In the ATC update sent earlier this week—subscribe here if you’d like to get on this list—I mentioned that one of the highlights of my year so far was the Royal Turf Family Seminar at the Park Hyatt Tokyo.

Mr. Hanzawa, the president of Royal Turf Company, had the presentations recorded. One of the things I discussed in my presentation was how one can use clipping volume to get an estimate for nutrient use and an estimate for N mineralization.

That starts at the 51:00 mark of the presentation video and runs for 9 minutes. This includes the translation too, so if you don’t understand Japanese, perhaps you can spend that time sipping coffee, or making some site-specific calculations based on grass and growth rates at your location.

Micah Woods on "Thinking About Countermeasures for Summer in Japan" from Micah Woods on Vimeo.

The accuracy of those estimates depends on a few things, with the most important one being the conversion from clipping volume to clipping dry weight. I’ve written about this in One Bucket at a Time, Doug Soldat discussed this in his Watching Your Grass Grow webinar for GCSAA, Bill Kreuser has shared his results on how to make the conversion, and the ongoing research about conversion equations will see them adjusted and refined.

This idea, that one can know the turf nutrient use from a single day, by checking the clipping volume, is a powerful one. The information can be especially applicable in summer, when grass is under heat stress.