and pushing a mower around, but there's more to it than that. Then you look in the on the equipment management side. I don't know how much an entire fleet of equipment costs these days, but that's. It's a lot of complicated equipment as a huge investment and you can be managing that And you look at the value of a golf course look at the price of an irrigation system these days look at how? detailed some of the New technologies are with with, you know, they're doing satellite imaging sometimes or drones, you know, to look at stress on the turf and GPS sprayers, all this kind of new technology stuff that I haven't operated yet. Um, but I know it's things that people are saying, yeah, this is awesome. I can spray at night. It's odd. It's got auto steer. This is stuff that. Is really interesting and it's something that I think we should make sure that people who have the potential to work in this industry, possible interest to work in this industry, they should be more aware of it.

Trent Manning: 9:49

Oh, yeah, for sure. And I do think all this technology or I'm hopeful that all this technology will bring in younger people to our industry, you know, just like the computer games and you know, all these things, you know.

Micah Woods: 10:04

I was so surprised I was talking with Janne Leto who's, I believe he's the president of the Finnish Green Keepers Association. I was in Finland last year and he's at her solid golf in Finland and we were talking and we were talking about the robotic mowers. They have a lot. They have their fairways are completely moaned by the small robotic auto mowers and they're rough at the time we talked last year. I think the rough was 80 percent or something like that was moaned by those robotic auto mowers and we started talking about the advantages and the disadvantages of that type of setup. And of course, there's both, um, But for from Yanni's perspective, it was mostly a positive and something I was thinking about, how does this affect the grass? How does it affect the golf play? How does it affect some of the you know, just like how the grass performs and, you know, compaction of the soil or being able to mow in wet and stuff like that. And of course we talked about all of that, but the thing that really surprised me when we talked is he said that. Having those mowers allows him to attract people to work on the golf course maintenance team that he thinks would otherwise not want to work in that business. He, you know, somebody doesn't want to come and work outside and rake bunkers all day. But when you tell them that you can be a robotics technician and you're going to be responsible for managing. And maintaining and checking the operation of this fleet of 30 or 40 robotic mowers, he said he, he was able to attract people who are really excited about doing that kind of work and it, That was a surprise to me, but, um, that was the first time I heard that. I've subsequently heard that from a few other people that, that there are people that, that's really attractive to them. And they're like, wow I would love to do that kind of work where if you tell somebody you can come you know, walk, mow greens and rake bunkers while you're doing it and get to work outside and all kinds of weather. That's perhaps a lot less attractive. So.

Trent Manning: 12:22

Yeah, I would definitely think so. And it just reminds me when I first started there on the golf course, we walk my teas and our teas were really small and we had three routes, a, b, and c route. You walk from the shop is you know, that's a clubhouse at one t basically. And you had to walk to and start at 12 t and you had the back nine and you walked from t to t. And it was the most miserable route. Like usually if you had done something bad, you got C Route. And I don't know if I was a bad employee, but I got C Route enough and to realize I really didn't like that. But like you say, I think that's awesome that people are interested in working on a golf course because we have robotic stuff. And I've heard good things from membership too. I think the members like to see the robots out running around. They're like, Oh, that's neat. Oh, that's cool.

Micah Woods: 13:19

As I've seen these used more and more, the thing that I really like is the low noise or, um, you know, they're just so quiet. And I think sometimes because of our, you know, Our experience working on golf courses. It's normal to, for us to hear a diesel engine operating a couple of fairways over, it's normal for us to hear that leaf blower firing up on the other nine holes. It's normal for us who've been around golf for a long time to hear that sand pro making his way back to the shop. And there's all these noises. Now, of course you notice it when you go out on the golf course and start trying to shoot video or recording an interview or something, all of a sudden it's like. Well, wait a second. They need to turn that machine off. We need to get it quieter out here. You don't, if you don't. But we just kind of take it for granted that there's these noises. We don't even notice them until they disappear. And then when they disappear, and that happens when you've got these electric machines out there and those little robotic mowers that are just doing their job. Silently. really cool because then you can hear more of the birds. You can have an easier conversation with your friends that you're out there with. Or if you're doing other work to me, it's just it's pleasant to see that machine is just doing its job. I can do my job and it's not disturbing me with any type of noise.

Trent Manning: 14:42

No, I think that's great. And I think I am for, you know, I'm just one of those humans that's really sensitive to noises for some reason. And I mean, I'm an equipment manager, so yeah, I'm working around loud stuff all the time. But if there's a chance to turn off that loud thing, I'm going to turn it off. You know, I mean, there's nothing I dislike more than trying to talk over a piece of equipment. For, you know, whatever the reason is, just turn it off. We'll start it back up.

Micah Woods: 15:10

Yeah. And that's something that I think it's terrific. And I think we've all been familiar with some areas on a golf course that might be close to somebody's home and they don't like to hear machines running at four 30 or five in the morning. Um, and we would think, well, you know, you bought the house knowing that there's a golf course there. You should know that there's going to be some golf course preparation noise is going to happen. But it. If you have the ability to run electric machines through there, um, that, that's just, it's, it solves that problem.

Trent Manning: 15:47

Yeah. We've just recently at our midtown course bought quite a bit of electric handheld equipment. So blowers and weed eaters, I think we even got a chainsaw and that stuff, this came a long way and it's amazing. Like you said, it's so quiet and we have an order. Noise ordinance on the weekends inside the city limits of Atlanta. We can't make noise till 9 a. m Well normally golfers want to tee off before 9 a. m. So, you know, it's a struggle to get the course prepared

Micah Woods: 16:20

Wow. Can you tell me more about that? Within the city of Atlanta, I can't go run a gasoline powered walking greens mower before 9am? Is that is

Trent Manning: 16:34

that is true Yes, and the way we kind of get around that is some of our holes are further away from houses So we start there and then we kind of work towards the houses and we try to be really friendly with all our neighbors. So none of them are mad at us. But like you say, you would think if you buy a house on a golf course that maybe there's some noise out there, but I think a lot of people are unaware.

Micah Woods: 17:06

Yeah, I kind of like I was unaware that there is actually a nice career to be had doing this type of work. And I'd been around golf for a long time and play to spend a lot of time on golf courses. And it was just oblivious to me. I wasn't aware of it at all until that first day I was working on a golf course.

Trent Manning: 17:29

Yeah. And for me, I never played golf or anything like that as a kid or a younger person. But it was my best friend in high school. He lived next door to the mechanic at the golf course. And so, you know, the mechanic had told his parents, Oh, we'll give him a job. You know, we're always looking for summer help. So he gets a job there and the next week I get a job there along with another one of our friends. Yeah. Yeah. No, you know, and it was good. It was a good time. Where are the three stages? Destroying equipment around a golf course. Ever mechanics nightmare. Yeah. Young people on expensive turf equipment.

Micah Woods: 18:08

I hate to see an expensive rough mower getting operated at what seems to me like 120 percent of the proper operating speed and it's just flying through the rough doing and it's not cutting all the grass and it's just, bouncing and the cutting units are just bouncy. You can hear the rattling and I'm like, what is this person doing? And it's not just young people, but like any operator that's operating the machine at the too rapid of a speed. Yeah, that's one of my pet peeves actually.

Trent Manning: 18:43

love it. I'm right there

Micah Woods: 18:44

I'm not an equipment manager, but I'm like, man, you got to make that machine last. You got to cut the grass properly. You got to be safe. Um, what are you doing?

Trent Manning: 18:54

One, I've never understood this because most of these positions are hourly positions and it seems like the employee is in such a hurry. to get finished with that job. And I don't, I've never really understood that. No,

Micah Woods: 19:16

I suppose it's just training and training and a team You know, if get everybody on the team to understand what the desired goal is, um, which is to get a lot of work done, but to do every job right and realize what the limits are. We're working fast or working as fast as you can still has a limit. You know, you can't go do hole changing and just say, well, we're going to skip three holes because we need to hurry up and finish. Like, like you can't do that. And you can't set the hole and put everything in like. Sideways and not fixing the old plug and stuff like that. You can't do that. So there's an upper, or I mean, there's a certain limit on how fast you can go. And I think with mowing and equipment operation and anything, if everybody on the team understands what the limit is on how fast we could go. And I suppose that's just something that, that you discover that when you find it's not working well, and then you do another reminder session and just keep working at it, I suppose.

