In my earlier post, I mentioned I had a lot of time off this past Winter. I spent that time reading and by that, I mean a lot of reading. I'm not the fastest reader in the world and like to read every article word by word and each magazine from cover to cover. I always set out to skim articles, but tend to revert back to old habits. Just like everyone else, I manage to lose my focus when something is written that causes my mind to wonder to circumstances that affect my life and or work. I would like to share some of those with you. Just a sampling of some of the nuggets I picked up.
"You can cut costs only to zero. After that, you must actually make money."
- Henry DeLozier
"This is survival of the fittest time, folks. The smart will live and dumb will die. And please God, let the dumb die soon for they hurt all of us through discounting, poor service and turning people away from the game by treating customers like crap."
- Pat Jones
"It's what you learn After you know it all that matters most."
-Ken Magnum
I also picked this up in my reading this winter. I've been concerned about this "pay me now, or pay me latter" agronomically for some time as budget cuts plunged most courses into survival mode.
"The take home message is that changes in your N fertilization program my not be obvious for many years. For example, if next year we reduced the double N rate treatment to the same rate as the half N rate treatment, the turfgrass visual quality and color would not drastically change because soil N can make up the difference for several years. Eventually the soil N bank will go broke and the greens will struggle to recover from stress and wear. When the problem finally is noticed several years later, it wouldn't be obvious that low N fertilization caused the greens to decline because the fertility had been the same (low) for many years while the greens performed well."
- Dr. Doug Soldat
"Experience breeds Instinct!"
-Ken Smith
Let's hope so! Lets pray we have a "normal" year so that my instincts can serve me well. I do not need the unpredictable curve balls thrown at us by Mother Nature as she has over past three years. I'll need them to as the fairway puddles have turned to frozen lakes after all the rain of last weekend. Arrgh! _Mk
