Beaufort Golf Club:
four robotic mowers, 220,000m² of championship turf

Beaufort Golf Club sits beneath the MacGillycuddy's Reeks in County Kerry - one of the most scenic parkland courses in Ireland, and now one of the most quietly maintained.

Working alongside club owner Will Magill and Head Greenkeeper Padraig, we installed and commissioned four Belrobotics BigMow GPS-RTK robotic mowers covering approximately 220,000 square metres across all 18 holes: fairways, tee boxes and semi-rough. From first survey to handover took ten days.

The greenkeeping team got their week back.

Every parkland course of this scale knows the problem: routine mowing eats the week. 220,000 square metres of fairway, tee box and semi-rough is a relentless cycle, and it runs whether or not there's anything more valuable to be doing.

Every hour on a fairway mower is an hour not spent on bunkers, drainage, presentation detail - the work that separates a good course from a memorable one.

With Padraig newly appointed as Head Greenkeeper, Beaufort wanted the team's time going into course development rather than repetition. The question was whether automation could take the routine work without compromising the standard of the cut.

Every robotic mowing installation begins long before the machines arrive.

We surveyed the course with Will and Padraig to work out the most efficient mowing strategy across all 18 holes - where RTK coverage would hold, where charging stations should sit, and how mowing zones could be shaped to work around daily golf operations rather than against them. On a course this size, that planning stage is the difference between a fleet that fits the club's rhythm and one that fights it.

With the plan agreed, the four BigMow GPS-RTK robots were configured, tested and commissioned over a ten-day period.

Replacing diesel fairway mowers and rough cutters with fully electric robots has noticeably cut noise across the property. Golfers get a less interrupted round, and the course has become a calmer environment for the deer and birdlife that live on it - something Beaufort's members have noticed as quickly as anything else.

The robots handle the repetitive mowing every day, which frees the team for course presentation, bunker maintenance, drainage improvements and ongoing development work. As we often say, these aren't replacing members of the team - they're simply four more tools in the toolbox.

Conventional mowing is limited to a working day of roughly seven hours. The BigMow fleet can spread the same workload across 24, cutting small amounts more frequently. That reduces stress on the turf and holds a uniform standard of presentation without putting pressure on the team.

Moving routine mowing from diesel machinery to battery-operated robots has cut fuel use substantially, reducing both running costs and the emissions attached to traditional mowing equipment.

Lightweight floating cutting heads put far less rolling weight on the playing surface than heavy cylinder mowers, so compaction is reduced. Combined with a "little and often" cutting pattern and micro-fertilisation - the robots finely mulch clippings and return them to the soil - the fairways are showing denser, more upright growth and a better visual finish, with less reliance on artificial fertiliser.

There's been a less obvious benefit too: the greenkeeping staff are being trained to programme, monitor and maintain the robotic systems. As automation becomes standard across the golf industry, that's a genuinely valuable addition to a modern greenkeeper's skill set.