Trent Manning: 20:18

I think that is a really good point. And I think it's lack of training most of the time at most courses, because I know a lot of places, they just put an operator on a piece of equipment and Here's the key. This is the way you start it. We'll see you later. You're mowing rough, you know, and they don't give them much direction. And then while they're out there operating the equipment, they don't give them much coaching on, you know, we'll slow down in this area, be careful making these turns, you know, whatever the coaching techniques are. And, but it reminds me of when I, the first time I ever mowed fairways, I was trained by another operator and that operator. The mower was a Toro 5100. I don't know why I remember this, but it had a speedometer on it. And he says, never get over four miles an hour. He said, if they see you get over four miles an hour, you'll never mow fairways again. And I thought, man, this is a real gravy job. I do not want, I'm never going over four miles an hour. And so I didn't. But I think you know it was that training that I had that no, I don't want to mess this up This is a good job to have

Micah Woods: 21:33

Yeah, and yeah, I think it's training and you know, everybody gets busy. I'm sure there's people that, that are in the role that they should be supervising or should be training and then they feel like they're short, they're not able to keep up with all of that. So it's not like complete neglect in most cases, I think, but maybe people just aren't able to keep up with that. But if you are, if you do have enough staff and a really good team of people. It's interesting because I see so many golf courses. I don't play so much golf, but I'm I'm often traveling around and I'm on golf courses. And you see some places where, you know, there's 18 people and the shop is pretty big. Is really well organized and the equipment is well maintained and everybody that you see out there operating looks like they are cross trained really well able to operate any equipment. Well, Well, and you go to some other places and it's more of a disorganized operation and the equipment may not be as well maintained and you see people maybe not operating things as well as at that other place. And what is it that causes that difference? Is it only one person? I mean, is it only the equipment manager or only the golf course superintendent? Or is it only the budget? Um, I don't know. I don't know what it is, but to me it's a team and it takes everybody. So you need a good leader, but you need good people that are going to support that. You know, leader also and you need the budget to make sure that you have the right equipment for the right job. And then you also need to have the equipment maintenance budget to take care of it. And so, you know, how you establish that, I don't know, but I definitely see that the outcome is some places run pretty smoothly. Other places don't.

Trent Manning: 23:27

My opinion is I think it's mostly boils down to superintendent or director of agronomy and Having a really good leader and I agree Yes, you do need a really good team to go behind that leader, but I do think it kind of starts at the top And I do think it's really hard to change the culture that is set up at a lot of maintenance facilities, you know, around the world. I'm sure where people are neglectful of equipment and everything else. So, you know, everything looks in disarray. So you walk into work and you're already in a bad mood because the appearance of the way everything looks and I've heard guys and gals talk about that too. If. a piece of equipment looks brand new, maybe an operator will take a little bit better care of that piece of equipment because of the way it looks. You know, if it looks like a piece of junk, they're probably gonna treat it like a piece of junk.

Micah Woods: 24:26

Yeah. I would think that there's something to that.

Trent Manning: 24:29

All right, we've probably bored everybody enough about what we think about operator training. So I want to get to the meat and potatoes of what I really wanted to, I want to learn about clipping yield. And why do you collect clipping yield?

Micah Woods: 24:49

Well, I was aware of this for a long time. I was a golf course superintendent in Japan in the years 2000 and 2001 before I went to graduate school. And there were Containers that we would use to put grass clippings in after the greens were mown I didn't really pay any attention to it But I knew that we were doing that and that we could report that to my boss and we knew how much the grass was growing, but I wasn't so excited about it because it's leaders It's a volume, you know, so a leader is about a court And I'm like what use is the volume? I just wanted, I just cared about how the grass looked and what the quality of cut looked like and how the ball rolled and whether there was disease or not. That's what I cared at that time. And then I went to grad school and I studied about turf grass science and. And I've read a lot of scientific articles and every time the grass yield was measured, it's always the dry matter of the leaves. So, so you take the clippings and you dry them and then you express it as, you know, pounds per thousand square feet of dry material or kilograms per hectare or grams per square meter of dry material. Definitely not a volume. Definitely not a volume. So I was going. Through my work and doing my what I do, and I was aware of these two things that yield is something that's dry matter per area, and I knew that there's people that actually do measure the clippings, um. So it goes beyond just looking in the basket and seeing or counting the number of times you have to empty the baskets. And it goes beyond just, um, reaching in, putting some clippings in your hand and looking at the quality of cut or, you know, how much debris is in there or whatever people were measuring. So, um, in 2013, I was working at a golf tournament in Japan and. The green speed was getting faster and faster through the week. And at that golf course in Japan, they were measuring the clipping volume. And I noticed, wow, the clipping volumes going down every day. And at the same time, the green speeds going up now at that golf course, which is Kea golf club. The reason that they are measuring the clipping volume is not, it was not to look at green speed. It was not to do what I like to do now, which is estimate nutrient harvest or look at how much the grass grows over the course of a season. They wanted to check that all the mowers were cutting the same amount of clippings. And so, they've got a sheet. And I don't have a image of that handy that I can show, but they've got a sheet that the operators go in and write down the volume of clippings from each green. And every green has two cells, two cells on this sheet that they can write in. So it's a spreadsheet that's been printed out. One, one of those cells or boxes, you put the leaders of clippings and the other cell, you put down your mower number. Okay. So, so it'd be like 26. Eleven. And I was always trying to, cause it's in Japanese. And so, um, the numbers of course are, I can read, but so the column and row labels, I couldn't quite read. So I had to double check like, which one is the leaders and which one is the mower number? Cause I don't care about the mower number. I just care about the leaders, but they use that to check and make sure that the mowers are all. Getting approximately the same amount of clippings. And so that's what the original use was. And that I think, um, it's a good check because it turned out, I think the next year, um, at that golf course, they had a, they have an annual tournament every August, they had their own machines. Um, this Shibaura walking mower. It's a 22 inch G slash E X E fixed head mower. And the they've got their own reels that had been ground a few times, and then they had the loaner machines where the reel had either It had been ground once or something. So it had a different reel diameter Basically the clipping volume, exact same cutting height the clipping volume was double on, I believe the I can't remember, but it has something to do with the behind center distance and the, Um, the amount of grab, and so, so this is where I feel like I don't have the the vocabulary or the understanding of what I'm talking about to to explain it. But I think you know what I'm talking about, where a different reel diameter is going to catch a different amount of grass.

Trent Manning: 29:51

Yes, unless well, I don't, yeah, I think it's always going to be different with different diameter, but the one thought I was having, so Toro, when they come out with the DPA cutting unit and basically I think the patent was like 99, but it came out, you know, around 99, 2000. And in that patent, they said that the behind center distance would stay consistent throughout the life of the reel, which a new reel is five inches in diameter, and their Toro spec for a worn out reel is four and a half inches in diameter. But the pivot point of where the bed bar rotates is at a higher location. And on a Toro, you're moving the front roller up to lower the height of cut, which you would be doing because your reel is getting smaller diameter. So it helps keep it pretty consistent, but they're the only ones that do that. And then, and I don't remember when it was, maybe mid two thousands or 08, somewhere in there, John Deere came out with an eccentric that you can flip, which changes the pivot point of the bed knife to reestablish the behind center distance. Because on the John Deere, your normal how to cut change is the rear roller, and your behind center distance decreases as the reel is wearing. So they moved their pivot point up. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on here.

Micah Woods: 31:38

National golf club for the U S amateur this year and had a really good talk with Austin, right? The equipment manager up there. And I said, something I don't understand. I said, I thought you can only mow like, you know, an eighth of an inch or, you know, your cutting height can only be just a little bit under an eighth of an inch. Um, but like at some point the bed knife gets so. Like, like you, I hear people talk about these mowing heights. That sounds to me like that's almost thinner than the bed knife or I mean, it's shorter than the bed knife thickness. I'm like I can't understand how you can actually mow like that at those heights, I'm like, what is the real limit? And he said, that's not really the way that you need to think about it. He said cause the real actually comes below the effective mowing height. As it's spinning around and he said that's the clearance. So I think that's the word that he was using is you need to be more worried about the ground clearance. And I think that's something to do with this issue that we saw in Japan, where one of the reels was cutting. Or one of the set of machines with a certain real diameter was cutting twice as much grass is it's is how much is going down into the canopy and grabbing that grass before it comes up and cuts it at the bed knife that set exactly the same height on each machine and so, um, Austin helped me to understand, the bench setting for cutting height is something that you want to pay attention to. It's not the thing that necessarily defines what the real effective mowing height will actually be.

