Why Palmer Hills Is Iowa’s Latest Stewardship Star

When Brian Hickey signed on as superintendent at east-central Iowa’s Palmer Hills Golf Club in 2014, he received a heartening mandate from the City of Bettendorf.

“When I got here, the administrator asked me to take about three months and make a list of things I wanted to do to this golf course. We really wanted to take it to another level. I gave him my vision of where I wanted to go,” says Hickley, only the third superintendent in the popular muni’s 50-year history. We had a whole new template – we could basically start over, and they gave me free reign.”

The journey began with some judicious nips and tucks for better playability for everyone, Hickley’s crew added tee boxes for juniors and better tees for women. “The golf course was just way too difficult,” he adds. “So we went from doing about 25,000 rounds a year to and over 42,000 rounds.”

Then came carving out more native areas, shaping better playing corridors, dialing in more sustainable turf management and much more, which led ultimately to Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary for Golf Certification in June 2025. Occupying land that was once owned by Palmer College, the nation’s leading school for the chiropractic profession, Palmer Hills finally worked out all the kinks on its journey to certification after many years of hard work and dedication.

First kink to smooth? Reining in chemical use. When Hickey arrived, the city sprayed a lot of chemicals, using a lot of synthetic fertilizer. “There were certain chemicals that we couldn’t use, like Banner Maxx, Heritage, and DMI fungicides. They just didn’t work,” he said. “As we increased our verification schedule, we started getting more oxygen in [the turf] and doing a lot of deep tine aerification. The greens started getting healthier. We went from 25 fungicide applications a year including greens, fairways, and tee boxes to nine total applications – five or six on the greens and three on the fairways. That’s a 50% reduction in fungicide. We started using a lot of organic good microbes and applying compost to our fairways during late season aerification. All those things helped us reduce our fertilizer usage and retain water during dry periods. Compost also helps open the soil during wet weather.”

Hickey calls Palmer Hills’s in-play turf a “hodgepodge” of Kentucky bluegrass, bentgrass, rye, fescue, and poa annua, which work together to handle the course’s eight-month season and Iowa’s wide variations in temperature and climate, while offering solid playing conditions for all. Fescue in native areas for added definition as well as playability for those off-line shots. But Hickey wasn’t finished augmenting good turf conditions with better conditions above the ground, too. Noting that the course had become too difficult thanks largely to tree overplanting and overgrowth, he set about opening corridors.

“The city had planted a lot of silver maples back in 1974 when they took over the property and decided to build a golf course. They must’ve got them for really cheap. So we got a tree management plan in place.”

They started cutting down non-native trees and strategically planting those native to Iowa – white oaks, red oaks, Kentucky coffee – to enhance rather than hinder play. That led to a commitment to further enhancements, including more teeing areas for kids and women, and 20 to 25 acres of “native prairie” near the banks of the Mississippi River.

“They had mowed the whole place like a park,” Hickey said. “The native areas are great for animals, for pollinators, and for stopping water flows that cause erosion. The golf course took on a new look. We cut down a lot of trees around greens; the more sunlight they got, the more airflow they got.

Superintendents at other Bettendorf courses — including a colleague at one of the six Iowa layouts that were ACSP for Golf certified at the time – took notice of not only the increase in play at Palmer Hills, but the sustainability measures Hickey had put in place. “He said, ‘you actually do way more than I do – it’s a no-brainer for you guys to get certified.’ I hadn’t really thought about it. We were just looking to be environmentally friendly and trying to do the right thing. So I started looking into Audubon International, and then we applied to get started with the program. It took us about two years.” A true “hands-on” superintendent, Hickey made sure he was in the thick of the journey. “I do most of our spray applications, and I cut cups most of the time too. I’m out there hand watering, taking POGO data for moisture, trying to keep our greens all playable and as dry as possible. Because this golf course is so busy with so many rounds of golf, it was sometimes hard for me to concentrate on all the office work needed to get done, but I thought it’d be a good off season project to do the Audubon International process. It ended up taking two winters to get it all completed. It all came together.”

Despite some occasional pushback from neighbors on the methods that keep Palmer Hills healthy and sustainable, he sees strong buy-in from the course’s clientele including players of all levels, some of whom invariably find themselves in the tall grass.

“I don’t think we’ve had any real negatives. We have a section of the golf course, a three-hole stretch where there’s a triangle in between the holes. If you’re a slicer, you can be in this no man’s land. We overseeded that area and put in fine fescue, what you’d see on a links golf course, and it came out really good. That stuff’s three or four inches tall, and with a seed head it can add another eight inches. It looks like it’s tall grass, but you can find your ball in it and play out of it. We’ve got some other areas that are 70 yards on each side of the rough, way off the fairway – big blue stem, little blue stem, which are more Iowa prairie grasses. Big blue can get six or seven feet tall, and little blue stem is probably three or four feet tall. When you hit your ball into there, there’s no way you’re going to find it. But there’s also wildflowers in there.

“Golfers understand what we’re trying to do as far as wildlife habitat and reducing mowing and wear and tear on machines. We have less turf we mow on a weekly basis, less area we have to fertilize on a yearly basis too,” he said. “We still seem to make somebody upset about burning, which we do in late November and December. But other than that, I think everybody’s bought into it. They all know me by name after 11 years as the superintendent, and know what I like to do, what our goals are.”

He carries the environmental sustainability message out into the community, as well, in keeping with a key tenet of Audubon International certification.

“I write newsletters and articles [touting stewardship], and while some may not always agree with my environmentalism, not ‘all in’ as much as I am, they can see the good what it’s doing for the land, the animals, reducing our water usage, all the things that make golf more sustainable and even regenerative – trying to make our soils better than they were before the golf course was even here.”

That deep dedication to improving Palmer Hills continues. Hickey and his crew will keep striving and learning as their first recertification approaches a couple years down the road. “One thing that really surprised me was how in depth the program is. They’re certainly not letting just the casual golf course become certified. It is rigorous, and it takes some effort to do it, but that’s a good thing. They want to make sure that you’re pretty darn committed to be able to achieve that certification.”

For more on Palmer Hills, visit https://palmerhillsgolf.com. For more on Audubon International’s certification programs, visit www.auduboninternational.org.