Part 1: Preparation

In the middle of golf’s Golden Age, a Minnesota club asked a burgeoning equipment company about developing a mechanical solution to boost efficiency and elevate the quality of its lovely lake-bordered grounds.

The result of the collaboration between The Minikahda Club and The Toro Company transitioned golf course maintenance from the horse era to the age of mechanical mowers. Seeking to satisfy growing customer bases, other emerging clubs wanted to maintain playing surfaces using five lawnmowers mounted to the front of a farm tractor like The Minikahda Club. Developing the first motorized golf fairway mower propelled Toro’s rise in golf, an industry that has experienced numerous slowdowns and surges since the ask-and-develop mower success of 1919.

As the late 2010s progressed, customers started asking Toro for solutions to address widespread labor concerns amid soaring course quality expectations. Listening and acting led Toro to another defining moment, which coincides with golf’s most recent play, participation and interest surge.

Golf lurks on the edge of the autonomous era. Nearly every owner, manager, superintendent and golfer gawks at images, in the field or on a screen, of autonomous mowers strategically roaming fairways. The images spark intrigue — and myriad questions, likely resembling the curiosity of turf maintained via machines instead of four-legged pasture animals in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

By incorporating machines into golf maintenance, Toro blossomed into a global company, with a footprint now spanning 125 countries. Extensive networks of engineers, technicians, managers, marketers, dealers and distributors allow the company to adapt to customer needs as golf evolves.

The looming maintenance evolution possesses a striking resemblance to what occurred during the Golden Age. Similar to tractors supplanting horses, machines guided by software and intertwined satellites and maps will complement and even alter how many courses are maintained.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents (61 percent) in Golf Course Industry’s 2025 Numbers to Know survey envision autonomous fairway, green and slope mowers as technology not currently in their fleet that they expect to deploy by 2035. The survey contrasts 2019 results, when Golf Course Industry asked superintendents their likelihood of using autonomous mowers in the future: More than 70 percent of superintendents replied then that they would “not likely” or “never” use autonomous units on fairways or greens.

The mindset shift suggests that instead of wondering if autonomous technology will touch key playing surfaces, the industry is bracing for large swaths of prized turf being maintained via prompts.

An enlightening stroll through the hallways of Toro’s global headquarters in Bloomington, Minnesota, demonstrates a company prepared for the transformation. Plaques touting more than a century of patents and innovations adorn walls, technical and tactical gurus educate customers in college-like classrooms, and climate-controlled rooms test everything from equipment’s ability to endure environmental stresses to software capabilities.

Helping advance an industry requires comprehending the nuances of that industry’s workload and management practices. Toro’s effort to bring an autonomous fairway mower to the golf market represents a microcosm of the past 111 years.

Listening, learning, developing, tweaking and adapting can bring an industry — and company — to new realms.

Listening to the voices

Jeff Ische is a former superintendent of a Midwest golf course with a Golden Age design. Like many of his peers, Ische observed a stressed golf labor market in the late 2010s.

“I think back to my last few years as a superintendent,” he says. “Around 2017-18, for example, labor just became increasingly harder to find. And then you throw in the impact of COVID on top of that. That’s when you realize we really needed to do something.”

Ische arrived at Toro in June 2020. Now a senior product marketing manager in the commercial group, a large part of his job involves listening to superintendents’ concerns, challenges and wish lists. Toro calls the process Voice of the Customer (VOC). The process guides nearly every corporate decision, including the one to seriously explore and develop autonomous solutions for the golf industry.

“That’s really the key, trying to provide solutions to customer problems,” Ische says. “The problem we are trying to solve here is the shortage of quality labor. That’s really where all of our project ideas come from is customer feedback and customer visits.”

Availability isn’t the only labor conundrum facing the golf industry. VOC interactions, which include global visits with distributors and customers and interactive events conducted at the Toro headquarters, indicated that handling post-COVID play demands while meeting conditioning expectations continues to perplex superintendents.

