For the purposes of this story, we’re calling the profile subject the room. At Bidermann Golf Course, a 205-acre northern Delaware meadow melding recreation and serenity, the room transcends industry norms.
Bidermann doesn’t use the four-letter word to describe where its agronomy team stores, mixes, loads and analyzes plant protectants. Following careful deliberation coinciding with its 2019 unveiling, the club determined it needed strategic nomenclature to convey the significance of the radiant, comfortable and tech-integrated spot where applicators store, mix, load and analyze plant protectants.
The room morphed into the Plant Management Building. The name reflects the importance of indoor operations to Bidermann’s exterior excellence.
“It’s the crown jewel of what we do and how we conduct ourselves,” says superintendent Pat Michener, CGCS. “If this building looks good and you feel good in here, then we’re doing the right thing.”
Transforming a room into a building requires a significant upfront investment, one most superintendents consider implausible at their respective courses. Admit it, you’re probably snickering because Bidermann’s 3,400-square-foot dream contrasts your reality.
Gene Scarborough’s reality involves a 300-yard journey past flying golf balls.
Scarborough is the director of golf and greens maintenance at Santee Cooper Resort. Application days meanScarboroughor somebody from his team must gather products from a cart-barn room and transport them past the driving range to a loading zone outside the maintenance facility. Product applications occur often at the popular central South Carolina playground: Santee Cooper Resort features 36 holes. Measuring 480 square feet, the room is crammed as spring approaches. Scarborough is a proponent of product purchasing via Early Order Programs. Every jug and pallet seems to arrive simultaneously.
Scarborough collaborated with Clemson University’s Department of Pesticide Regulation upon his 1997 arrival to establish baseline procedures for the room. Following those baselines 29 years later, plus tweaking and honing storage and application practices, make what Scarborough calls a “challenging” arrangement tolerable.
“It’s like when you first get on Medicare when you’re 65 and have that first physical,” he says. “It’s extremely thorough, and that’s the baseline for the rest of your life. That’s what I’ve done when I’ve gotten to places. I get baseline recommendations to present to my bosses or to the board, letting them know this is what we have got and this is what we have to do to make it legal and organized. They’ll spend money on some stuff; some stuff they won’t.”
Unseen by golfers and near the bottom of capital improvement plans, yet vitally important to work environments and course conditions, the room is a spot where organizational diligence and incremental tweaks can help overcome severe structural limitations. And yes, you can learn a few things from a place with an aspirational building.
Safer evolution
Ask industry veterans about the first time they entered a room, and they recall experiencing olfactory overload.
“My first inclination was,” Michener says, “it stinks. As I look back on it, the rooms were always small, they were dark, and they had odd smells to them. And you don’t realize at that point in your career how much all these products cost.”
Commerce and science intersect in the room. The average course, according to 2024 and 2025 Golf Course Industry “Turf Reports” surveys, spends $65,250 on fungicides, $21,420 on herbicides and $12,800 on insecticides. Annual plant protectant investments swell into six figures when adding fertilizer, wetting agents, growth regulators and adjuvants to budgets.
Scarborough spends around $200,000 on EOP purchases. Santee Cooper Resort’s room supports more than $400 of single-use solution per square foot. Similar constraints permeate the industry.
“A lot of these guys are organized,” says Envu area sales manager Darrin Batisky, “but they are organized with buildings that are 50-plus years old.”
Safety becomes the first consideration when ensuring a room meets modern workplace and regulatory requirements. “I was a superintendent in Maryland for 15 years,” says USGA Green Section East Region agronomist Brian Gietka, “and every year you could pretty much count on getting an inspection of your records, your facility and your loading.” Perhaps you work in a less stringent state. But regardless of regulatory oversight, making a room less pungent, brighter and capable of containing spills should be non-negotiable.
Bidermann reduces noxious odors through a return-air system that removes one CFM of air from its building for every two CFMs entering the structure. Hyde Park Golf & Country Club in Cincinnati, keeps an exhaust fan inside a compact cinder-block plant protectant room attached to an elongated maintenance facility. Hyde Park’s diminutive room, grounds superintendent Pat O’Brien says in jest with serious undertones, remains functionable because the club has zoysiagrass fairways. Zoyiagrass requires fewer pesticide applications than turfgrass species covering fairways at neighboring courses.