Trent Manning: 33:15

Oh yeah. 100 100%. So, and our industry term, that's a whole nother probably podcast. And this is my agenda to get done in the next few years. Is I really think the industry terms for cutting unit set up needs to be addressed to somewhat get us all on the same page because there's some new terms coming about that need to be cleared up and then some of the older terms we need to define better. Um, so we'll work on that, but, what I was getting at is you have actual height of cut. So that's how tall the grass actually is after it's cut. And then you have your bench set Right? So that's what we do in the shop. And just like Austin's saying, um, so for instance, on a Toro DPA, they have a spacer you can add to the rear roller. If you add that spacer, that increases the behind center distance of the bed, front face of the bed knife. So you can add that spacer, set your high to cut at 125. Take the same reel with no spacer, set your high to cut at 125, and the reel with the spacer is going to get a lot more clippings. Because the behind center distance is greater and you have more real blade in the canopy of the turf

Micah Woods: 34:53

And that, yeah, that That's the kind of thing that I think we can't really learn enough about. I mean, I mean, we, I agree with you. It's really good to standardize the terminology, understand what's important and then teach everybody in the industry about this. So then we can communicate. Clearly. And whether we're talking to the the machinery manufacturers rep, or whether we're talking to the equipment manager, or whether we're explaining something to a new employee, everybody's got the same as close as possible. Everybody has the same mental image about what's really going on. I think that would be good.

Trent Manning: 35:36

One case in point on this and this is one that really gets me so Toro they come out with you know Aftercut appearance that is a PDF document to help end users troubleshoot after cut appearance. And one of the after cut appearance issues that can arise is called, Toro calls it bobbing. And that's when the front of the front roller, there's a resistance to roll and the actual rear of the cutting unit picks up. And So you get a wave like pattern in the turf and that wave like pattern the waves are roughly eight to 10 inches apart because that's how far the rollers are apart. And so Toro calls that bobbing. John Deere calls it marcelling. And I've heard marcelling throughout the years. You know, when I first started, I heard marcelling. And it's the washboard. Some people call it washboard. That's fine. I don't care what you call it, but we all need to have, you know, understand that all those are the same thing because the other difference is I've heard people Toro calls clip marks where they're one inch apart and that's when you're real is not spending fast enough.

Micah Woods: 37:03

Yeah, and that to me, that's what I, when I see something that's that close, and it looks like the reel's not grabbing all the grass. So, so you've got grass that's cut, grass that's not cut, grass that's cut, and it's, and it that's what I would have called marcelling. Um, but that's nothing to do, I think, With the roller lifting up and coming back down. It's not an eight to 10 inch wave. I would have called Mark selling. If you like driving too fast, if the ground speed is too fast and you're the real is not able to cut all the grass. So yeah, that is something that maybe my terminology is wrong, or just maybe as an

Trent Manning: 37:44

Well, no I've, that's, I guess that's my point. I want to standardize that somehow or another because I have heard people just describe just like you're describing the reel not turning fast enough or the mower moving too fast to be more selling. But I've also and Toro calls that clip marks because your frequency of clip is not. At the right level.

Micah Woods: 38:12

Interesting. Interesting.

Trent Manning: 38:14

yeah, that's fun. What I love about task tracker is they're constantly innovating and listening to their users. They've added dozens of updates to make our job easier. One new feature is the ability to upload manuals to the equipment. All you have to do is scan the equipment. QR code. And you have the manual and all other information at the tip of your fingers. You can even create links to those manuals and the work orders. And it goes directly to the page that you need. Make your life a lot easier and check them out at AASB task. tracker.com. Let's get back to the episode

Micah Woods: 38:50

So, so, so back to the clipping yield or clipping volume.

Trent Manning: 38:54

Yeah. Sorry. Got sidetracked there.

Micah Woods: 38:56

That meanders a little bit that's interesting. So the the the interest that I had in it initially was to do with green speed because I saw that the less the grass was growing in, at the fewer clippings that were harvested, the the faster the green speed or the. The longer distance the ball rolled. So I thought, well, that's really good. So next year for this tournament, why don't you try to manage your fertilizer and growth regulator and make sure you've cut the greens enough so that as you come into tournament week, why don't we try to hit on Monday of tournament week what you were out on Sunday of the final round the previous year, because it's like now we've got a number that we're shooting for. Of how much grass we'd be cutting off. And I thought that should give us a consistent green speed. I also thought, well, let's make sure that the greens are consistent from green to green. So that should lead to more and improved, consistency of green speed, which is what the stint meter is supposed to be all about anyway, is making sure that you have consistent ball roll across the property. And so I was interested in that and then I realized, wait a second, you know, that clipping yield thing that I learned about in school, the stuff that scientists study about how much the grass actually grows. That's the dry weight. What if it's consistent enough? When you dry the clippings, what if a certain volume of clippings tends to have a certain weight? So in 2014, 2015, 2016 in Japan and in Thailand with some co operators at research institutes and with a company's research facility and with the golf course superintendent in Thailand we sent some clippings of known volume. And we dry them in drying ovens, and we checked how much they weighed. And it's a bit of variation, but there is some consistency in, on average, in how much a certain volume of clippings will weigh. And subsequently, at the University of Wisconsin, there was some research done, and they found a very similar number to what we'd measured in Japan and in Thailand. And so now as a researcher, I'm like, wow, now that we know the dry weight, we can measure like over the course of a year, if we measure the clippings every time and we know what the volume is, we can now know how much the grass grew this year. Well, if you know how much the grass grew this year, don't you think that the grass grows twice as much? It's going to need twice as much top dressing sand. To keep the organic matter diluted, because you want to keep that consistent matrix of grass and organic matter production and then dilute it with sand. It goes in the other direction too. If you grow the grass a third slower this year than the previous year, you should be able to reduce your clipping sorry, reduce your sand by 33%. And that extends to fertilizer too. If the grass grows half as much, it used half as much potassium. Thank you. If the grass grew half as much, it used half as much calcium. So the nutrient supply should be proportional to that. So I realized in the first couple of years of getting excited about this, which was about a decade ago, it's like, wow, this is related to green speed, top dressing, organic matter management. And nutrient requirement and it's just related to overall consistency of the surface and it's very obviously related to mower setup or mower consistency from machine to machine. And I'll tell you it was a hard sell for me to get people to want to do this because everybody feels like they're doing it already. Because they're like, I, you know, I've been doing this for years and I check the clippings every day, but they're not measuring it. They're just looking at it but there's a difference. There's a difference in precision. We actually empty the clippings into a bucket and look at the volume. And a lot of people are like, well, can't we get a meter for that? It sounds pretty crude to dump it into a bucket. Like there must be some kind of sensor that we can use. And I think eventually there will be, but I've not found anything yet. This is consistent and is foolproof. It's just dumping the clippings into a bucket and measuring it. And then, um, so, so the thing that everybody notices, and this happens at It happened at Hazeltine National. They found differences between machines. And it happened at Kalir Golf Club in Reykjavik, near Reykjavik in Iceland. They, within the first month of doing this. They found difference differences between machines in setup that they're able to then fix the problem or fix the inconsistency that they otherwise wouldn't have noticed. And it leads over time to more consistent cut. And that's something that people notice. I mean, everybody tends to notice this and then it's something that they can check for, um, so, so, but it was a hard sell because people, yeah, I remember in 2017, I gave a talk in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. It was to a golf course superintendent association like a tri societies. I think it was Idaho Montana and maybe Eastern Washington area something like that peaks and prairies

Trent Manning: 44:33

Okay. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Micah Woods: 44:34

GCSA a couple of those and Yeah, there must be 150, 200 people there at this meeting and I'm giving a talk about clipping volume. I'm like, okay, here's something I think is really useful. How many people can anybody raise their hand of anybody that's doing this? And you just see like, you know, everybody still keeps their hands on their laps and you know, nobody's raising their hand. I'm like, Oh, this could be a tough audience. But I think, um, It is something that eventually people come around to. And if you're not doing this yet, I would encourage you to do it because it provides so much useful, actionable information. And the type of, um, feedback that I get from people who do this once they get started, they say, man, this is so useful. It's more useful than I thought it would be. I can't believe I haven't been doing this my whole career or I wish I'd been doing it my whole career because you want to know like back in 2006 when the grass was really struggled through the summer or something you wonder was that how fast was it growing? How much did it grow that summer? And now you have that. You can look at it It's just, to me it's just a useful number for all kinds of reasons.

