From Farmland to Golf Course and Back Again
From the Northwest to the Midwest to the East Coast, golf is down and farms are up.
It’s not widely reported outside of golf circles, but the fact is: In almost every way, golf is a declining sport. The National Golf Foundation declared that, despite a not-insignificant rise in the number of female golfers, the total number of golfers in the US is down by a whopping 400,000 in the last year. Dick’s Sporting Goods sales are holding relatively steady except for golf (and hunting, but mostly golf); retail sales in the company’s Golf Galaxy stores were down more than 10 percent last year.
Most importantly for our purposes, more golf courses have closed than opened every year since 2006, meaning that the total number of golf courses has been decreasing for eight years. Hundreds of courses are closing every year. (The theories why this is happening range from the lack of a superstar, a la Tiger Woods, to the declining state of the American middle class.)
This leaves big chunks of fairly desirable land, carefully tended and often with water and electrical hookups, sitting unused, all around the country. And a curious thing has begun to happen: That land is being turned into farmland. This is not necessarily a given; farmland has been disappearing from both the US and Canada over the past decade, with arable land typically gobbled up by developers. The golf course conversions are an unexpected bright spot.
Some examples: James and Stephanie Lemon, of West Virginia, converted their failing nine-hole golf course into a working organic produce and egg farm in 2010. Dennis DeYoung is turning a Michigan golf course into a hog farm. And John Taylor is converting a frequently flooded golf course just outside Seattle back to the purpose it served before the course was built: a dairy farm.
Economically, this is a tricky decision; farmland is not a spectacular earner. (A 2015 study found that a high-productivity grain farm in Illinois would return about $244 per acre.) Converting the golf courses to farmland largely depends on zoning. For example, Taylor’s Washington conversion was valued at around $4.5 million as a residential plot, but will sell for more like $720,000 as agricultural land. And occasionally that causes fighting; one proposed conversion in Alexandria, Virginia, is being fought by neighbors who fear that a nearby farm will lower their home prices.
In the long term, we hope, people will see the advantages of converting golf courses to farmland. Many of these courses, being small, will be snapped up by family farmers who may practice modern techniques, like the Lemon family’s organic farm in West Virginia. Golf course conversion could be a great way to get new farmers some starter land.
Follow us
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
December 17, 2015
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.
Golf a time-wasting and land-wasting game.
Sounds real nice..until you think of the chemicals dumped on many of those properties for a few decades..a challenging transition to organics to say the least.