Robot mowers spread across US golf courses, Massachusetts club pays $200,000 apiece for two autonomous units, crews reassigned to ball marks and weeds rather than laid off

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zerohedge.com

The Country Club of New Bedford in Massachusetts has bought two robotic mowers at $200,000 apiece, and autonomous machines are now at work on golf courses across the United States. Four Seasons' Tranquilo Golf Club in Florida, Barton Hills Country Club in Michigan and Baltimore Country Club are among the courses where the machines have appeared this year, and Oahu has its first fully autonomous fairway mower — part of a run of dozens of such stories in the trade press.

The machines cost anywhere from several thousand dollars to nearly $200,000 each, and the crews they work alongside number in the tens of thousands across the golf industry. Walter Garcia, assistant superintendent at New Bedford, described the arrangement to Golfweek: "It's pretty much like a Roomba. You don't just let it go completely on its own. You set it up, give it its directions, and it maps out what it needs to do." After that, he said, "it can move around and handle the work, but we're still there monitoring it and making sure everything runs properly."

Courses using the machines report that groundskeepers have been freed for other tasks — repairing ball marks on greens, trimming weeds — and the industry's current answer to the labor question is reassignment rather than layoffs. The sequence is an old one: mechanization begins with the repetitive and the expensive. A fairway is a bounded area, mowing it is a repeated task, and the wage bill recurs every week of the growing season — which is why agriculture mechanized its field work generations before anyone robotized a lawn. The first buyers are private clubs and resort courses, where a $200,000 machine is weighed against member dues and guest fees rather than a municipal budget.

The club spent $400,000 on two mowers; the groundskeepers who monitor them are still on the payroll.