Trent Manning: 45:49

No, that's yeah, really good stuff. And so personally at my club, we don't do it. Um, I'm definitely no other clubs that do. And I consider Austin right. A really good friend. Um, I was lucky enough to work with him. We volunteered together advance week for the 100th PGA at Belle Reef in 2018. And that's how I got to know Austin and we've been friends ever since. But back to your point, and we were kind of talking about the Toro DPA and put a spacer on one and not on the other and set them at the same height. So a friend of mine told me that they did this by accident. You know, it happens sometimes on a triplex and they said they got double the clipping yield off the one with the spacers. Cause it was a more aggressive setup, but you know, they didn't catch the mistake until they saw the clipping yield. So they start saying, Hey, why is this mower getting double the amount Versus the other mower and that was why so I definitely think that's something Very interesting and great, you know feedback for what the piece of equipment is doing also

Micah Woods: 47:12

Yeah, I think it would be so nice. I've talked with Eric Johnson, who's the director of agronomy at Chambers Bay in Tacoma, Washington. And I've talked with him about this. Cause they measure clipping volume and he's like, can't we get it set up in some kind of app where the operator can put in the clipping volume almost immediately after they measure it. So you could get a snapshot. Of what's going on immediately. So you could, let's say you've got two mowers out, or let's say you've got four mowers out, you can check their consistency almost immediately because some people don't realize that we adjust this by area. So you know that this green is 5, 647 square feet. This other green is 7, 222 square feet. Um, you divide the volume by the area and it standardizes it on a per square meter basis or a per thousand square foot basis. And so, so once you do that standards standardization you're able to compare directly. And I know I talked to Bjarne Hannesen in Iceland about this also. And it seems like something that would be really nice to put into some kind of app where you could check in real time and it's going to flag for you. Real quickly, like this mowers seems to be cutting 20 percent more. And of course you have a lot of natural variability out there. You do have some greens that are in shade that might be growing more than greens that are in full sun because grass that's in shade, it tends to, I think the technical word is at the elation where the leaf extends more, cause it, it has a different hormone balance in the plant and it's trying to. It's not trying, but it's somehow that's how it grows when it's growing in more shade, the leaves get longer because it's trying to reach some light. Um, and so you surprisingly will find. more clipping volume sometimes from shaded greens. So you've got that kind of natural variation, but you can put those bounds of normally we'd expect this type of variation. And then if you actually were measuring after two greens had been cut by mower number 12, then it's saying, whoa, this one is even, it's outside the normal bounds. This is cutting 30 percent more. Then the other machine, you can quickly go check that before, um, before things continue. And it's something that, that we can't really see with our naked eye, but the simple measurement of clipping volume allows us to catch some of this. And then the idea is it's not just finding problems, but it's finding, okay, how do we make this more consistent? How do we make sure that, that. That is more consistent because I think in the long run, it's going to lead to grass that's healthier grass that looks better grass that plays better for golf or, you know, I think this is applicable to football, soccer, you know, baseball, any type of sports turf, but I think it's more common right now in golf.

Trent Manning: 50:24

Yeah. No, that makes, I mean, a ton of sense. And I mean, honestly, I would like to collect clippings just for that reason. So I would know how my mower is performing and potential set up issues with that mower and if one mower is getting 30 percent more volume than another, that couldn't lead to a consistent putting surface. I wouldn't think. You know, I would think it would be different. Oh,

Micah Woods: 50:58

we're trying to make it as perfect as possible and because we're growing in a challenging growing environment, I think you know, if you're in Atlanta in the summer, whether you've got ultra dwarf or whether you've got bent grass that's some pretty extreme growth. Growing conditions. It's high heat during the day. It's humidity and thunderstorms and saturated soils and high heat at night and disease pressure and all this stuff who wants, whether you're the superintendent or the assistant or the equipment manager or the greens committee chairman who wants to allow discrepancies in the way the. The clipping volume is coming off the greens that one green might be getting 30 percent more grass off of it. And if you think like you run that same machine on the same route, and if you don't catch that, then the next day you cut 30 percent more off that next green, off that same green. The next day you cut 30 percent more off that green. And, In one day, I don't know that we'd notice a huge difference, but it could be that cumulative effect that the greens that get more cut off of them might be better or they might be worse. But what we don't want that discrepancy between greens. We want it all consistent so that we can manage it better.

Trent Manning: 52:19

for sure. And I know a lot of courses they get in a routine, so they might send mower 12, as you said, to it mows one, three, eight, 13, you know, it mows the same route every day, that same mower. And if there's an issue with that mower and it's getting that much more every time over a week. Yeah Who

Micah Woods: 52:45

Yeah, and there's things that are unique to everybody's property and the way that their grass grows, the way that they're growing environment is the way that their machines are and what the What they and the way the operators do the work and I think you would find at your facility, if you have the clipping volume data, you start to find things of like, oh, we could do this better, we could make this a little bit more consistent, or this is something that happens twice a year, let's make sure it doesn't happen. During our club championship and those are, I mean, that, that situation I described of the loaner mowers, which are basically brand new machines coming from the, manufacturer and they had like six machines were the clubs machines that were mowing grains and six machines that were the loaner machines mowing grains. And I think the clubs machines were cutting twice as much grass because they had a different angle of attack from more behind center distance, or they have whatever, again, I lose the terminology, but it was cutting twice as much grass during a professional tournament. And if you send those same machines out and you cut twice as much grass, eventually you're going to lead with, have something that looks different on TV or you know, the ball's going to roll different in the afternoon and you have all kinds of inconsistencies. The only way they caught that was by Measuring the clipping volume because it's during a tournament. They're not getting so many clippings. So you just would look in the basket and say, yeah, there's not a lot of clippings. We're not getting a lot of clippings today. That would be the normal way to, to kind of explain it. But when you actually measure it and say, well, these greens all got. Two liters of clippings and those other grains on average got four liters of clippings. If you look at it with your eye, it's not a lot of clippings. We're just, you know, we don't have to empty the basket on this green. It's just the bottom of the basket gets filled, but in reality it's twice as much grass. Yeah. So

Trent Manning: 54:47

like you're saying at a professional tournament where those fixed head mowers.

Micah Woods: 54:52

fixed head mowers.

Trent Manning: 54:54

Yep. So in my experience and what I've learned, so me and some colleagues have been doing extensive testing on behind center distance and what happens to the behind center distance throughout the life of the reel. But what we've seen on fixed head mowers is normally, The smaller the diameter, the more aggressive it is. So the greater the behind the center distance is of the real. So it's gathering more grass.

Micah Woods: 55:25

And that's something,

Trent Manning: 55:26

that tracks, and I don't think a lot of people understand that. I think there's very few in the industry that understand that.

Micah Woods: 55:35

that's something that I had absolutely no idea about because I thought that it was all about cutting height. And making sure that the mower is adjusted to cut the grass cleanly, and then that the mowing height that, or, you know, the bench setting is set just at three millimeters or 0. 11 inches or whatever. I thought that's all there was to it. To it in terms of this is what the goal should be, but it turns out there's a lot more to it. There's the behind center distance and the real diameter that's associated with that. And then that it could lead to such a difference. Now I know it and I'm I'll never forget it. And I still don't know how to go adjust the mower. I don't know how to go measure those kinds of things, but I know how to talk. about it with people to say, Hey, let's make sure that we've got the same real diameter and everything set up the same. If we've got machines of different age, um, going out to, to cut.

Trent Manning: 56:38

And the other thing I think that's counterintuitive is that reel wears the bed knife. You know, you're constantly moving it up, if you will. So the attitude, as we know it, that angle of attack of the bed knife is decreasing. And we've always been taught if the attitude decreases, aggression decreases. But that's not true in a fixed head mower. The attitude is less, but the aggression is more because you got a greater behind center distance.

