By Jim Cavan

Ever since the environmental movement started to gain recognizable steam in the 1970s, a few select industries have enjoyed their fair share of the greater green brunt.

Some of them you can probably name without much thought: oil companies, logging outfits, factory farms, auto manufacturers. And golf courses.

Though certainly not the subject to the degree of scorn seen by the previously listed, environmentalists have long seen golf courses as antithetical to their core values. They’re big, expansive, chemical-dependent, require copious amounts of water to properly maintain, and change the nature and course of the ecosystems in and around them.

While much of that criticism remains palpable and relevant, one course in particular is changing the way you think about the links.

Sagamore Golf Club, located on North road in North Hampton, has long been known as a laid back and unassuming alternative to the standard golf and country club, with greens fees that are widely touted as some of the most reasonable anywhere on the Seacoast. In 2009 they were named by Golf Digest as one of the “Best Places to Play” in the country, and they even hold a Guinness World Record for the most holes played by a foursome in one day at 180 – ten full rounds if you’re keeping score at home.

But for all the accolades and accomplishments of the recent past, the roots of Sagamore’s everyman aura go back quite a ways. With the help of his father, L.K. Luff, Sagamore Springs Golf Club was founded in 1929 by R.E. Luff in Lynnfield, Massachusetts as one of the first public golf courses ever in New England. Despite opening just months before stock market crash of that same year, Sagamore was able to take hold with a new generation of New England golfers tired of the exorbitant fees charged by private clubs.

After 33 years, R.E.’s son Peter Luff opened a second location in North Hampton, New Hampshire in 1962. Right off the bat, the younger Luff’s intention was to design and build a golf course using as few chemicals and hazardous materials as possible. According to his son and now owner Richard Luff, Peter’s motivation wasn’t so much rooted in environmentalism per se as it was in recognition of the often hazardous realities of post-World War II approaches to golf course maintenance.

“Before the war, in the 20s and 30s, using natural methods to maintain courses was pretty much the norm,” explains Richard Luff. “But in his teenage and college years, [my grandfather] would regularly be handling raw mercury and other really nasty stuff they were using at the time. Eventually he just started asking himself, ‘why am I feeling nauseous at the end of every day?’ He knew there was a better way.”

As Richard tells it, Peter – who had long helped maintain the family’s expansive organic gardens – started lobbying his father on precisely this front. “He said to my grandfather, ‘we’re already doing stuff the right way with the garden. Why not with the golf course too?’”

Inspired in part by J.R. Rodale’s Organic Farming and Gardening magazines of the 40s and 50s, Peter Luff began taking it upon himself to apply many of those principles to the family’s charge. He was convinced that, while anyone could simply “maintain” a golf course using traditional methods, it took a special, dedicated effort to do it “the right way” – meaning safely, with minimal use of chemicals, and within the boundaries of Mother Nature.

First and foremost that meant feeding the soil, and not the plant. Doing so – and doing so properly – meant that you could guarantee strong, beautiful and healthy grass and turf that was as natural as possible, without taking away from what Richard Luff calls a course’s “competitiveness”. And while Luff is quick to point out that, in some instances, the use of chemicals is necessary in order to achieve that competitive edge, for the folks at Sagamore, such methods are used only as a last resort.

In the decades that followed, the Luffs stayed true to Peter’s vision, making use of all natural alternatives including soy bean meal, granite dust, kelp, fish emulsion, and turkey manure. According to Richard Luff, his course has seen much of the industry finally catch up with Sagamore’s long-standing ideal, providing more natural alternatives in the form of spreadable fertilizers.

In an effort to further improve the “green” quality of their grounds, Sagamore has partnered with York-based Purely Organic, a lawn care company that boasts some of the most effective green products on the market. Not only does Purely Organic supply much of the organic fertilizers and other materials for the course; they’ve also struck up a deal to render one hole completely green, using absolutely no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides.

While Luff knew of Purely Organic’s and owner Jim Reinertsons impressive track record, the Sagamore owner was at first skeptical about the partnership. “We were definitely more conservative at first, more so because this is something we’d been doing for decades,” said Luff. “But he just kept coming out with products that were workable for golf course conditions. So it was a real coup for us.”

Luff has said that if making the second hole completely green proves successful, Sagamore will gradually pursue doing the same for the remaining 17 on the grounds.

Now in the third generation of family ownership, the Sagamore helm is in as sturdy a pair of hands as ever. On top of Sagamore’s flagship Lynnfield and North Hampton locations, the company now also boasts a driving range, mini golf course, and one-hole practice center just down the road in North Hampton. And in an effort to further bolster their ever-greening credentials, in July Sagamore joined the Green Alliance, a Seacoast-based “green business union” and discount member co-op which helps raise the profile of green businesses throughout the region.

While Peter Luff passed away in 1998, his vision has only thrived. To assure that continues, Richard Luff is determined to carry on his father’s near five decade legacy. In 2002 he coauthored a book with Paul Sachs, Ecological Golf Course Management. According to Luff, the idea of writing a book about Sagamore’s philosophy and approach to golf course management was always on his father’s radar screen. But with long workdays the norm for most of his adult life, the elder Luff never quite found the time. The last chapter of the book – simply titled “Taking Responsibility” – was dedicated, at least in spirit, to Peter’s vision.

“We basically tried to sum up in three pages where he was coming from,” says Luff. “At the end of the day, we’re just trying to carry on the family legacy he began, and to embrace his attitude and approach to all of these things.”

The book is still in print, and the philosophies behind it are growing in both volume and followers all the time. The last few years being a sea change of sorts for the golfing industry, more and more courses have started to see the green flag from the tee, and driving towards it. In the process they’ve begun to salvage, at least in the eyes of environmentalists, the reputation of an entire industry.

But for as many courses as have recently jumped on the road to sustainability, Sagamore can hang any future step along that greater green path on the luxury of knowing that, when it all began nearly 50 years ago, they already knew where they were going.