"We calculate that golf courses have had to cut back 97% on their water usage in this drought, while other water-using industries were only asked to reduce by 10%"

John Paul Newport uses his Saturday WSJ column to look at the water usage debate, with ominous signs for the future.

In Georgia, it has already begun. "We calculate that golf courses have had to cut back 97% on their water usage in this drought, while other water-using industries were only asked to reduce by 10%," says Mike Crawford, president of the Georgia chapter of the superintendents association and the course superintendent at TPC Sugarloaf in Duluth, Ga. "We want to be a good partner, but that's not fair. Golf is a $3.5 billion industry in this state."

Nationwide, golf-course irrigation consumes less than half of 1% of the 408 billion gallons of water used daily, a golf-industry report concludes.

Even so, that's a lot of water -- two billion gallons a day, or enough to satisfy the household needs of more than two-thirds of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. And it's clear from the pioneering work that some courses have done in reducing water usage how much less water golf overall could get by on.

Four years ago, for instance, the Olympic Club and two other courses in the San Francisco area collaborated on a project to reclaim wastewater before it was discharged into the ocean. The courses now irrigate exclusively with this nonpotable "gray water," as do 12% of U.S. courses.

Many courses have also scaled back the acreage they maintain as turf, substituting low-maintenance vegetation in areas where golfers are unlikely to hit balls. Moisture-metering systems, coupled with watering systems that use as many as 3,000 computer-controlled sprinkler heads, allow some superintendents to spot-water only when and where the turf needs it.