Micah Woods: 57:15

Oh yeah. So the real is coming down in front of the bed knife and it's being more aggressive and cutting more into the canopy, but then, and then the bed knife will start scraping. You could do all kinds of bad things to the grass. You got the real being more aggressive and the back of the bed knife, potentially, if you, if, as you go really low, it could be

Trent Manning: 57:36

Yeah, dragon, yeah, or, yeah, skating, floating, whatever, yeah, whatever you want to call it. Yeah that's good stuff.

Micah Woods: 57:43

So, so then something that's kind of led from those initial things that I was interested in with clipping volume. Um, in 2019, I was at a golf course in Thailand and. It was Tiff Eagle, Ultradorf, Bermudagrass Greens, and I was doing some stint meter measurements, and I was talking to the pro who's from the UK, and he's played on the Asian tour, and he said, you know, the greens aren't quite as good as they used to be. And he's like, I can't quite Explain it. The speed is still good, but he's like just the way it rolls. It's not quite up to the standard that we've had at this club in the past, and I could see it with my eyes. The ball was rolling far, but it was not rolling smooth and true. And of course there was some sand on the greens. And of course we have this idea I've taught seminars in the past. I don't do it anymore, but I used to teach seminars and say, you know, you put sand and it'll make the green smoother. And, you know, you have to keep to maintain the firmness on greens. You need to keep putting sand on it to match the rate of grass growth and stuff. And so. There, there's certainly a fascination in this industry with sand and there's some people who seem to try to figure out ways to put down more sand was just this idea that more sand is going to somehow be better. Well, I've switched the way that I think about this over the past 10 years and Because I used to teach those seminars. I used to go really repeating things that it was developed by Dr. Bob Carroll. Really? He did some research. The USGA funded some research because bentgrass greens were failing in the Southeast 25 years ago. And so the USGA funded research and everybody was concerned about what can we do to keep these bentgrass greens from failing in the summer. And. The research that Dr. Caro did suggested that the organic matter accumulating to a rate, to an amount of four percent by mass or more at the top of a sand based root zone is what could lead to catastrophic failure of bentgrass greens in the summer in high temperatures. And so out of that, in the early 2000s, there was recommendations from the USGA Green section to do that 20 percent surface area removal by coring to add from 40 to 50 cubic feet per. 1, 000 square feet per year of sand, which is 12 millimeters to 15 millimeters of sand per year, which is a half inch to five eighths of an inch of sand, basically. That's how much sand you should be adding per year in order to keep the organic matter in the soil from reaching that critical threshold that Dr. Caro developed. So that was all from late 90s and early 2000s research. Back then, there wasn't so much growth regulator use. It was not certainly not, you know, pure distinction. It was on the bentgrass side. It wasn't pure distinction, 007, 777 the new varieties of bentgrass and on the ultra dwarf side, it certainly wasn't ultra dwarfs. In the nineties, it was still tiff dwarf, I think. So some of the. And there wasn't so much growth regulator use, and there was more nitrogen use, I would say. So, we've taken all those sanding recommendations and surface area removal recommendations that, Were developed I would say with different grasses in a different management style back in the 90s And I was repeating those Recommendations and then people were doing them a lot of people repeat those recommendations And what happens then is people put a lot of sand because in order to Do 20 percent surface area removal with cores. Basically you have to do like a normal coring three times a year, and then you fill those holes with sand. And you also have to talk dress all the time to put that much sand down. You have to talk dress almost constantly. I, People were telling me this and I was just like, look, I'm just telling you what the research says, right? Of course it wasn't research I did myself, but I was just saying, you need to be doing this much, which was about three times as much as what is reasonable. I think like to put that much sand and do that much coring, it's about three times as much as what's reasonable. To actually maintain a golf course where you're presenting a surface that's pretty good for most of the year that's kind of how it was and I would tell people as I would teach these seminars and make these recommendations I would say you I understand it's very difficult to do. I understand it Your members may not allow you to do that I'm just telling you in a few years when your greens start to fail because your organic matter has accumulated to such high levels, at least you'll know why it happened. And then you can say, okay, look, now I really need to do this. Disruptive work to put this much sand. So that's what I was teaching up until, Oh, I think the last time I gave that kind of seminar was 2014 the last time I expressed it that way and what had happened is I'd gone back to these places that weren't following my recommendations. I'd gone back year after year and saw their greens were fine in year one, fine in year two, fine in year three. Like, wait a second, why am I recommending you're not doing enough? You're not putting enough sand. And they just have great greens year after year. I said, I need to pay more attention to this and not just repeat recommendations but really make correct recommendations. And so from that I realized, well, clearly the ball rolls better on greens that don't have sand on it. If it's just rolling on really nice grass. And I thought, you know, I've worked at the Masters many times worked at a lot of other tournaments. It's pretty rare to go do a sand top dressing event during tournament week. So even though we say that top dressing is something that makes the green smoother. You don't actually go do that on Tuesday of tournament week, you, in fact, I think the PGA tour may have had some agronomic guidelines that suggested a certain cutoff time prior to the tournament when you do your last venting or last cultivation event or your last top dressing event. And I realize, wait a second, clipping volume could be related to this, because if the grass doesn't grow, we don't need to put sand. The amount of sand that we need to put is going to be proportional to how much the grass grows. And you think about dormant grass in the winter, If for some reason we did need to top dress dormant grass which I think it's pretty rare that you would need to do that. But if you go top dress a dormant putting green on Monday do you need to go top dress it? And so it doesn't grow all week because it's dormant. Do you need to go top dress it again the next Monday? Absolutely not. Cause the sand that you put the previous Monday is still going to be there. And if you take it, If you do that kind of thought experiment and take the thought to an extreme, you realize if our clipping volume is really low, we can put less sand. There's just less need to put sand. And so I've kind of taken my thinking about clipping volume in that direction of like, wow, Maybe we can just make better surfaces with less sand because we're just not producing as much organic matter. So that's something that I'm really excited about because it would seem that also you could have a certain accumulated amount of clippings and say, okay, that's our trigger that now we finally have to put some more sand. So go moving away from a calendar schedule. Of top dressing and to something where we really let the grass growth this year with the weather conditions that we have this year, with the way that we're managing the grass this year, let that tell us how much sand we need to put.

Trent Manning: 1:05:50

I love it. I absolutely love it. And what I'm, yeah, and no, I'm getting so excited now because I'm getting so excited because you're telling superintendents not to put out as much sand as you were before. Hopefully that's where I'm going with this. The less sand, the better for us equipment managers.

Micah Woods: 1:06:15

And I was I looked at that. In the past is something if just like that's an unfortunate part of the job, but it's essential. And I would have just said, I understand this is doing all kinds of problems and destroying the cutting units that we're putting out there. And just making all kinds of hassle and adjusting mowing heights and. Just all the problems that we all know come with having sand, in the canopy or on the surface. And I just looked at that as a necessary evil, I guess. And now I really do look at it in, from a completely opposite viewpoint. And I look at anytime I go to a golf course and I see sand and I can notice and or I can touch the surface and I can feel sand. I instantly question was that necessary? What are they trying to accomplish by putting the sand? Now, there can be very good reasons why you need to put sand and I still think some sand is necessary. But I am, again, I look at it completely opposite. To the way I used to recommend a minimum amount, make sure you're putting out at least 12 millimeters of sand, which is a half inch of sand per year. That's some of it goes into holes. Some of it gets spread across the surface, but I used to teach seminars and say, you, if you're not doing this, you're falling behind. And now I tell people, you really should be measuring your organic matter using the, what I call the OM246 method to very precisely measure the total organic material right at the surface, track the change in organic material over the time, over time, and look at the clipping volume and use those numbers to fine tune how much sand you put. And what I've seen is people put half as much sand or a third of a third as much sand as in the past, and the surfaces are even better and the organic matter stays under control. So sometimes now I might be, I could talk, it might be more popular talking to equipment managers because I think golf course superintendents around the world are still thinking the way that I did 10, 15 years ago, unfortunately, um, I think not everybody that teaches seminars has flipped 180 like I did. And I still see sometimes, um, In fact, I had a friend, I have a golf course superintendent friend who had to watch some um, watch some webinars to make sure that he can maintain his class a status. So he had to do some continuing training and make sure that he checked off those continuing education points or something. And he was watching something about organic matter management in 2024. And he's like, Micah, you know, He sent me screenshots of what the slides were from the webinar. He's like, you're not going to believe what they're teaching. And it's still all that 10, 15, 20 year old recommendations about how much sand you should put. So I realized that those recommendations are still out there. And a lot of people haven't updated and. And not everybody's doing clipping volume. Not everybody's doing this OM246 changing testing. Um, the, these things change, the technologies change, and what I'm doing, I think, is really cutting edge in terms of the recommendations, and it's not quite the standard. But, you know, we, we can't expect, if people think they're getting good results, and they have been getting good results, and people have been telling them that they've been getting good results, and they've done that without clipping volume, they've done that with a lot of top dressing on a calendar schedule and you can get good results that way. I just think it's more difficult. It's not as efficient. Um, it's hard to change if you're getting good results and people are validating that you're getting good results and you know you're getting good results. So, um, what's the incentive to change? But my incentive to change is it'd be even better and we don't destroy our reels.

