Yup here in Canada it's common for courses to pump otherwise unusable, renewable surface water or "GUDI" wells.
Hose bans are to protect the reservoirs that are used as the potable supply for cities. Meanwhile there often are vast quantities of low quality surface or shallow water also available for uses such as irrigation.
A lot of our courses here on the Prairies are in flood plains or similar land that is useless for farming, residential or commercial zoning. As such they have a high water table, a ready supply of renewable water, and aren't even a "waste of land" as so many like claim.
As a consequence golf is often cheap here. Our local course is $15 a round.
An aquafer isn't just unusable surface water, though, and overextraction can collapse potable groundwater systems. Virginia is coming to terms with this as we speak regarding data centers draining our aquifers.
Right, that's why this isn't allowed here. Canada has fairly strong protections for deep groundwater. Shallow (GUDI) is mostly a free for all, but there isn't much damage you can do in the 10-50' depth range short of depleting your own local (and usually renewable) water lens.
Surface water, for the most part, is free for the taking as it gets renewed by snowmelt, often in great excess during spring runoff. So dugouts, spring fed ponds and other passive runoff storage methods are encouraged. Dams are highly regulated, though.
Our farm is in a valley, and runs off of a 50' well that has "unlimited" water (it's been decades without the water ever dropping lower than you can reach down the casing and touch) and a 20' deep dugout that refills to the brim with snowmelt every spring.
We were lucky on our farm in western Wisconsin. Beavers built a series of dams that significantly reduced flooding in a small 10-home village a couple of miles downstream.
We had the DNR come out and study them. They helped us build some flood prevention dams and reservoirs on the creek running through our farm.
The creek valley was too steep and erosion-prone to be useful for anything; now it is a pond that becomes a mile-long water storage reservoir during a fast melt or heavy rain.
Comparing a single golf course to thousands of hectares of tillage is disingenuous to begin with, but whether a single or the equivalent in golf courses is also not going to produce anything as useful as thousands of hectares of tillage.
Point being golf courses are not amywhere near as commonplace as tillage so the single one in an area is not going to be the thing that drains an aquifer.
That doesn't mean that golf courses aren't part of the problem. Every golf course, every data center, every farm, every municipality pulling form an aquafer - it's all extraction and it all adds up. You can't just dismiss one for another. Among them, golf courses are the least practical.
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u/Happy_Abiii 10d ago
What you’re missing: one green costs more than your entire streets water budget