Science and Technology for Canadians

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Summary

It's hard to picture a golf course as a microcosm of the urban environment, but that's what Cindy Grant sees at the Clear Lake golf course at Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. The course's waste generation from the restaurant, groundskeeping and toilets closely resembles the waste streams of city living, which makes the links ideal for Dr. Grant's composting experiments. With colleagues at the University of Manitoba, she's recycling the wastes as compost to fertilize the fairways.

The ultimate goal of the experiment is to come up with a method that can be used on a larger scale to enrich agricultural land with municipal wastes. Meanwhile, Cindy is looking at a number of issues such as how much compost to use and its impact on nutrient and heavy metal content of plants and soils. In the short term, the study will help golf courses reduce their fertilizer loads, and in the long term, it will help reduce urban wastes destined for landfill sites.

Transcript of Video

Jay Ingram
Golf courses are popping up all across the country... lush, beautifully manicured expanses of grass. But those rolling green hills sometimes come at a price. The chemicals being used to maintain them can harm waterways and human health if they aren't properly managed. Now one Canadian scientist is trying to get golf courses back on a healthier, more natural diet.

Jay Ingram
Golf courses around the world have the reputation of being environmental villains, often clearing out fragile ecosystems and dumping fertilizer into soil and water systems. At the Clear Lake golf course in Riding Mountain National Park, scientists and golf course managers are trying out some new groundskeeping ideas with a focus on compost.

Dr. Cindy Grant
What we are trying to do here is incorporate different compost streams into a composting system for the golf course.

This is really an interesting situation here because there's three basic streams of compost coming here; there's the restaurant compost, and then there's the waste that's coming off the golf course in terms of grass, and leaves and clippings, and then there's also the Port-O-Potties. And these three waste streams are sort of like a microcosm of an urban society.

Jay Ingram
Food waste, plant waste, and material from composting toilets are all being collected and recycled into compost to fertilize the course. The idea is to come up with a technique that can be applied on a much larger scale... composting urban waste and using that in agriculture.

But first, Grant and composting engineers from the University of Manitoba need to identify exactly what nutrients the grasses and soils need.

Dr. Cindy Grant
We're trying to see what sort of nutrient balance we need, we're trying to see when the nutrients are released, we're trying to see where in the soil profile these nutrients, primarily nitrogen, ends up so the distribution of the nitrogen through the profile... what sort of carryover we get and how much ends up in the plant.

Jay Ingram
Nitrogen is one the main chemicals being studied, and can be an excellent fertilizer, but once it's in the ground, it travels with water from irrigation or rain, into groundwaters, lakes and streams. As these nitrogen or nitrate levels become more concentrated, they can become toxic.

In situations where very high levels of nitrate get into drinking water, it poses a serious threat to infants and livestock.

Dr. Cindy Grant
One thing with inorganic fertilizer is that they are, unless you use slow release fertilizers, the nutrients from inorganic fertilizers are released fairly rapidly, and so you get a flush nitrogen becoming available, and so you have to keep re-applying, and what we are trying to do, basically, is match the nitrogen release to the utilization of the nitrogen by the plants, so there's no buildup in the soil. If it builds up in the soil, it can move through the soil into the groundwater, or if it's at the surface, it can run off into waterways.

Jay Ingram
Another concern is that plants might also accumulate heavy metals, like cadmium, from the compost. These heavy metals are present naturally in the soil, but as more and more compost is applied, plants and grasses can draw in too much of them. That's a big concern in agricultural systems, like pasture lands. These same heavy metals might concentrate in the grasses eaten by cattle or other livestock, and be passed on into food products.

Research continues this winter, and the project will run for the next two or three years. Scientists hope that eventually compost generated onsite will be the only fertilizer needed at the golf course, and if all goes well, they plan to expand the experiment beyond the golf course, to agricultural systems, like pastures and forage grasses.

Dr. Cindy Grant
We can take this information and apply it to say, a grazing system, where there are cattle that might be consuming the grass, and so we are taking some of the information that we get here on the golf course, and sort of extrapolating it to a forage system where maybe we would want to put compost onto a pasture system that's maybe outside of an urban centre.

Jay Ingram
Using urban compost for agriculture offers a double advantage. It cuts down on how much waste we dump in landfills, and it reduces the need for potentially harmful inorganic fertilizers.

Dr. Cindy Grant
Basically, if it's a source of nutrients that can be provided to the producer at a reasonable price, where they could utilize it effectively, they would probably be happy to use it.

Jay Ingram
Today's Earth Tones was produced with the help of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.