Trent Manning: 1:10:22

Ah, there you go. I love it. I love it. No, and I, you know, I was joking there a little bit about that. And I understand some need to top dress, but I agree a hundred percent, a lot of people probably top dress too much. And I'm saying that based on my experience. If you top dress a putting green and you mow it and you collect 75 percent of the sand that you just put on the green, what good did you really do?

Micah Woods: 1:10:55

Yeah not very much.

Trent Manning: 1:10:57

Yeah, so I, you know, and I've never understood that and luckily at my club, we don't make a habit of doing that, but I know other clubs that tend to do that quite often. So why put the sand out, pick it up with the mower, throw it in the woods?

Micah Woods: 1:11:12

I did a project in Thailand looking at leaf nutrient content. And And I think it was almost 30 different golf courses. We asked to collect a a leaf tissue sample, a clipping sample from putting greens and did this from past Balaam golf courses Zoysia grass, green golf courses, and Bermuda grass, green golf courses in Thailand. It's all warm season. So I asked them to collect the sample. And then I went into the golf course and And collected that sample and some of them, it was shocking to me how much sand was in those clippings and I was just like, man, what do you talk dressing for? If you're just mowing it back up and I was just like, just pretty worried about what the machines are like, what the cutting units are like when you're just picking up sand.

Trent Manning: 1:12:02

And so I, I hate to admit this, but I'm going to, I'm going to admit it. So we're ultra dwarf Bermuda here and champion Bermuda. Um, we're going to renovation and going to be TIFF Eagle, whatever. Um, but when I've experienced heavy top dressings, and I'm not talking about posterification, but just heavy weekly top dressings on this Bermuda. If you set your reel to bed knife with a slide drag. And you send it out and it mows. So, you know, we walk, mow green. So we're sending out five mowers. So each mowers, you know, mowing roughly four greens ish. Right. So it comes in and I'm talking Toro again. So seven, 10 thousands in each click, and you have to give it 10 clicks to get contact back, you know, real to bed knife. We know the last green that mower mowed, it was not cutting grass with a scissor like cutting action. I'm, I can say that confidently. Were we getting clippings? I don't know because I wasn't on that green. We were probably getting a lot of sand though because we're picking that up. But what I noticed is no one was And I mean, including myself could look at the last green that mower mowed and say that cut looks terrible. Did I look at it with a microscope? No, I did not. And I will be doing this next year since I got a microscope now because I am curious to what the health of that turf looks like. But when you're picking up so much sand, why grind the reel to go out and pick up more sand again? So in my experiment, what I would do is adjust reel to bed knife. So I had lock, light contact again, and we'd send them same mower out the next day. I know it would not cut paper, but it picked up sand pretty good.

Micah Woods: 1:14:12

yeah on Bermuda grass, I think you can get away with that. Um, on zoysia grass greens, it certainly you can tell if the mower's not set up to cut it, it just shreds it and turns it white. And, um, it's interesting how Bermuda grass can cut so much cleaner. Paspallum doesn't cut very clean either. Um, so, I think it, it's certainly been a problem. I've seen it at a golf course in Japan. Again, Kea golf club. Where the mechanic or equipment manager there he, when they top dress, he really just won't grind the real until they're not going to get any more sand. He won't change the bed knives until they're not going to be picking up any more sand because it destroys it so fast. And the quality of cut will not be good. And so you'd have to basically change the bed knife every day, grind the reels every day, and he's not in a position to be able to do that, but they want to go mow the next day. So top dressing becomes a huge ordeal. And they've done some innovative maintenance there where they now typically will top dress just once a year. And I would have thought that's completely impossible. I've done consulting there since 2013 and in 2013, I recommended 2013, 2014, I recommended put as much sand as you can. Now I'm do we even need to top dress this year? And this year they top dressed and then the greens had a bad quality of cut for like two weeks and then once they weren't getting sand anymore, then they change the bed knife, adjust the reel, and then they go out and actually

Trent Manning: 1:15:51

At what type of grass was this?

Micah Woods: 1:15:53

Zoysia. Zoysia on the putting greens. So, that's It's a different animal in terms of being able to cut it.

Trent Manning: 1:16:01

Oh yeah, and I know exactly what you're talking about with white tips. I've seen that on Zoysia a time or two in my career when I've had dull cutting units.

Micah Woods: 1:16:11

Yeah. Yeah. You can,

Trent Manning: 1:16:12

or two.

Micah Woods: 1:16:13

I've seen it as time or two. Yeah. I think my best pictures, if I take a closeup picture of shredded leaf tips, it tends to happen on zoysia. And I would say just one more thing about sand on the greens. I've seen. Places that have problems around the perimeter of greens not just in the cleanup pass, but just around the edges and sometimes you'll have issues with irrigation coverage. You have issues with, um, traffic, but if you have sand on the green, it's more abrasive and so just rollers. And setting the cutting units up and down, maybe a little bit of turning of the machine, the drive roller or tires, it, over time, it accumulates that damage and puts more stress around the perimeter. Something that's anecdotal is. People who have cut back on sand top dressing have seen improved turf grass performance through stressful periods and less of that damage around the edges that people used to just think happens every summer. Um, now they're saying, Hey, never. I even I visited a course in the Cincinnati area Hyde Park and they didn't use turning boards this year, which they attribute to the. Some changes in the way they're managing. They used to put a turning boards on the collars and turn the walk mowers on those on bent grass grains. This year, they brought the turning boards out zero times and didn't see any decline. Um,

Trent Manning: 1:17:41

Oh, wow. That's

Micah Woods: 1:17:42

in the past they always would start to see decline and bring the turning boards out and this year it was a really hot year and they didn't have that, um, and they attribute that to some changes in fertilizer, measuring the clipping volume, adjusting the fertilizer according to that and I think putting out a very reasonable amount of sand, not a, not an excessive amount.

Trent Manning: 1:18:03

Well, I think one of my biggest takeaways so far that I hope most superintendents pick up on is if the grass is not growing, why are you top dressing? Because I mean, you made the, you know, you made the perfect point of if it's dormant, you wouldn't go out every week and throw sand on it. If it's, you know, in the spring and here in the South and we're just starting to grow, you're probably not going to have to put out as much sand on week one as you do on week 10.

Micah Woods: 1:18:31

And people put out sand because they've been taught and they know that if you don't have enough air in the root zone, the grass is going to fail and it's going to fail when the temperatures are extreme and you know, if you're in Atlanta, the temperatures are going to be extreme, so you're preventatively putting that sand as much as you can whenever you can, I think, with this idea that you're going to put the sand to maintain enough Aeration porosity in the root zone so that the grass doesn't suffocate from just being surrounded by like a sponge full of water. And so you want something that has some airspace in it. And the only way to do that we think is to keep it very sandy. Well, I just, I recommend controlling the growth. And if you just don't, if you don't produce that organic matter that holds the water, then. It doesn't hold water and to test that you can do the OM 246 testing. That is a very accurate way to check how much organic material is present and you can check how much rapidly it's accumulating. The USGA green section has funded a big project on that. They offer that service. I offer that service. Any Brookside lab consultant can offer that service because Brookside labs up in Ohio does does a lot of that testing. And there's a few other companies that offer a very similar type of testing. Although I recommend doing what I call OM246, which is the same as what the USGA green section recommends for comparison purposes. You know that you're using the exact same method that everybody else is.

