Two days at Eagle Point with the experts who shape the agronomy of championship golf and the world's elite private clubs, alongside a small, hand-picked group of guests.
This October, we're putting the people building the future of golf agronomy in one room. A small group of our investors, in conversation with the practitioners who set the standard. We'd like you there.
Sustainability is among the most pressing forces shaping the future of golf. Water usage, pesticide and input control, holding elite course conditions while doing more with less. Automation and connected technology are the opportunity beneath all of it.
Golf course agronomy is still a manual, reactive discipline. The tools to change that already exist. Most of the industry isn't using them yet. That gap is the opportunity.
Sustainability is the defining challenge of the next decade in golf: improving agronomic efficiency while reducing the inputs a course needs to thrive. Water is the most visible pressure within it. Regulatory pressure around usage is tightening, public scrutiny of how courses consume it is growing, and the tools most superintendents rely on today were not designed with scarcity in mind. But water is only the symptom. Most maintenance decisions are still made by experienced people walking a property, observing problems by eye, and responding with broad interventions.
The same technologies reshaping row-crop agriculture apply directly to golf: geo-mapping, remote sensing, predictive modeling, GPS-guided application, real-time soil monitoring. The connected, data-driven operation is not a future concept. It exists at the leading edge of the profession today. It is not yet the standard.
These tools are built for a market that demands near-perfect surface quality. They are tested under conditions more rigorous than almost any other turf application. When they move into commercial agriculture, sports turf, and municipal landscapes, they carry proof from the game's most demanding surfaces.
The vendor landscape is fragmented. Small, specialized businesses each solve one part of the problem, with nothing connecting them. That integration layer does not yet exist in golf. Building it, or backing the businesses closest to it, is where Old Tom Capital is focused.
Agronomy is a wide space. The five categories below are illustrative, not exhaustive, examples of where we see immediate opportunity and durable businesses forming, each with use well beyond golf. The more time we spend here, the deeper it goes.
The move from observation to prediction. Geo-mapping, remote sensing, and real-time monitoring give superintendents a picture that did not exist before. They map disease pressure before symptoms appear and connect soil conditions directly to application decisions across a property.
Knowing where a problem exists is only useful if you can treat it exactly. GPS-guided application is replacing the blanket interventions that defined turf management for decades. In row-crop agriculture, where the acreage is far larger, the economics change entirely.
Water scarcity is the most immediate operational pressure operators face. The infrastructure that manages it, including drainage, subsurface irrigation, and root-zone moisture control, is where capital is moving fastest. Demand extends well beyond golf, into urban development and climate-resilient construction.
The shift away from synthetic inputs is underway across agriculture, driven by regulation, cost volatility, and improving alternatives. In golf, where surface quality is non-negotiable, biologicals are validated under the most demanding conditions in turf management.
No single platform connects these systems into one accountable operation: soil data, application decisions, performance tracking, compliance reporting. The superintendent still does that work by hand, vendor by vendor, every day. The category will be defined by whoever closes that gap first.
Most of what defines how a championship course plays happens out of public view. The standards, the science, the judgment calls made weeks before a tournament begins. We're assembling the people who do that work at the highest level, and bringing the conversation to Eagle Point.
We're finalizing the roster now and will name each guest closer to the date. What we can tell you is the caliber of the room: marquee subject-matter experts in the agronomy of championship golf, drawn from the governing bodies, the world-ranked clubs, and the professional tour, the people who set the standard for how the game is played and presented.
Old Tom's advisor on the science underpinning the thesis, and a working voice in the field. Sam spent seven years as golf course superintendent at Eagle Point and is now president and COO of Aqua-Aid. He moderates the fireside, translating what the panel surfaces into what it means for operators, vendors, and the businesses forming around them.
Along the Intracoastal Waterway outside Wilmington, North Carolina. The Tom Fazio design opened in 2001 and hosted the PGA Tour's Wells Fargo Championship in 2017. It is among the best private courses on the East Coast, a layout that plays differently every time the wind moves off the water.
Wednesday afternoon is eighteen holes, one speaker per group. The golf is unhurried; the conversations that happen on the course are often the ones people remember longest.
Thursday morning, the par-3 course is open to anyone who wants it. No groups, no scorecards. The speakers will be out there.
Arrival Wednesday morning, departure Thursday early afternoon. The agenda is built around access, not airtime.
Accommodations on property. Space is limited to roughly twenty guests.