ALL ABOUT TURF series. Episode #1

In our 1st Episode, Dr. Fritz Lord, Global Crop Manager Turf at COMPO EXPERT Group @COMPO EXPERT GmbH, answers 2 questions about Turf.

1. Why is it important to have good quality sports and public green spaces?

2. Perfect TURF is “ART or SCIENCE”

Enjoy his answers on #K2MCTV

and let us know what you think in the comments section.

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QUESTION 1: Why is it important to have good quality sports and public green spaces?

Dr. Fritz Lord: ” Yes, of course, you know these final sentences after a match, for example, if a match was not so successful the trainer is telling you yeah it was the bad turf, it was the bad term, the turf was in a bad condition and that’s why it was not possible to win.

So, of course, it’s important to have good quality because yeah you can only play the sport on a very well maintained surface on a high-quality surface and think about golf, for example, it’s a very precise sport and the ball have to roll through and that’s why it’s very important to have a high quality to do all these things on a turf surface. In the public green area, we know that the impact of turf on the microclimate of a city is very important and you can also have these, or you can only have these benefits if you have plants of good quality so that they can do the whole metabolic system that they can do the photosynthesis and all these processes in the plant so we can only get the benefits from the plants from the turf areas if they are in a proper condition if they have a high quality.

QUESTION 2 : All right, so to my mind some people I discussed with, say having a perfect turf is an art and some others say that it’s just science. So is it an ART or a SCIENCE for you?

Huh, it’s a combination, it’s a very tricky question because what we know today is that it’s very difficult to maintain a professional turf area and the people who are doing that are called greenkeepers, so they try to keep it green and I can tell you that they all have a very very high standard of education. In the United States for example we have universities and they only focus on turf. In the UK they have a very high level of education in the greenkeeper segment and also in Germany we have greenkeeper schools, we have universities that are focused on that issue. So what we have learned is that turf is a complex system and correlated to a lot of factors and we have to understand turf more deeply to keep it on a high-quality standard and that’s why I would say a practical experience is very important to do your own experiences on your football pitch on your goal of course in the municipalities, but without signs, we will totally fail and there are a lot of challenges for the future and that’s why we need the signs of course and we need also the practical experiences.