New Zealand’s first golf course with artificial turf greens opens for play

The country’s first golf course with totally artificial greens – and with special connections to the Māori golf sector – has officially been opened for play.

Tapora Golf Club, on the Kaipara Harbour north-west of Auckland, has undergone a major redevelopment programme over the past four months – with the biggest improvement being the installation of totally artificial greens replacing the course’s traditional grassed putting strips.

The conversion to an all-weather playing amenity cost the club around $500,000. However, the club calculates the initial upfront outlay will pay for itself over five years through savings associated with reduced greenkeeper’s wages and lower operating expenses for the likes of specialist green lawnmowers, turf maintenance machinery, grass fertiliser, weed control and irrigation.

The new artificial turf – comparable to sports surfaces already now used in New Zealand for hockey and soccer pitches – has an estimated life of up to 15 years if maintained carefully. With the underlying civil works and landscaping to establish the new greens undertaken as a one-off cost, replacing the artificial greens at the end of their eventual “best by” date will be considerably cheaper.

Construction of the greens involved excavating nearly a metre of subsoil, which was then backfilled with free-draining rocks, followed by a layer of smaller gravel, then topped with sand – all of which was compacted with heavyweight rollers normally used for roading construction.

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