K fertilizer recommendations and more with Dr. Frank Rossi

I talked with Frank Rossi today on the ATC Doublecut. You can watch or listen to the show at the links. We discussed potassium (K) fertilizer, and why there are still recommendations for so much more K than the grass can use.

There’s a lot of dogma around this topic. Still. Surprisingly so. We’ve talked that over enough times, so we didn’t spend too much time on that. But the very fact that the mainstream recommendations for unnecessary fertilizer are so persistent makes me want to bring the point to your attention, at least for a brief moment.

Then we moved on to more interesting topics. I enjoyed revisiting our ideas about measuring putting green smoothness. I also got some advice from Dr. Rossi about teaching seminars.

We had a chat off air about how I ended up going to study with him at Cornell University. One reason was Tom Cook, who had recommended to me that Frank would be a good professor to study with. Another was my desire to study soil, and nutrients, and how to optimize those somehow to make the grass as good as it could possible be. Frank was going to let me study that topic. I also wanted to attend an Ivy League school, if I could, and I wanted to live for a while in New York.

I also have a vague memory of the Crop Science Society of America meetings in Seattle in 1994.

I’d gone there with the OSU Turf Club, and I might have met Frank, or heard him speak, or somehow interacted with him. I don’t recall details, but I was impressed enough to want to work with him, as my first choice, when I was applying to graduate school. That’s the only place I applied, and the only professor I applied to work with.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as we reminisce a bit—but more importantly we discuss the present and the future of professional turf management around the world.