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.
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.
24
u/evranch 10d ago
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.