The three largest single-season United States rounds played totals — 545 million in 2024, 531 million in 2023 and 529 million in 2021 — have come in the last four years. By comparison, the United States supported 434 million rounds in 2018, according to the National Golf Foundation. The average course received 7,000 more rounds in 2024 than it did in 2018, leaving fewer gaps to conduct basic maintenance tasks such as mowing. The need for more efficient equipment is immense.

“Through VOC, customers will share what their existing challenges are,” says Kelly Meemken, a senior product marketing manager working on Toro’s advanced technology. “But it takes a long time to develop products. It’s having the foresight of looking at the trends going on right now and trying to position ourselves where we need to be.”

Enter a need to develop autonomous solutions for golf customers.

Changing fairway mowing

Toro released its first two autonomous golf solutions in early 2025: the Turf Pro series of rotary mowers and the Range Pro ball picker. The smaller units represent practical gateways to one of the most anticipated releases in company history: the GeoLink Solutions Autonomous Fairway Mower Series.

VOC gatherings and internal discussion led to the Toro team selecting the Greensmaster eTriFlex 3360 as the ideal unit to incorporate autonomous fairway mowing. The hybrid mower debuted in 2019 and features all-electric components, eliminating the possibility of hydraulic leaks when operating without direct human oversight. Maneuverability represented another key consideration when determining the proper machine to incorporate GeoLink autonomous technology. The Greensmaster eTriFlex 3360 provides a 59-inch cutting width.

“We call it autonomous ready,” says Meemken, who worked on integrating software into autonomous solutions before moving into a product marketing role in 2024. “You need to be able to electronically control the actuated devices when you don’t have a human operator. That machine set us up best for that. At the time this decision was made exactly five years ago, we started to prepare the software for it.

“As the customer goes down this endeavor of autonomous machines, we thought maybe a smaller, less intimidating machine would be more appealing than a traditional 100-inch fairway mower because a customer could take advantage of the fact they aren’t paying an operator so they can get more creative with their mowing schedules, if they needed to.”

Methodical field testing has accompanied the mower’s development and one of the biggest tweaks is perhaps the most noticeable feature on the unit. When Toro publicly announced expansion of its autonomous exploration through the introduction of GeoLink Solutions in early 2020, images surrounding the news depicted a mower without a seat. The GeoLink Autonomous Fairway Mower being released to the golf market includes a seat to help courses handle situations where an operator might be needed, to satisfy after-market demands and for other applications customers traditionally use a triplex mower for when not being operated autonomously.

Tweaking, especially with software and hardware like Toro does with its irrigation control systems, will be an autonomous mowing norm. Toro is preparing for this practice as part of its Design and Continual Improvement (DCI) efforts. Testing equipment on different courses, in contrasting parts of the United States and the world, offer situational-based feedback to improve technology designed to elevate the industry, including the GeoLink Autonomous Fairway Mower.

“The benefit of getting on all sorts of golf courses is that you develop use cases that didn’t exist on one course that exist on another course,” Meemken says. “You need to be able to accommodate those cases. It’s tough for somebody to sit down and think about every use case off the top of their head to put it in a simulation or try to mimic a specific course. You have to get out there and see it for yourself.”

The development of autonomous mowers coincides with Toro’s commitment to its existing product portfolio. In short, DCI investments in autonomous solutions must be juggled with other corporate objectives and equipment demands.

Continual investment has defined Toro’s existence in the golf market. The Standard Golf Machine Toro introduced at The Minikahda Club sparked a lineage of golf innovations and industry firsts spanning decades. Replicating the enduring impact of their predecessors motivates the teams and individuals helping bring autonomous solutions to superintendents.

“It’s been fun for us to be involved in a project that really is going to be changing the way the industry does their work,” Ische says. “This is changing the way we take care of a golf course. That’s a pretty cool space to be working in.”