For Natural Golf Courses

It's microbes, stupid! That was the consensus among scientists, "green guerrillas," and manufacturers of "microbial inoculants" who attended a seminar at the Southampton Publick House on Tuesday. The seminar concerned non-chemical alternatives to controlling pests and diseases in vegetation - golf course grasses, specifically.

The seminar was organized by Bob Ratcliffe, owner of The Hole Nine Yards, a Bridgehampton company that specializes in golf course maintenance. The superintendents of three area links were present.

Pete Smith of Shinnecock Hills Golf Club said he was not attending "to endorse, or not to endorse" the organic approach to controlling golf course blights.

For Coexistence

Carl Olsen of the National Golf Links of America, also in Southampton, said his links had been working "to coexist with the environment for over 11 years."

"We're on the edge of the bays in Noyac and we've made buffer zones around the ponds, and we want to [protect] people and animals," he said. "We work with the soil and its chemistry in order to reduce the amount of pesticides."

Bob Ranum of the Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton also spoke of a commitment to "do everything we can to not use pesticides. We don't want to stock chemicals on the premises. We want to be curative, not just preventative."

Difficult Alternatives

Scientists, including Dr. Eric Nelson of Cornell University and Dr. Thomas Yamashita of the Sunburst Plant Disease Clinic of California, agreed that alternatives to the "silver bullet" fertilizers and pesticides developed after World War II were not easy to use, required a knowledge of biology, and did not achieve results overnight.

Not discussed outright during the lunch and seminar was the growing concern among environmentalists that golf course chemicals contributed to increased cancer rates. Neal Lewis of the Long Island Neighborhood Network, a consortium of environmental and cancer-prevention advocates, came to support the trend toward chemical alternatives.

Holistic Revolution

Bill Myers of the Florida-based company Green Releaf likened the revolution in links care to the holistic approach to medicine, one which aimed at precluding the need for powerful medicines with side effects.

Cornell's Dr. Nelson said that the "explosion" in the bio-control ap proach began early this decade when, for one thing, it was realized that the growing of turf, as in golf courses, represented the greatest use of fungicides, followed by peanut and orange growing.

Dr. Nelson said experiments showed that weaning away from fungicide use required soil that not only contained the right nutrients, but, more importantly, was rich in microbial activity.

The key to assuring such activitywas to manage the environment so it favored good microbes over pathogens, and this was helped by the use of microbial inoculants, the introduction into soil of helpful microbes.

Watch For Snake Oil

"There are many good [products] but there is snake oil, too," he warned. "You have to be biologists, and you have to ask good questions" of the suppliers, he said. Dr. Nelson said composts (mixtures of plant and leaf cuttings and manures) were also effective "biological amendments."

Dr. Yamashita, who said his interest in the bio-control field began on his family fruit farm, said current approaches to farming would not be able to support the 117- million-person increase in the human population each year.

But, he added, microbial technology would go a long way toward preventing the 40-percent loss in crops to disease each season. Creating strong soil was the best prevention, he said, adding that what made a soil healthy in one place was not what worked in another. "You must mount specific programs."

A Tree-Hugger

Mr. Myers of Green Releaf characterized himself as one who had never been environmentally conscious, but had grown "passionate" about the bio-control revolution. The 50 or so attendees laughed when he said, "I'm getting to be a tree-hugger."

He added that more companies like his were coming. He welcomed them, he said, because there was plenty of room. "Thirty-five billion dollars-worth of chemical control products are sold each year."