Post by Old Tom Capital

The USGA Green Section recently published a piece on using Arccos shot data to guide turf reduction decisions. The core insight: many courses maintain significant acreage of irrigated, regularly mown turf that experiences very little play. By mapping where shots actually land, courses can identify areas to naturalize—reducing water, labor, and inputs while barely affecting playability. It got us thinking about a broader shift underway in golf course management. The same structural pressures that transformed row-crop farming over the past two decades—water scarcity, labor constraints, rising input costs, regulatory scrutiny—are now arriving at golf courses. In agriculture, these forces created a $15 billion precision ag market. Golf is roughly a decade behind that curve. The parallel is instructive. In farming, early investment dollars chased hardware—tractors, sprayers, GPS systems. But value ultimately migrated to the intelligence layer: the software, analytics, and data platforms that turn sensor readings into actionable decisions. We see the same pattern emerging in turf management. Our new piece examines five structural forces driving adoption, the technology stack taking shape across sensing, actuation, and analytics, and where we believe investment opportunity concentrates. We also lay out a ten-year roadmap for how we expect this transition to unfold—from elite-course early adopters through mid-market expansion to full automation. For those tracking the intersection of golf, technology, and private markets, we think this one is worth the read. https://lnkd.in/ehp_cW9h