Mike Richardson

I get paid to watch grass grow - it's a tough job, but someone has to do it...

[Wendell Hutchens @HutchensWendell]

Highly active dollar spot losing the battle to potent fungicides. Dollar spot risk is currently through the roof in most of Arkansas. Time for effective fungicides at tightened intervals. Check the Smith-Kerns Model for current risk levels in your area! @KernsJim @ArkansasTurf

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

Head covers are useless - my driver gets all of its damage when I am swinging it!!

[Paul B. Hurst @GreensPro]

Journaling my fusterations with golf.

Thanks @mindfulsuper_ and Lyla concerned @DogsOfTurf

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

Great to be in Portland to speak at the @OregonGCSA meeting! Got to visit Lake Oswego CC and stay at Waverley CC. Always learning!!

[David Phipps @GCSAA_NW]

Recognition well deserved. The @OregonGCSA just awarded Brian McDonald of Oregon State University with the Richard Malpas Distinguished Service Award!
@osubeaverturf

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1870, if you took a spade to the ground in Iowa, or Nebraska, or eastern Kansas, you could push it in to the haft and not hit anything that wasn't soil.

Six feet of topsoil. Black, friable, alive. The richest agricultural earth on the planet, by a margin so absurd that European visitors with farming backgrounds went silent when they saw it turned over.

Most arable land on Earth carries between one and eight inches of topsoil. The Great Plains carried seventy-two.

Nobody had ploughed it. Nobody had fertilised it. Nobody had irrigated it. It had been built, slowly and completely, by something else.

Stand back from the spade. Stand back from the field. Stand back far enough to see the continent.

A herd of bison, fifty miles wide, takes five days to pass the hillside you are standing on. Colonel Dodge recorded this in Arkansas in 1871, and he was not the only one. From the top of Pawnee Rock the herd ran to the horizon in every direction at once. The earth, observers wrote, trembled at three miles.

Sixty million animals. The largest gathering of large mammals the planet has ever held. They had been doing this for ten thousand years.

The grass grew tall because the bison grazed it hard and moved on. Their hooves broke the crust for seed. Their wallows held the rain. Their dung fed the microbes. Their carcasses fed them harder. The deep-rooted prairie grasses, big bluestem, switchgrass, Indian grass, drove their roots fifteen feet down, locking carbon into the soil at a depth no plough would ever reach.

The bison built the six feet of black earth. The bison were why it existed.

Then the hide market arrived. Five thousand bison a day, shot from train windows, left to rot. The U.S. government encouraged it openly, because starving the Plains nations was cheaper than fighting them. By 1889, of the sixty million, five hundred and forty-one remained.

The plough followed within a decade.

The grass was turned under. The hooves and the wallows and the dung had stopped. The soil, untethered from the system that built it, dried.

In April 1935 it rose into the sky as a black wall a thousand miles wide and travelled to the Atlantic.

Six feet of soil, built over ten millennia, blown into the sea in a generation.

There is no putting the bison back at that scale.

The cow is the closest analogue the continent has. Run her like a bison, on grass, on the move, in a tight mob. Watch what the land does.

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

@JeffSmithGolf Where does Chamblee come up with these gems? "Long gone" sounds a lot better than "ZERO highlight reel putts in majors" like he has...

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

@golfman60 It would do fine here in a lawn. Seems like I remember some winterkill on it 20+ years ago when we had it mowed at 0.5 inch…

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

Centipede grass - I have never recommended it in NW Arkansas, but this patch has been in place for 4 years, no winter injury, and continues to perform well and spread into the fescue. Very low maintenance!! #springturfobservations

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

An update on my centipede patch 6+ weeks later!! #springturfobservations

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

The Kentucky 31 tall fescue in the foreground is not like the Kentucky bluegrass behind, but it is still a well-adapted grass in the Ozarks. #springturfobservations

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

@KCseaweed @ventrac @PurdueTurfDoc If it’s my law,,,

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

When mowing, the 1/3 rule is a “rule of thumb”, not a “rule of law”…

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

Well done Sam!!

[Samuel T. Kreinberg @samTURFkreinbrg]

Thrilled to announce the tests for our DGCI sprayer prototype have been published! It’s been an incredible journey seeing my first project through to completion!

A major thank you to all authors: @HutchensWendell, @ThatWeedsDoc, @ArkansasTurf, Jason Davis, and John McCalla

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

I love #countryroads in Arkansas!!

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

@GreensPro Me too!!

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

So, can you identify ANY disease except anthracnose with that microscope?? 😂

[Paul B. Hurst @GreensPro]

The Holy Trinity of Traits of a High Value Golf Course Turfgrass Sales Professional.

That hat and hoodie 🔥🔥🔥🔥@SyngentaTurf and @Aquatrols.

Lyla not having it @DogsOfTurf

#sales #golf #controversial

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

I planted these ryegrass plots last fall and have nurtured and mowed them since…proud of this work!!

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

Great turnout for our first turfgrass spring field day! Got chased early by the weather, but got most of the tour done and had some great interaction with our industry!!

[Wendell Hutchens @HutchensWendell]

Plots are looking DIALED IN for tomorrow’s Spring Turfgrass Field Day! We’ll be showing off winterkill, spring dead spot, overseeding, large patch, and many more trials. Hope to see you there! @ArkansasTurf @uarkhort @UarkTurf

https://t.co/TffqLBBcLV

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

Great to have the @USGAGrnSection research committee in Fayetteville today to review our research. Always a learning experience for everyone involved. THANKS for your support!!

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

The orioles do like grape jelly and, apparently, so do red-bellied woodpeckers!! The orioles are such beautiful birds….

[Mike Richardson @ArkansasTurf]

I wonder who figured out that orioles like orange slices and grape jelly?? They are like 8yr olds…