Ventilation becomes more scrutinized if EC formulations are a critical component of a plant protection program, says Kevin Miele, a PBI-Gordon Northeast field representative. Recirculating air every 10 minutes might seem audacious — but it could be legally required in some jurisdictions. Seeking outside assistance to enhance a room’s ventilation is a worthwhile investment. Proper ventilation also ensures a room stays within the recommended temperature range of 40 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
“It’s relatively easy to hire a good contractor who can come in and put in an economical and effective ventilation system,” says Miele, a former golf course superintendent who mastered storing, handling and applying plant protectants during an eight-year stint as a University of Connecticut turfgrass research technician. “It can be as simple as something as when you walk in the room and turn on the lights that also kicks in the ventilation and pumps that atmosphere out of there.”
Lighting considerations are more complex than a random ecommerce click or home improvement warehouse store purchase. Poor lighting makes movement within the room treacherous and can lead to applicators misidentifying or misreading labels. Bidermann outfitted its building with non-explosive LED lights. Non-explosive lights are sealed and designed to be used in hazardous locations. Outlets were kept to a minimum when Bidermann constructed its building; retractable extension cord reels create lighting flexibility.
When Scarborough arrived at Santee Cooper Resort, one incandescent bulb illuminated the room. The room now includes “LED everywhere,” with four-wing overhead LED lighting providing a practical and affordable illumination solution, Scarborough says.
Improved lighting helps prevent and contain spills. And the emphasis on containment represents one of the more encouraging room evolutions in Batisky’s nearly four-decade career. “In fact,” he says, “there are folks that even take it to the next level and do double containment; containment on shelves and containment for the whole room.” Bidermann’s building has four drainage sump pumps connecting to a rinsing tank with capacity to hold enough solution to fill a sprayer. Sealed concrete flooring and a knee wall provide additional protection.
Heightened applicator awareness further helps prevent spills. “If you’re putting things high up, particularly things that have the potential to spill, you’re just asking for an accident,” Miele says. If space limitations require elevated storage, place lightweight dry materials on upper shelves.
Storing materials directly on the floor induces perilous situations, too. “Not everything has to go on a shelf,” Miele adds. “If it’s dry, frequently used bulk bags of fertilizer, that can be acceptably put on a pallet. But even then, you’re going to want a liner on the bottom of that pallet to have something that will contain spills and make cleanup easy.”
Other non-negotiable safety necessities for a room include:
- Personal Protective Equipment (stored away from plant protectants)
- Spill kits
- Safety Data Sheets (printed copies in the room, digital copies on a hard drive)
- Eye-wash station
- Door signage to demote access
- First aid kit
- Brooms and/or squeegees
- Spray instructions
- Fire extinguishers
Careful consideration also must be taken to what’s not in the room. Miele emphasizes safe and effective rooms solely use space for essential elements of a plant protection program.
“You shouldn’t have any mowers, blowers, garbage and that sort of stuff in there,” he says. “It’s not a closet that can take overflow storage from other places in the facility. Everywhere is pressed for space, not just that room. What’s in that room should certainly be very purposeful.”
Logistics, efficiency and mindset
With the right approaches, agronomy teams can navigate space limitations, even in a confined room like the one at Hyde Park. Structuring and organizing the room is a group effort among O’Brien and applicators.
The process begins with a technician writing arrival dates on jugs and inputting them into a shared digital turf management app. “Our goal is to have as limited material left as possible,” says O’Brien, Hyde Park’s superintendent since late 2004. “We don’t want to have that much inventory in that small of a space.” To further maximize space, only jugs are placed on metal shelves O’Brien purchased from a local retailer’s going-out-of-business in one of his first acts as superintendent.
Fungicides are ordered by classes and modes of action; herbicides are stored in a secure locker as a precaution to avoid a tank mixing mishap. A sheet with mixing instructions from multiple universities and spill containment procedures hangs from the room’s interior door.
“It comes back to the culture and how you approach the room,” O’Brien says. “When we become complacent with what we’re applying, then safety can go out the door, and we’re not protecting our greatest asset: our people. That’s when accidents can happen.”
During his tenure at Fountainhead (Maryland) Country Club, Gietka implemented a system where two employees inspected and labeled every product upon delivery. Opened products were labeled again using a black Sharpie, indicating the volume of solution remaining in a jug.
