Quail Hollow, the home of next year’s PGA Championship, isn’t just a golf course. It’s a rare green space in a growing city, and the people in charge of it don’t take that responsibility lightly.
On a Sunday evening in mid-August next year, a golf ball will fly toward the 18th green at Quail Hollow Club in the final round of the PGA Championship. It might be a Titleist or a Callaway or a Taylor Made, but that’s not all that important. What’s important is that the ball will land because gravity says so, and when it does, it will press against the tips of Champion Ultradwarf Bermudagrass that came to Charlotte in a refrigerated truck from a Texas turf grass farm that used decades of genetic research to develop the grass. The Charlotte soil that received and accepted the Texas company’s genetically engineered Bermuda grass is some of the most nutrient-rich soil in the country. It’s a mixture of sand and blended soil and worm castings from a worm farm in Cheraw, South Carolina, about 70 miles southeast of Charlotte.
“Largest worm farm on the face of the earth,” says Ron Danise, the owner of Southern Organics. (He later corrects himself to say it’s definitely the largest in the country, but he’s not sure about the world.) “We can produce 50 tons of worm castings a day.”
And what are worm castings?
“Worm shit,” Danise says.
And what did the worms eat that helped them make all this, um, poop?
Glad you asked!
They ate compost that had been breaking down for 12 to 14 months. That compost was then mixed with other materials, such as hay scraps and other organic matter from Danise’s 560-acre organic farm. The vermi composting portion of the farm is a 385,000-square-foot, indoor facility that used to be a cotton mill. It’s now home to the European night crawlers that ate the compost that made the poop that gave the soil the nutrients it needed to house the grass that made the greens that will receive the ball that will win one of the biggest events in golf.
This story is from the October 2016 edition of Charlotte Magazine.
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This story is from the October 2016 edition of Charlotte Magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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