The single most important conversation in modern course agronomy is not, as is often supposed, about the carbon footprint of the maintenance fleet, or the embodied energy of an irrigation system, or the genetics of disease resistance. It is about grass selection. Specifically: about whether to plant fescue.
Fescue is the fine-leaf grass that built the original game. It is what the Scottish links are. It is what the Yorkshire moors are. It is what most of Northern Europe’s great inland courses are. It is also — and this is the part rarely discussed in Japan — what could plausibly survive a Hokkaido summer better than the bentgrass we currently rely on, and what could spare a Kansai course thirty per cent of its annual water bill. It uses, depending on the climate, between one-third and one-fifth of the water of a bentgrass or Bermuda fairway. It runs fast. It plays firm. It needs almost no fungicide. It is the right answer to almost every question that the next fifty years of climate stress will ask of a Japanese golf course.
And — this is the part nobody likes — it does not look like the lawn at your house. It looks like a moor. It browns in late summer. It goes silver in the wind. It does not stripe.
A fescue fairway uses a third of the water of a bentgrass one. Sometimes a fifth.
In a world where the membership has been trained, by sixty years of televised major championships and by every glossy real-estate brochure, to expect that a fairway should be a uniform emerald rug, fescue is a hard sell. It is the correct one. The Guide will be making it.
The Sustainability Award this year will recognise a Japanese course doing the slow, hard, unglamorous work of converting to fine fescue — there are now four of them, mostly in Hokkaido and northern Honshu. The work is generational. The water case for it is non-negotiable. The aesthetic case for it is, in my view, even stronger. We will publish a fuller piece on this in the autumn.