Gietka and his team examined inventory monthly. Fountainhead resides in the Transition Zone, an unforgiving growing region requiring a robust plant protectant program to preserve peak-season playing surfaces. Gietka, who joined the USGA Green Section in 2023, organized products by category.
“It continues to be that more and more products are on early order or pay later, which means you’re taking a lot more products in the winter than you used to,” he says. “You need to plan for not only having adequate space to store them, but to also access them. Traffic flow is huge.”
Bidermann, another Transition Zone course with abundant pest, disease and insect pressure, organizes plant protectants by category and alphabetically within each category. Inventory is tracked monthly. Michener views the shelves as a “plant protectant supermarket.” Safety and efficiency shape every storage decision. Nobody likes lingering in supermarket aisles.
Michener conducts a comprehensive review of procedures and processes during a late January meeting with applicators inside the Plant Management Building. The meeting introduces the upcoming spray program, and addresses safety procedures, product organization and other plant protection fundamentals. Bidermann employs five licensed applicators. “For anybody who is new to the team, we want them to understand how serious we are about how we conduct ourselves in the Plant Management Building,” Michener says.
Thoroughness defines Bidermann’s plant protection program. On the eve of a spray, Michener creates an Excel spreadsheet describing the application. He distributes the spreadsheet to Bidermann’s assistants and applicators discuss details of the spray. The sheet requires two signatures before mixing and loading commences.
“We don’t rest on our laurels,” Michener says. “I certainly trust our guys with just about anything here, but I don’t take anything for granted. It’s my duty and my responsibility that we stay organized and make sure we stay safe and we staff efficient.”
Implementing the above mindset doesn’t require an exorbitant budget or modern room. Instead of approaching the room as a physical structure, O’Brien views the space as an extension of Hyde Park’s teaching philosophies and relationships.
“It’s a culmination of everything we have learned,” he says. “It’s the final phase where we go, ‘OK, we have a strategy and now we are going to employ that strategy, and that’s going to help us a lot.’”
Strong leadership helps young turf managers understand the seriousness of all activities emanating from the room.
Growing of turf age in Canada, which features a stringent regulatory environment, still shapes O’Brien’s philosophies. O’Brien refers to his lead applicator as an Integrated Pest Management technician. Michener honed all aspects of plant protection while working for revered Aronimink Golf Club superintendent John Gosselin, who leaned on Michener to help outfit a new environmental management building constructed in the early 2010s. Working for superintendent Ed Walsh at Ridgewood Country Club introduced to Batisky the importance of product storage, usage order and organization. Batisky brought Walsh-ingrained practices to three superintendent positions, examining and revamping the room early in each tenure.
“Not many members come down to these places,” he says. “But being organized when nobody is watching speaks volumes.
“You can tell somebody’s attention to detail from where things are and whether they are utilizing older products first. Products are just like anything else: they have an expiration date.”
If you get your work dream …
Michener returned to Bidermann — where he spent 2006-10 learning the course under his predecessor Jon Urbanski — as superintendent in 2019. His first year leading the agronomy department presented a rare perk: the construction of the Plant Management Building.
“It was incredibly exciting that we had these four walls going up and this plan was in place,” he says. “For us, it became, ‘How can we make this thing as incredible as it can be?’”
The building symbolizes the possibilities when stakeholders commit to exemplary working conditions. The building comfortably fits four sprayers and two mixing and loading tanks in addition to other plant protection necessities. Walled rooms within the building include a restroom and turf diagnostic lab.
Remote-control garage doors and five spots where applicators can draw water of all temperatures boost efficiency. If applicators need to check spray rates, volumes and mixes, a digital board hangs from the front wall. Devices stay connected via the building’s Wi-Fi router.
“We really went all out to make sure the building was functional, efficient and safe,” Michener says. “We had a lot of support from our membership to do that.”
Obtaining stakeholder support involves showing results. Bidermann’s playing surfaces and peripheral plots sparkle, and the club keeps the Plant Management Building at the forefront by conducting member meetings in the maintenance compound.
Seeing confirms an investment’s purpose — or reaffirms the need to incrementally advance the antiquated. There’s a path to making every room better than the first time you entered it.
“There are always guys in every business that are seeking to do better than everybody else and some of them have the resources to do that,” Scarborough says. “Me, as a human being and as a golf course superintendent, I try to be better than I was yesterday, and I try to encourage my team members to do the same thing.”
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