Each month two speakers presenting at the 2020 National SFMA Conference and Exhibition in West Palm Beach, Florida will be featured. Don’t miss the educational opportunities offered at the conference!
John Mascaro is the President of Turf-Tec International. On Tuesday, January 14, he will be presenting “John Mascaro’s Photo Quiz Comes Alive.”
This is a live version of the Photo Quiz article that has appeared each month in Golf Course Management Magazine since September 2002 and SportsTurf Magazine since 2006. With over 564 photos that have appeared in the magazines since their inception, I have many great situations to choose from. The live Photo Quiz is an interactive presentation with questions on what caused a particular turfgrass problem and an answer that tells what the problem was and how it was solved. In this live presentation additional photographs are also used that are not published in the magazines because of size limitations. This session will show common and uncommon problems that occur on golf courses and athletic fields and how superintendents and sports turf managers deal with these problems. The Photo Quiz is one of the member’s favorite features in the magazine, and the live version is a real audience pleaser as it shows “the rest of the story”.
Brad Park is a Research and Outreach Agronomist at Rutgers University. On Tuesday, January 14, he will be presenting “Recent Traffic Stress Tolerance Research at Rutgers University.”
The Rutgers Center for Turfgrass Science continues to assess the wear and traffic tolerance of existing tall fescue and Kentucky bluegrass cultivars and new experimental selections due to the frequent establishment of these species on sports fields. The Center has previously studied mixtures of tall fescue and Kentucky bluegrass and compared machines used to apply wear and traffic stresses to turfgrass research plots. The presenter will describe research results generated from these trials and the practical implications of this research relative to the challenges faced by sports field managers.
Objectives of the presentation:
1: The attendee will be provided background on how turfgrass traffic stress research is performed in University research trials with an emphasis on the machines and evaluation methods used at Rutgers University.
2: The attendee will be able to identify specific cultivars of tall fescue and Kentucky bluegrass that have demonstrated superior turfgrass quality, lower disease susceptibility, and improved traffic stress tolerance at Rutgers and in other University research trials.
3: The attendee will be able to better understand how mixtures of tall fescue and Kentucky bluegrass perform over time and how cultivar selection impacts mixture performance.
