Mike Richardson

Head covers are useless - my driver gets all of its damage when I am swinging it!!

Great to be in Portland to speak at the @OregonGCSA meeting! Got to visit Lake Oswego CC and stay at Waverley CC. Always learning!!

Recognition well deserved. The @OregonGCSA just awarded Brian McDonald of Oregon State University with the Richard Malpas Distinguished Service Award! @osubeaverturf

In 1870, if you took a spade to the ground in Iowa, or Nebraska, or eastern Kansas, you could push it in to the haft and not hit anything that wasn't soil. Six feet of topsoil. Black, friable, alive. The richest agricultural earth on the planet, by a margin so absurd that European visitors with farming backgrounds went silent when they saw it turned over. Most arable land on Earth carries between one and eight inches of topsoil. The Great Plains carried seventy-two. Nobody had ploughed it. Nobody had fertilised it. Nobody had irrigated it. It had been built, slowly and completely, by something else. Stand back from the spade. Stand back from the field. Stand back far enough to see the continent. A herd of bison, fifty miles wide, takes five days to pass the hillside you are standing on. Colonel Dodge recorded this in Arkansas in 1871, and he was not the only one. From the top of Pawnee Rock the herd ran to the horizon in every direction at once. The earth, observers wrote, trembled at three miles. Sixty million animals. The largest gathering of large mammals the planet has ever held. They had been doing this for ten thousand years. The grass grew tall because the bison grazed it hard and moved on. Their hooves broke the crust for seed. Their wallows held the rain. Their dung fed the microbes. Their carcasses fed them harder. The deep-rooted prairie grasses, big bluestem, switchgrass, Indian grass, drove their roots fifteen feet down, locking carbon into the soil at a depth no plough would ever reach. The bison built the six feet of black earth. The bison were why it existed. Then the hide market arrived. Five thousand bison a day, shot from train windows, left to rot. The U.S. government encouraged it openly, because starving the Plains nations was cheaper than fighting them. By 1889, of the sixty million, five hundred and forty-one remained. The plough followed within a decade. The grass was turned under. The hooves and the wallows and the dung had stopped. The soil, untethered from the system that built it, dried. In April 1935 it rose into the sky as a black wall a thousand miles wide and travelled to the Atlantic. Six feet of soil, built over ten millennia, blown into the sea in a generation. There is no putting the bison back at that scale. The cow is the closest analogue the continent has. Run her like a bison, on grass, on the move, in a tight mob. Watch what the land does.

@JeffSmithGolf Where does Chamblee come up with these gems? "Long gone" sounds a lot better than "ZERO highlight reel putts in majors" like he has...

“The days of Cam Smith making highlight reel putts in majors is long gone. LIV Golf ruined his career.” - Brandel Chamblee Also: Cam Smith today at the PGA CHAMPIONSHIP (a “major”) making a highlight reel putt.

@golfman60 It would do fine here in a lawn. Seems like I remember some winterkill on it 20+ years ago when we had it mowed at 0.5 inch…

@ArkansasTurf How would Empire Zoysia do?

Centipede grass - I have never recommended it in NW Arkansas, but this patch has been in place for 4 years, no winter injury, and continues to perform well and spread into the fescue. Very low maintenance!! #springturfobservations

An update on my centipede patch 6+ weeks later!! #springturfobservations

The Kentucky 31 tall fescue in the foreground is not like the Kentucky bluegrass behind, but it is still a well-adapted grass in the Ozarks. #springturfobservations

@KCseaweed @ventrac @PurdueTurfDoc If it’s my law,,,

@ArkansasTurf @ventrac @PurdueTurfDoc I thought it was “Richardson’s Law”🤷‍♂️

When mowing, the 1/3 rule is a “rule of thumb”, not a “rule of law”…

Well done Sam!!

I love #countryroads in Arkansas!!

@GreensPro Me too!!

@ArkansasTurf Doc, rewatch. Anthracnose is the only one I can identify with that scope. 😂😂😂😂😂😂

So, can you identify ANY disease except anthracnose with that microscope?? 😂

I planted these ryegrass plots last fall and have nurtured and mowed them since…proud of this work!!

Great turnout for our first turfgrass spring field day! Got chased early by the weather, but got most of the tour done and had some great interaction with our industry!!

Plots are looking DIALED IN for tomorrow’s Spring Turfgrass Field Day! We’ll be showing off winterkill, spring dead spot, overseeding, large patch, and many more trials. Hope to see you there! @ArkansasTurf @uarkhort @UarkTurf uada.formstack.com/forms/turfgras…

Great to have the @USGAGrnSection research committee in Fayetteville today to review our research. Always a learning experience for everyone involved. THANKS for your support!!

The orioles do like grape jelly and, apparently, so do red-bellied woodpeckers!! The orioles are such beautiful birds….

I wonder who figured out that orioles like orange slices and grape jelly?? They are like 8yr olds…

@szintri I spent this week in Padua, also teaching at the university where he spent many years as a professor…always an honor!

Today I taught class in the city where Galileo was born and held his first professorship. And for the past few days, I’ve had the best morning commute anyone could ask for.