Seth Jones visits Turfco to check out the new CR-20 Topdresser/Material Handler

Golfdom Editor-in-Chief Seth Jones visits Turfco Executive Vice President Scott Kinkead at the 2025 GCSAA Conference and Trade Show to learn about Turfco‘s new CR-20.

Seth Jones: Hey everybody, it’s Seth Jones, editor-in-chief of Golfdom Magazine. I’m at the 2025 GCSAA Conference and Trade Show in San Diego, and I’m being joined by my buddy Scott Kinkead, executive vice president of Turfco, Scott, thanks for taking some time. Always good to see you.

Scott Kinkead: Absolutely.

Jones: This thing’s a beast out here, this thing’s like, you know, taking up a lot of space. CR-20, talk to me about what you got, what you guys designed for this show.

Kinkead: Well, you know, if you’re going to do fairway top dressing and material handling, you’re going to want capacity. So it is a big machine. We’ve actually spent the last three years working on this, and a lot of it kind of started out with just asking guys what’s available out in the marketplace. How do we make it more usable? Everything we focus on is like helping a superintendent be more productive and helping their staff be more productive. And so that’s kind of the culmination of the CR 20. Is what we heard, is give us a material handler or top dresser that’s more user-friendly, a little more intuitive. So, on the top dressing side, you can set various different settings for different widths, but the same rate. So when you’re doing a fairway, you could do 40 feet wide, hit a button, drop it down to 20 feet wide, but be at the same rate or even be able to increase your application in certain areas around the fairway. So really, being able to get a really good quality spread and evenness on the topdressing side, on the material handling side, what we’ve done is we’ve our patent pending machine. We have a joystick control now for the cross conveyor, so the cross conveyor is mounted on the machine. And what we really spent a lot of time going guys saying, you know, I need to get material at least 20 feet into the bunker. So we’ve sped it up. We’ve done a hydraulic system where it’s more smooth, and I can throw sand out 20 feet, or I can drop it at 10 feet, and I can save those different settings. And we now have 40 degrees of movement up front, where I can move that cross conveyor back and forth. And the big benefit of that is now I’m not dropping it all in one spot. And so I can distribute that material around, which makes it easier for the guys when they’re spreading the material, so you don’t just end up with a big pile in one location.

Jones: Labor savings, but also cost savings in terms of the amount of beer you don’t have to buy for the guys afterward because of the backbreaking work that they were doing previously because that’s heavy sand.

Kinkead: 100 percent, and that’s what guys have said to us, its like we used to have four guys in the bunker. Now we have two couple courses where they used it. They were able to just do a quick skim of bunker sand to spruce up before a tournament, and then without using as much material, they were able to do the job in two days, which would normally take them a week and a half.

Jones: That’s great, great labor-saving. So cool. Okay, well, Scott, thanks for sharing with us and showing us what it’s all about. We’re gonna have guys on doing another thing, right for the superintendents,

Kinkead: Yeah, absolutely always.

Jones: Okay, everybody. Scott Kincaid, I’m Seth Jones. Thanks for watching us here on Golfdom TV.

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