Ladybank Golf Club, situated in wooded heathland 10 miles west of St Andrews in Fife, is the latest prestigious Scottish golf club to purchase Ventrac equipment to assist in the maintenance of their challenging heathland championship course.
Grant Frogley is the Course Manager and is responsible for a team of 8 full-time greenkeepers, who maintain this beautiful and challenging course. The club have purchased a Ventrac 4500 all-terrain compact tractor and two attachments to help maintain the course.
“I’m one of the many converts to the Ventrac compact tractor and attachments,” he said. “We had two rough mowers when I came in, each one for different areas of the course. We’re a relatively flat site in terms of elevation, but we do have quite a lot of subtle movement with some extreme hollows and bumps. The rough mowers weren’t the best at following contours, so we found ourselves doing a lot more hand work.
“I’d seen the Ventrac at a demonstration at Gwest and knew it would be the perfect piece of kit here; a versatile machine that could do more than one task. We got it in on demo and sure enough it flew round, coped with every contour out there, without a problem.
“We’ve got the Contour deck and the Tough Cut deck. We use the Tough deck a lot during the winter to clean up the woodlands and remove the gorse and broom. We basically cut everything that’s not on the maintained grass areas. We cut every blade of grass during the winter, so it’s very versatile and mobile for getting in amongst the trees. As I said previously, it’s very good at removing brash, gorse and broom.
“It came with a rear three-point linkage kit, which is brilliant. We bought a small sprayer with hand lance that hooks up on the back of it and we also have a terra rake, which we use a lot during winter projects, especially if we’ve got soil that just needs a tilth-up before we re-turf. It’s brilliant and such a light footprint, it just glides over the surface.
