Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 February 1920 — POPULAR IMPRESSION OF SHEEP IS ERROR [ARTICLE]

POPULAR IMPRESSION OF SHEEP IS ERROR

Grazing Animals on Golf Courses Is Poor Practice. Practically All of- Big Clubs in land Regret Making Experiment to Help Increase Food Supplies During the War. To the question of whether golf courses benefit by allowing sheep to graze on them comes from England an emphatic negative. In the early da vs of golf the belief was generally accepted that sheep were good for the courses, but in the process of time it was discovered that drives through the green could be made just as good in places where it was impossible or inconvenient to graze sheep as on regular sheep runs. The war revealed the whole truth about the effect exercised by sheep on turf used for golf. Many clubs did their bit during the war to increase the food supplies of the country, either by doing sheep farming themselves or by allowing neighboring farmers to graze sheep over their courses. Practically all of them, according to London Field, have cause to regret the necessity of making the experiment. Sheep do little harm, if no positive good, says the Field, on genuine links, such as St. Andrews, For one thing, the constant stream of players at St. Andrews drives them to the less fre--quented spaces during the hours of daylight. On a rich clay soil, which might be warranted* to crop thirty hundredweight of hay to the acre in an average year?"they may even do some good by/fining down the growth of grass. But it is a great mistake to introduce sheep on those courses which, if they are not quite the real thing, form the best substitute for a seaside links. Such courses are carved by ingenious architects to the order of’capitalist committees out of heathery wastes or virgin forests. It is highly important to keep the fairways and putting greens poor when once they have been constructed. Not a few greens in their anxiety to get a new course ready for play at the earliest possible moment, have, exceeded .in the use of manure and top dressing. As a result the water does not drain away from the surface so quickly as it should In winter, and in summer the soil is capable of becoming hard baked.