When Did Turfgrass Agronomy Get So Devalued in Australia?

When did common sense go AWOL in Australian turf? Somewhere in the last few years, glossy brochures have replaced good science and nobody seems to be noticing. Nowhere is it worse than in turfgrass agronomy.

To quote SportEng, turfgrass agronomy is an understanding of how all the elements of a turfgrass system interact to provide a playing surface.

A proper grounding takes time. Further education courses run two to four years, and after that you either go into the workplace or on to postgraduate study. That’s how it’s meant to work.

In practice, it seems you if you simply print a business card  you can become a turf agronomist. Experience, further education, qualifications: all apparently optional now. And the same gap runs right through the products being sold. In neither case does anyone have to prove a claim before putting it in front of you.

You see it in the advice that gets handed out. I know of three recent examples, both from people trading as agronomists. One recommended fosetyl-aluminium as a curative for active Pythium. Fosetyl-aluminium is a phosphonate. It works preventively, largely by priming the plant’s own defences, and once Pythium is running the curative work has to come from chemistry like mefenoxam, cyazofamid or propamocarb. Prescribed as a curative, it arrives too late to do the job.

The second was a recommendation to use gypsum to lift calcium levels on a cricket wicket. A wicket is built on a heavy, high-activity clay which is used due to its ability to bind and shrink so the surface plays with pace. Calcium is almost never short in that soil, and gypsum is an amendment that flocculates clay and opens it up, the exact opposite of what a wicket needs.

The third again recommends the use of gypsum but in this case to displace silt out of a sand rootzone during a sportsground construction job. Gypsum does none of that. It supplies calcium and flocculates dispersive clay. It has no mechanism to remove silt. Instead you deal with it by washing, screening or rejecting the sand, not by chemistry. The gypsum leaves the fines exactly where they were, in the pore space you needed clear.

Three confident recommendations, all wrong, all from someone carrying the title.

Deregulation in Australia

In Australia the state governments regulate fertiliser sales, but only to keep impurities below permissible levels. Nobody checks whether the product does what the label says.

The industry has drifted further into deregulation, to the point where the only bodies with real jurisdiction are the APVMA and the EPA. Everything else, meaning fertilisers, soil wetting agents and biostimulants, is self-policed, and often not policed at all. As Bell, Bound and Buntain put it in a 2021 University of Tasmania review: “a lack of regulation in many countries, including Australia, has led to significant variation in product quality and inconsistent results in the field”.

Europe does it differently. Manufacturers making biological claims have to register the product. Under the EU Fertilising Products Regulation (2019/1009), which took full effect in July 2022, biostimulants have their own product function category, distinct from conventional fertilisers and regulated separately from plant protection products. The regulation defines a biostimulant as a product that stimulates the plant’s nutritional processes regardless of its nutrient content, with the sole aim of improving one or more of: nutrient use efficiency, tolerance to abiotic stress, quality traits, or the availability of confined nutrients in the soil or rhizosphere.

In a 2015 review, du Jardin grouped them into seven main categories, from humic and fulvic acids and seaweed extracts to microbial inoculants and mycorrhizae.

What’s the situation in Australia?

Australia has nothing like it. The fertiliser industry polices itself, which leaves the door open for the less scrupulous.

I’ve seen a company print a run of labels carrying an analysis it couldn’t possibly have hit, because one of the ingredients wasn’t even available at the time. I doubt that was a one-off.

Left unpoliced, this goes one of two ways. It stays a free-for-all, or buyers start asking harder questions about the claims they’re being sold.

Where to from here for turfgrass agronomy?

Start with the liquid products that claim to contain live biological organisms. No expiry date. Unaffected by fungicides. Too good to be true? Ask for the data. A certificate of analysis is a good start, or send a sample off for testing. My experience is that the contents often don’t match the label, so you’re paying good money for nothing. I have tested this directly. In a replicated field trial run over 170 days on a bentgrass green, seven foliar biostimulant products used on their own all produced unacceptable colour and no significant gain in soil organic matter at any depth. Not one earned its keep as a standalone product.

Where independent researchers have looked, the pattern holds. In a survey of 68 commercial products, 84% claimed a nutrient benefit, yet the reviewers themselves conceded field efficacy is inconsistent and the economic case unclear (Basiru et al. 2021). When arbuscular mycorrhizae were added to a low-phosphorus bentgrass green in a replicated field trial, they produced no measurable turf response. The authors concluded that using mycorrhizae via aerification is ineffective (Bero & Soldat 2025).

Then the soil amendments that claim to lift CEC or the moisture-holding capacity of sand. The independent evidence behind those claims is weak, and they get used at arbitrary rates. Ask for the data. And ask yourself why you’d build a freely draining green, then wreck its infiltration rate with an amendment that has never been shown to do what it says.

For example, when zeolite and ceramic amendments were drilled into a poorly draining green and tracked for three years, they did not improve infiltration or turf performance. The only measurable effect was a little extra potassium held in the profile (Guertal & Waltz 2008).

Who Pays?

One more question worth asking. is who paid for the trial, and what did it actually measure? Vendor-funded studies on a single product tend to report large benefits. This is in contrast to  independent field trials on turf that tend to come back flat.

In Australia, registered fungicides and insecticides are a different case. To become Registered it  means efficacy data had to be submitted and assessed before the product can be sold. That’s far more scrutiny than any biostimulant on the market faces.

For now, the questions are yours to ask, and that includes whether the person advising you is actually a qualified turf agronomist. It is the same test either way: on the label or on the business card, ask to see the evidence before you pay for the claim.

If you’ve got a query about turf agronomy, use the contact form on this page.

Jerry Spencer. Principal agronomist, Gilba Solutions Pty Ltd. BSc Hons Soil Science (Newcastle). Former STRI (Sports Turf Research Institute) agronomist. Author of Nutrition of Sports Turf in Australia (CSIRO/Landlinks Press). 35+ years advising on sports turf, golf and stadia across Australia, NZ, UK and Europe.