His original reasoning was the coating of his family’s control-released fertilizer matched the primary color of the equipment company David Pursell wanted to bring to rural Alabama.
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So before building a research and demonstration golf course on his vast property, David Pursell contacted the company. The call didn’t yield an immediate arrangement between Pursell Technologies Inc., creators of the green-coated Polyon fertilizer, and John Deere.
But 15 years after making the call, Pursell admits that John Deere was the first company he approached about a partnership at FarmLinks Golf Club, a course that brings superintendents to Sylacauga, Ala., to try products and forge relationships. “It was all kind of coming together in my head of what we wanted to do,” says Pursell, FarmLinks’ co-founder and CEO. “John Deere was very, very nice and all, but they decided they were going to go a different direction.”
Pursell pursued – and inked – numerous industry partners, and thousands of superintendents have participated in the “FarmLinks experience” on Pursell’s 3,500-acre piece of land. Last week on the wooded 16th hole, eight superintendents, a sports turf manager, and multiple dealers and regional sales managers, split into four groups and operated mowers, tractors and utility vehicles. Nearly 20 vehicles were used to maintain the hole.
The color of the equipment? Green and yellow.
In the middle of the fairway, FarmLinks director of agronomy Mark Langner interacted with the superintendents, who hailed from Virginia and Kansas. Ren Wilkes, John Deere Golf’s new marketing manager, paced the 250 yards from the green to the start of the fairway, answering questions and overseeing demonstrations.
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John Deere, which quietly started bringing superintendents to Alabama last year, is beginning to fully understand the benefits of its partnership with FarmLinks. “It provides us a chance to get the customers and dealers away from their facilities and to really look at equipment, look at the technology and to ask questions of the Deere people they might not get to ask questions to on a regular basis,” Wilkes says. “And it provides us as a company a great venue to bring someone to.”
Besides some of the corporate partnerships, many things have changed since FarmLinks, a 7,400-yard course designed by Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry, opened on June 4, 2003. And more changes could be on the way.
The surfaces superintendents maintained and relaxed on included almost every imaginable turfgrass variety capable of growing in Alabama. One of the trickiest questions Langner must answer involves the number of turfgrass varieties on the course. The total was 16 by Langner’s most recent count. The turfgrasses range from uniform coverage (T-1 bentgrass on the greens) to curiosities (Discovery Bermudagrass on the 15th tee). “We keep playing with different grasses and changing them out and seeing what might be the perfect grass,” Langner says.
The people visiting FarmLinks are also changing. Pursell sold the family fertilizer company to Agrium Advance Technologies in 2006. Koch Agronomic Services purchased Agrium in 2014. FarmLinks represents Pursell’s major golf-related emphasis and he says the facility is “trying to operate more like a classic resort.” Adding amenities that appeal to leisure golfers is part of the growth strategy, although Pursell doesn’t want to stray too far from FarmLinks’ research and demonstration roots.
“One phase of what we are trying to do here is to continue on with what we originally did with the end-users,” Pursell says. “But we don’t have a dog in the hunt as we say in the South here. When we sold the fertilizer business, we didn’t have anything to sell to superintendents. We have changed some partners and kept some. It’s fun.”
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FarmLinks once hosted more than 1,000 superintendents per year. Those numbers have dipped, but the experience still features a familiar feel, and Pursell and Langner’s contact lists might be as extensive as a Southeastern Conference football coach’s recruiting Rolodex. An active partnership with John Deere likely means new visitors to FarmLinks, which excites those who have been there from the start.
“John Deere has been wonderful,” Langner says. “We are FarmLinks. We have agriculture, we have forestry, we have golf and John Deere has a very large company that covers every one of those markets and does a very good job of it. They have some goals and some desires. We know how to tee up southern hospitality and give them 3,500 acres of a golf course and facility to utilize, and let them develop their own program. Feedback has done a very good job over the years of taking the superintendents’ desires and needs and building that platform of equipment, and FarmLinks takes it to the next level.”
Guy Cipriano is GCI’s assistant editor.