Will Jobs Be Taken on Greens?

The area of my study is turfgrass. To be more specific, golf turf. When people talking about golf, then think we are working like this:

http://www.greenmakers.com.au/images/turf_maintenance_greenmakers2.jpg

Actually, we are working more like this:

http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/files/2012/07/countryclub.jpg

Nowadays, more and more machines are taking humans' job on the golf courses. They are faster, and of course, cheaper. However, the best courses are still maintained by hand. Take Scioto Country Club,where I did my internship for example. All the greens and tees are mowed by walk-behind mowers. All the 82 bunkers are hand-raked everyday(God, I remembered so clear!!) Fairways and roughs are mowed by machines, but all the divots are fixed by hand. As I recall, most of my time spent on the course was wandering around with a basket full of sand and seed mix, fixing divots all day long. Is it really necessary to do all these job by hand? Does it worth?

In Scioto Country Club, we have 4-5 long-term workers and 6-7 temporary workers in the summer breaker, which makes approximately 11-12 labors working for the course. Each of us get about $1500 per month, which means about $18,000 labor cost one month, 216,000 per year, not including the lunch fee, health insurance or other welfare.

While on a low maintained public golf course, the "green-keeper" group usually consists of 3-4 people. This leads to $72,000 per year of labor cost, about 1/3 of a labor intense golf course. And this all achieved by mechanization.

The cost of machines can be very high. For example, a new Toro Greenmaster Triplex reel mower would have a price about 20,000. However, to achieve the same work with hand, we need two walk-behind mowers, which is around 8,000 each. There is not much money saved on the equipment. By the way, a second-hand triplex could get a price at about $5,000 and a second hand walk mower 2,000, even less difference there.

Money is saved with machines and less labor work, but there are still courses use human hand to do the job, because definitely human are more flexible than machines. More detailed and fine job could be achieve with hands. This is what superintendents with too much money to spend on the course would think. But with the development of computers and the artificial intelligence, I wonder how long this advantage will last.

Every aspect in our world is getting more and more digital. So is the golf turf maintenance industry. Now it is not that obvious, but we should be well prepared that one day mowers with GPS with positioning and navigation system will take our job. There are already some computer and mechanic geeks working on this project. What should we do then? Just remember it is always better to keep your eyes open, because  with the power of the information exchange capacity of the Internet, everyday is a new era.