Thirsty Industries: Golf Courses

From ten thousand metres the Californian desert east of San Diego is brown in every direction, creased with dry washes, and in the middle of it is a green shape the size of a small town: fairways looping between rows of houses, a lake or two, palms, and the darker green of the putting surfaces. It is a golf community, and the pattern repeats across the American Southwest, the Gulf, Spain's coast and the edges of every dry city that has money. The game that began on the sandy, rain fed links of the Scottish coast became, in the twentieth century, a lawn fifty hectares wide, kept green through a desert summer, and that lawn is the thirstiest single thing in most of the towns that have one.

This article is about what a golf course waters and how much, where the water comes from in the places where it matters, what the industry has done to cut the number, and why the game keeps ending up in the argument about a city's water.

Fifty hectares of lawn

A full course is about fifty to sixty hectares, of which thirty to forty are irrigated: the fairways, the greens, the tees and the rough beside them, planted in grasses chosen to be mown short and walked on, which are the same grasses as a garden lawn and want the same water. The lawns article on this site has the arithmetic for one lawn: in a hot dry climate, grass kept green needs one and a half to two metres of water a year, applied by sprinkler at night, most of which goes into the air through the leaves. A course is that arithmetic multiplied by thirty hectares. In the Coachella Valley, the stretch of desert east of Palm Springs that has more than a hundred and twenty courses, the water district's own figure is about a million gallons a day per course in the summer, close to four thousand cubic metres, which is the water of a town of ten thousand people. Across the year it comes to several hundred thousand cubic metres a course.

In a wet climate the numbers collapse. A course in England or Ohio is rained on for most of what it needs and irrigates the greens and tees in a dry spell; a links course on the Scottish coast, where the game was invented on grass that grew by itself on sand dunes, is watered by the weather and gets a hose on the greens. The water question about golf is almost entirely a question about the places the game moved to.

Where the water comes from

A desert course needs a source, and the sources are the ones the places articles on this site keep meeting. In the Coachella Valley the courses drew for decades on the aquifer under the valley, which fell by tens of metres as the courses, the farms and the resorts multiplied, until the district began piping Colorado river water from the canal into the aquifer to refill it and into the courses directly, so that the valley's golf is now partly the Colorado's water, shared with Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Mexico. In Las Vegas the courses were on the city's drinking water until the water authority put each one on a water budget, about six acre feet per irrigated acre a year and falling, with fines above it and payments for every square metre of turf removed, and the courses took out their roughs and kept their fairways. In Arizona and much of Florida the courses run on treated sewage from the town, the purple pipe of the greywater article on this site, which is the one use of a golf course that makes a water engineer happy: a lawn that takes the effluent a river would otherwise have had to. In the Gulf the courses are desalinated seawater and treated sewage in roughly equal shares, which the Dubai article describes, and in Spain's Costa del Sol they are the reason the coast's reservoirs are argued over every dry summer.

Cutting the number

The industry has cut its water, and more than most. The superintendents' association's surveys put American courses at about two billion gallons a day in 2005 and about a fifth less by 2013, and the desert courses have done better than the average. The methods are the ones a city uses. Turf is removed where nobody plays: the roughs between fairways go to gravel, native scrub or bare sand, which the Las Vegas courses have done by the hectare. The sprinklers are replaced with heads that water the fairway and not the cart path, run by a computer that reads a weather station on the course and an array of soil moisture sensors, and that waters at three in the morning when the evaporation is lowest. The grasses are changed to ones that go brown in winter without dying, so that a course that used to overseed every autumn for a green December lets the fairways rest. And the source is switched, wherever a town's treatment plant is near enough, from drinking water to effluent, which leaves the volume unchanged and takes it out of the city's supply. A desert course built in 2020 uses about half the water of one built in 1990, and the one built in 1990 has usually been made over.

The links and the coast

The game's own history is the counter example. The links courses of Scotland and Ireland were laid out on the strip of dunes between the farmland and the sea, on sandy ground that drained too fast to farm and grew a fine, tough grass by itself, grazed by sheep and rabbits, and the first courses were simply paths through it with a hole cut where the ground was flat. The Old Course at St Andrews has been played for five hundred years on grass the rain grew, and it is still fed almost entirely by the weather: the greens and tees are watered in a dry spell, from a borehole, and the fairways are left to go the colour the summer makes them, which the televised tournaments in a hot July show as brown and fast and which the players regard as the game as it should be. A links course uses a tenth of a desert course's water and in a wet year close to none, and the lesson the game's governing bodies have drawn from it, in their guidance for the next decade, is to stop expecting a course to look like a lawn.

The coast of Spain is the other model. The Costa del Sol has about seventy courses in a province with a few hundred millimetres of rain, built for the northern European winter visitor, and the regional law has required them since the 1990s to irrigate with treated sewage from the coastal towns wherever a plant is near enough, so that most of them now run on effluent with a desalination plant as the dry year's backup. In the Catalan drought of 2024 the courses around Barcelona were ordered to water only the greens, and the fairways went brown; the Barcelona article on this site has the rest of that summer. The game adapted in both places by changing what a course is allowed to look like, which turned out to be the cheapest water measure of all.

The argument

What remains is the argument, and it is about priorities rather than engineering. A course is a visible use of water in a place short of it: a hundred and twenty green rectangles in a brown valley, a lake in a desert city, a sprinkler running at night past a sign asking residents to shorten their showers. The game's answer is that golf is a small share of a region's water, which is true, that it pays for its water at a rate the farms do not, which is usually true, and that a course on effluent is a service to the town, which is sometimes true. The city's answer, in the dry years, is that the course is the lawn it has asked everyone else to give up, and in Cape Town, in Las Vegas, in the Coachella Valley and in Barcelona during the drought of 2024, the courses were among the first users to be cut, ordered onto effluent, or told to let the fairways go brown. The best courses have stopped arguing and built the argument into the course: fairways in a strip of green and everything else the colour of the desert, which is also, as it happens, what the links courses looked like in 1850.

What it teaches

Golf is the industry on this site whose water is a landscape. The course drinks what a lawn drinks, which the lawns and the pool articles on this site have measured, multiplied by thirty hectares and placed, more often than not, in the one climate where a lawn makes no sense. The volume is small beside irrigation or a power station; the visibility is total, and the visibility is what has driven the industry to cut its water faster than most. A course on a city's effluent, with its roughs in gravel and its sprinklers under a computer, is a reasonable use of water. A course on a desert aquifer, overseeded green for the winter visitors, is the lawn argument at its largest, and the cities around it have begun to say so.

A million gallons a day in a Coachella summer, a fifth less than in 2005, and a game that began on grass the rain grew by itself.