Trent Manning: 1:20:13

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely makes sense.

Micah Woods: 1:20:14

and so when you do that, you're, you quickly can find out like, Hey, my organic matter is okay. Okay. Okay. For UltraDwarf Bermudagrass Greens, I'm normal. And then you can say, okay, maybe I can just cut back a little bit. And then you monitor it. You've cut back on the top dressing a little bit. And then you measure the organic material again. And you can find out, hey, It's going in, it's still stable where you might find, whoa, it's exploding. It's going way too high. I clearly now have justification. I need to put more sand, but what we've done in the past is just following textbooks and following what other people are doing. And I think the way to do it is do it really site specific and just see, you know, champions going to accumulate. Organic matter different than TIF Eagle. You can actually measure that. And it, and people think that they're doing that already. Um, and they are to some extent I would just say it's such an important topic, use all the resources available. Um, and make sure you're doing that kind of testing.

Trent Manning: 1:21:17

Yeah, hands down. Can we talk about cutting unit setup a little bit and clipping yield?

Micah Woods: 1:21:24

Yeah I don't know how much

Trent Manning: 1:21:25

Or volume? Um,

Micah Woods: 1:21:28

go for it.

Trent Manning: 1:21:29

alright, so, well, let's hit one question here from Chris Whitaker. He says, how much time do you wait after top dressing to get accurate clipping yield? So does it matter? Top dressing?

Micah Woods: 1:21:45

you know, I really hope that when people are top dressing, that they're not collecting too much of the sand in the baskets. Um, one of the reasons

Trent Manning: 1:21:54

heard it here first, superintendents do not collect a lot of, yeah,

Micah Woods: 1:22:01

so basically for me, I want to measure clipping volume every time you mow. And if you're collecting a lot of sand. Um, then, yeah I don't know why the mowers were even sent out that day. Like, just take the dew off the greens and leave it, um, cause you want that sand to stay there. That's why you put it out. Um, so, so for me there's no, in, in terms of measuring clipping volume, just, I want to do it every time we mow. Cause I think if we collect a certain, let's say 3, 000, um, liters of clippings this year from our grains, then we know we'd need a certain amount of sand to create a good surface when we get 3000 liters. That's the total amount per year. So next year I want to measure all the clippings too. And if we're at 2500 liters for the entire year next year, we should be able to reduce our sand amount by whatever that ratio is of 2, 500 divided by 3, 000

Trent Manning: 1:23:06

and if you're collecting that, then you know how much sand to put out, or at least a guess

Micah Woods: 1:23:12

you'd have a guess because you'd know last year you might be like last year it worked really good for us and we put this much sand. So next year we measure the clippings every time and we find out how much clippings, how much it grew. That's how much sand you put. So for me there's no weight in terms of clipping volume. It's just obviously if you've got a basket full of sand. That's not clipping volume. You probably can disregard the number, but I hope that nobody does that.

Trent Manning: 1:23:43

Me too. Definitely not. So, next question from Ben, I'm going to mess his name up, so I'm not even going to try. It's Ben H. How much does cutoff bar adjustment affect clipping yield? So, and I guess I need to apologize because I was saying yield, but it's really volume, correct?

Micah Woods: 1:24:07

Yeah. To be precise. I would say volume because clipping yield to me means the dry matter.

Trent Manning: 1:24:17

Okay. So, and I brought this up earlier. The cutoff bar is on a Toro and it's a black bar and it's just above the real of the cutting unit. And as the real wears, that bar is supposed to be adjusted down towards the real. And if I remember correctly the gap is supposed to be about a sixty thousandths gap. So a sixteenth of an inch above the reel. And that is supposed to help throw clippings into the basket. And John Deere does it very similarly. The shield on Deer units adjust and I think the spec is about the same, about a 16th of an inch. So if that gap gets wider, I guess you have less velocity as the real spinning around. So it's not throwing the clippings as far. Have you noticed any difference in that?

Micah Woods: 1:25:18

No, but I suspect it has quite a big difference and, um, I, I wish there could be some more. Research about that, or I would just encourage people to try to keep it consistent because I think there's, there must be big differences between different machines and different machine setups in terms of how many clippings stay on the stay, you know, fall down and don't go into the basket and how many actually go into the basket and basically, I don't know, but I suspect it's it has a big effect.

Trent Manning: 1:25:52

Yeah, I would think so too. And you know, just like we're talking about consistency. I would think you would want to make your cutting unit set up. as consistent from mower to mower from reel to reel as possible, whether that be the cutoff bar or the shield or your bed, not behind center distance, your number of spacers, your real diameter. I know that's something, you know, kind of on our side of the shop, if you will, we try to keep most of us anyway, try to keep our real diameter within a certain number. So. You know, if it's a brand new reel, we try to keep them all within 10 percent ish of one another. If you got three reels or five reels on a machine, because once you start getting over that, then you're going to start seeing more issues. It Makes sense.

Micah Woods: 1:26:49

I can imagine. Yeah

Trent Manning: 1:26:51

Yeah.

Micah Woods: 1:26:53

I don't, I've never done that job, but it seems daunting to me. It's there's, you know, for an 18 hole golf course, how many cutting units do you typically have? Like, cause we're talking, you know, greens, fairways, tees, that it's gotta be 30,

Trent Manning: 1:27:12

Way, way more than that for me. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I got 14 walking greens mowers. I got four fairway mowers. So there's 20, there's 35 right there. And

Micah Woods: 1:27:23

That they go out, that it go out basically daily. And then you've got a lot of extra too.

Trent Manning: 1:27:29

yes. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot, it's a lot to keep up with. And you were kind of mentioning. The amount of equipment and I mean, we're a fortunate club, but I have, we have 27 holes total between the two clubs and I have close to 4 million worth of equipment. I mean, it's just, you know, and that's including all the increases in the last four years of equipment, but still that's a lot of money to, to be responsible for. And it's not, unfortunately, it's not just cutting units. We have

Micah Woods: 1:28:03

Right. Yeah. We've been

Trent Manning: 1:28:04

a lot more stuff.

Micah Woods: 1:28:06

yeah, we've been talking. Yeah. It's yeah. It's such a big job. And I really appreciate when I see a shop that is well organized and the equipment is, um, is well taken care of. And it's been Supplied with enough resources and a nice working area and stuff. So I, I see in Asia, I just feel sorry for the people who are put in the position of taking care of the equipment and they may have a place that's not air conditioned or not heated properly and just don't have the right kind of workspace. And then the golf course buys this machine that is, you know, six figure. Type of fairway mower or something, you know, so, so it's, the machines cost the same all over the world, but sometimes, and it's not just in Asia, but I'm, you know, there's shops in the U S and Canada and wherever that, that are not provisioned with enough it's just not a good enough working space and not enough tools. And it's like, okay, you're supposed to take care of this. And it's just like, what's going on with the whole operation. It really needs to start, I think, from having a really. You need the right equipment and you need to be able to take care of it. That's where it all starts. And you can't have the back of house not able to do that. So is it, and it just gets to be a bigger and bigger job because the standards keep increasing and what the product is supposed to be in terms of playing surface presentation and you know, what the green speeds are supposed to be and stuff like that. So, so to do that, yeah, it's a big job. Yeah.

Trent Manning: 1:29:42

helped out a course in the Bahamas and the shop. I don't understand. I mean, I think they were doing really good on their quality of cuts and after cut appearance with the resources they had. They're working out of a craftsman toolbox that has four drawers of tools and there's nothing on the island. You can't run to Napa, you can't run to the auto parts store to get something. You know, it was, you need a battery, you gotta wait for the boat to come from Nassau to bring you a battery. I mean, and most of the parts that they would order, it would take three to four months. To get a part in for a piece of equipment. So, I mean, it's really amazing. And they were having a corn fairy tour tournament there. I mean, it was crazy. I can't believe what these people are doing. And I'm so spoiled here in America and all the resources I have at my club. And, you know, they're doing as good as me. So, you know, good on them. But it is amazing. You know, in your travels, I'm sure you've seen a lot of places that are not as well equipped as others.

