The crew at Estes Park Golf Course must regularly stir the compost piles and add water to them. Photo by John Feeney
Everybody knows you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken droppings, but it turns out it’s possible to make something quite useful out of a poop of a different stripe.
John Feeney, GCSAA Class A superintendent at Estes Park (Colo.) Golf Course and 25-year GCSAA member, has been “blessed” with literal (blank-)tons of elk poop deposited around the courses’ 27 holes over the years. Until recently, his only recourse was to scoop the poop, toss it into 30-yard dumpsters and landfill it. The course toyed with the idea of using the plentiful poop as a soil amendment, but soon discovered, Feeney says, that, “Elks’ stomachs are so efficient, there really aren’t any nutrients left in their pellets. It was useless. So, we’d rent dumpsters, fill them with pine needles and elk crap and haul it off to the landfill.”
Fed up with the ungulates’ fecal follies, Feeney a few years ago decided to find a way to make his scat situation more manageable.
He found the magic formula by mixing the problematic poop in roughly equal portions with grass clippings collected from greens, approaches and tees; aeration cores; pine needles and pinecones; and spent grains from the nearby Lumpy Ridge Brewery. The compost then can be run through a soil shredder.
“There’s not a lot of topsoil in Estes Park,” Feeney says. “The golf course is built on the side of a mountain. Our root zone is very shallow, and we’ve had a lot of challenges.”
Among the greatest agronomic challenges he faces is keeping the annual bluegrass fairways alive over the winter. That’s where the compoopst comes in. Feeney takes the compost and uses it to topdress his most exposed fairways, and, he says, “Last winter, we realized topdressing with the compost gave us a good product in the spring.”
At just under 8,000 feet, Estes Park Golf Course is seasonal. It’s open May 1-Oct. 31. The elk are seasonal, too, and from September through April, Feeney says, 200-300 elk make themselves at home on the course, before they move back up to higher elevations.
Spring is prime poop time.
“Historically, we send out core harvesters every spring, and it’s wall to wall elk crap,” says Feeney, who has been at Estes Park about 11 years.
The key is the composting. The course crew collects the ingredients in the composting area in piles 4 feet high and 50 feet long.
“Moisture is important,” Feeney says. “We’re a dry climate up here, so you have to add water. And you let it sit there. You go in with a backhoe or a skid steer and turn that pile every couple of weeks and add water to it and keep turning it, trying to get it to heat up enough it breaks down those elk pellets.”
There are two prime poop seasons at Estes Park GC — spring, after the elk had spent all winter there, and in the fall, when they begin to migrate back down.
“If we sweep the course in April, by June we’ve got a good product,” Feeney says. “In the fall, between now (mid-August) and October, we’ll be cleaning fairways, and we hope to have a product from the stuff we’re picking up now by Nov. 1, in time to run it through the shredder and have it ready to topdress fairways for winter.”
Feeney uses most of the compost on the course, but because the Estes Park Recreation and Park District also operates campgrounds, parks, ballfields and a marina, some of it finds its ways to other properties.
“But it’s pretty valuable to me,” Feeney says. “The biggest benefit we’ve seen is literally burying our fairways in the fall.”
And when he says bury, he’s not kidding. Feeney estimates he can create nearly 70 cubic yards of the stuff in a year, and when he’s done topdressing his “worst” fairways, they’re blackened with a ½ inch to ¾ inch of the topdressing.
“When I think about how much turf we used to lose … the difference now is remarkable,” Feeney says.
Feeney had tried other similar approaches, from pigments to straight sand topdressing to sand/compost mixes, but they all cost money. Feeney estimates it would have cost $40,000 to $50,000 to sand topdress 18 fairways to the depth he’d need.
Feeney had the compost tested before putting it out, and, well, it’s no miracle amendment.
“There’s not a lot of N-P-K in it,” Feeney says of the fertilizer triumvirate of nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium. “But it does two things: It insulates and protects the crown of the plant; and the dark color heats that soil up much quicker than fairways that weren’t treated. When we’re opening the course up before it’s ready, anything you can do to heat those soil temps up gives them that little bit of an advantage. You could have that same effect with straight topsoil, but this stuff is free. We’re pretty excited with what we’ve done. Elk are the team’s nemesis up here. They ruin greens, poop all over the golf course. Sometimes it seems all we’re doing is repairing greens and picking up after them. Now we’re able to take what they leave behind and return it to the golf course.”
Andrew Hartsock is GCM’s editor-in-chief.