Golf gone country

I've never actually golfed. Something about paying lots of money to try and hit a tiny ball into a tiny, faraway hole never seemed like anything more than a recipe for frustration to a klutz like me. But boerengolf, or farmer's golf, which is played on existing farmland in European countries like Holland, sounds like my kind of game. From "You can golf 'til the cows come home" on Marketplace:

Boerengolf is certainly simple. Two teams compete. [Using a wooden shoe on a stick], each hits a ball towards Hole 1. The team that's behind keeps hitting 'til they're ahead, so the teams stay together. The object: sink the ball using the fewest strokes. Repeat 10 times, with a break in the middle for beer. The end.

What's not to like about that? Plus, it beats supporting the environmental enemies that are regular golf courses.

The 18,000 golf courses in the U.S. cover more than 1.7 million acres. Las Vegas alone has 60 golf courses. According the Worldwatch Institute, the world's 35,000 golf courses used 2.4 billion gallons of water per day, the same amount it would take to provide 4.7 billion people with daily UN minimum. Each course uses an estimated half ton of pesticides each year, and undoubtedly plenty of fertilizer, too. Both pollute the water. Course landscapers use noisy lawn mowers and leaf blowers, which can each create the same amount of air pollution in one hour as a small car does in four.

On the boerengolf courses, course maintenance is a different story. Rain waters the grass. The landscapers (also known as cows) eat the grass. Then they turn it into fertilizer (manure) for the grass. That's it.

Of course, you could argue that cow pastures are not exactly the most environmentally friendly places, and you'd be right. (The EPA estimates that ruminant livestock produces 28% of the methane from human-related activities globally and EarthSave states that methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all the other greenhouse gases put together. Runoff from fields with animal waste can also contaminate water and overgrazing degrades the soil). But cow pastures probably aren't going away anytime soon. Nor do I think they should as long as people continue to consume dairy and beef and to use leather--cow pastures are a infinitely better for the cows, the environment, and beef eaters than are industrial feedlots (read The Omnivore's Dilemma if you don't know what I mean). I'm just happy that people can enjoy golf without degrading the land additionally.

Ok, and I also just think golfing with a wooden shoe on a stick and a bunch of cows sounds like a lot of fun.