Micah Woods: 1:31:00

Yeah I think I get hired to I get hired to advise about grass and soil and water and stuff like that. But Whenever I go visit a golf course, if I just have a short amount of time I say, take me to the, I want to see the best grass. I want to see the worst grass. I'd like to see the most scenic point. And I want to see the maintenance shop. And between those four things, I'll end up seeing some amount of the property. I can see the best grass and the worst grass and get some idea of what the problems might be. But really we can learn so much by looking at the shop and just seeing what the, Maintenance team is provided with from the club and then how they're utilizing what they're provided with. And I see too often that they're not provided with a good working space. They're not provided with enough equipment and they're not provided with enough equipment or resources to take care of the equipment. And yet the club may have the expectation that they're going to be a really nice, product out there on the golf course. It's really hard to do that if you don't have the right machines and you don't have the right machines in working order. So

Trent Manning: 1:32:06

Yep. Very true.

Micah Woods: 1:32:08

yeah, I just don't know. I mean, that's not telling you anything you don't know, but sometimes I don't know how to communicate that because people don't, you know, the people making the decisions at the club sometimes about what they're going to spend money on. They might be happy to buy a new, buy new grass or maybe buy a new mower, but they don't want to invest on. on keeping it keeping it up.

Trent Manning: 1:32:31

Yeah, I think that happens. Yeah, everywhere. You know, a lot of these clubs that way. And definitely, I think golf course maintenance kind of gets the court short end of the stick a lot of times, especially, you know, private clubs and membership and all those things. You know, they see the clubhouse, they see the kitchen, you know, they seeing all those things. They don't come down and hang out in the maintenance shop too much and see our struggles and what we're dealing with. Yeah,

Micah Woods: 1:33:02

like GCSAA and the type of credibility that they can give and the certifications that they can give and the continuing education that they can give and some of the promotion that they can do of the profession can be quite helpful in the long run, I think. Um, and in just putting a message out there of, you know, if this is what we want our industry to be, then we need to have this, we need to have these kind of people, we need to have these kind of workspaces, we need to have this kind of expertise and we need to have, You know, support of the people doing this work. So, um, I, I think professional organizations maybe could be helpful in that regard. And that's why I think maybe in the United States, it's a little bit badder, I think, than another certainly in, in Asian countries where we find people working on dirt floors sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Me too.

Trent Manning: 1:33:57

I see some of these short videos on YouTube of these guys, you know, doing all kind of like shop work and they're wearing sandals and I'm like, wow, you know, we have it so lucky here, you know, and they have like these homemade machines that they're doing stuff on that where they cobbled stuff together or whatever, but they're definitely very. Innovative. And I'm very thankful for GCSA and associations like that. And especially for the equipment manager, the GCSA has done so much for the equipment manager over the, since they took us in under their umbrella, I think it was 2015 and really elevating our position and it's great what all has happened and I'm excited to see where it's going to go in the future. Yeah. so you ready to wrap this up? You want to do some rapid fire? All right. What's your favorite movie?

Micah Woods: 1:34:58

That's a tough one for me, and the one that came to mind was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Trent Manning: 1:35:04

Oh, that's a classic.

Micah Woods: 1:35:06

That's a classic,

Trent Manning: 1:35:07

Yeah.

Micah Woods: 1:35:08

and I thought, you know, I could, that's a movie I could sit down and watch, and then watch again, and then watch again. That's the one that came to mind.

Trent Manning: 1:35:17

Awesome. I love it. What would be your last meal?

Micah Woods: 1:35:21

Um, that's a tough one because I eat a lot of good food but I'm American. I don't often get a really good cheeseburger and fries. And I think that's something that I've come to appreciate as I get older. I may just go for that because every time I have a good cheeseburger and fries it reminds me of home. Of my home.

Trent Manning: 1:35:43

Okay. Yeah. So what is your favorite cheeseburger and fries?

Micah Woods: 1:35:48

Oh it would be in some kind of local local kind of bar or bistro and yeah, something with something with onions and bacon. I think,

Trent Manning: 1:35:59

There you go.

Micah Woods: 1:36:00

But yeah, not I mean, it's not gonna be a Big Mac. I like a Big Mac but it would be something in a place with a wooden bar or I'm up on a one of those round tables and a Bar stool kind of place have some kind of nice beer and a nice ambience and just enjoyed a nice burger.

Trent Manning: 1:36:23

I love it. Well, if you're ever in Atlanta, you hit me up. We'll go find a nice

Micah Woods: 1:36:27

we'll go find out. I bet we can. They're not too hard to find in, in, in many parts of America, but I generally avoid them in When I'm outside of it is like, if we go to Atlanta, I don't really wanna have sushi, but if I'm in Tokyo, I'm happy to have sushi.

Trent Manning: 1:36:43

Oh yeah.

Micah Woods: 1:36:44

but because I spend so little time in the US when I go there, I really cherish having a, just a really nice burger. I'm like,

Trent Manning: 1:36:50

I love it.

Micah Woods: 1:36:51

That's, that was so good.

Trent Manning: 1:36:54

What are you most proud of?

Micah Woods: 1:36:56

Um, I think I've come to realize over the years that some of my work has been. It's things that people can utilize and helps them do their job. In a more efficient way or get good results with the grass. So for me I'm really proud of stuff like MLSN for nutrient recommendations, being somebody who's promoted clipping volume that now people use to get really good results and stuff like the OM246 testing. And just the overall philosophy that I've been able to share about turfgrass management. Um, I'm. It's very satisfying for me to see that this has been used all over the world and people get good results with it. And to realize that I had a small part in that's pretty cool.

Trent Manning: 1:37:43

That is awesome. Yeah. I mean, how great is that? I love it man. That is, that's really good stuff. If you can't be proud of that, what can you be proud of, right?

Micah Woods: 1:37:52

well, it's just, you know, I don't want to be too proud and too certain that this is the best way to do it. I always have to be questioning myself, right, because I hate to be giving advice that would steer anybody in the wrong direction. Um, so, so I'm proud of this, but also. Try to be humble enough and questioning myself and saying, okay what do we need to do to make sure that the recommendations continue to work in the, you know, going forward? Because like I said, you know, I did that 180 degree complete reversal on how I think about sand. I'm not saying we don't need sand, but I used to recommend sand on a calendar schedule, annual totals. You need to hit these minimum values. And now I'm wow. Why did you put that sand? I asked that question a lot and it's more like how can we get away with as little sand as possible? So I've flipped on that and I'm proud of that too. I'm happy to admit that I learned something and I think my current recommendation is way better than my previous recommendation. And I just, yeah I'm proud of what the impact that this kind of stuff has had, but I want to keep going and continue to do better.

Trent Manning: 1:39:07

I think that's what makes us human. Right. I mean, you know, we're constantly learning. Yeah. We're constantly learning.

Micah Woods: 1:39:15

yeah. And everybody's trying to do their best. And yeah, we just, yeah, it's a big mess, but we just keep going. That's what makes us human.

Trent Manning: 1:39:23

That's right. I love it. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. I've thoroughly enjoyed this. We went an hour and 45 minutes. That's a lot longer than I normally go. But it's, I mean, we've had a lot of fun. I mean, no, don't apologize at all. Cause I mean, this has been a blast and I think the listeners will love it. And if they don't, okay. Cause I've had a good time and I hope you have too. Yeah. Could you tell the listeners how they could get ahold of you, reach out to you on Twitter or something like that.

Micah Woods: 1:39:53

Yeah. Well, you can Google my name and it will turn up. I would recommend go to my website, asianturfgrass. com and there's an about page there. That has a little bio sketch and it's got a link to all my social media channels or email or whatever so if you want to get in touch with me or tell me that i'm completely wrong or Tell share some case study or story with me of like yeah I cut back on the sand and the grass has never been better. I would love to hear both that I'm wrong or that I'm right and through that I can learn. So you can get in touch with me through my website, AsianTurfCrafts. com.

Trent Manning: 1:40:34

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Micah Woods: 1:40:37

You are welcome. Thanks for having me.

Trent Manning: 1:40:50

Thank you so much for listening to the Reel turf techs podcast. I hope you learned something today. Don't forget to subscribe. If you have any topics you'd like to discuss, or you'd like to be a guest, find us on Twitter at Reel turf techs.