Course Profiles / Nebraska

Landmand Golf Club: A Course Profile

Start with the size of one green. The 17th green at Landmand measures about 34,000 square feet. A typical green on a typical course is maybe 6,000. The 17th at Landmand is a small field with a flag in it, and it is not even an outlier by the course's own standards, since the greens average 14,000 square feet across the property. Everything at Landmand, the public course Rob Collins and Tad King opened in 2022 in the farmland above Homer, Nebraska, is built at a scale that makes ordinary golf courses look like models of themselves.

The facts first, because they are the fun here. Landmand plays 7,200 yards at par 73, an unusual par that tells you the routing answers to the land rather than to convention. It was the first 18 hole design by King Collins, the firm of Collins and King. It sits on a 580 acre site in the Loess Hills above the Missouri River in northeast Nebraska. The first and last holes share a fairway up to 150 yards wide. A farming family, the Andersens, developed it, broke ground on September 3, 2019, and opened for public play exactly three years later, on September 3, 2022. Golf Digest put it in the top 200 in America by 2025. For a public course in Homer, Nebraska, that is not a debut. That is an arrival.

Big is a design idea, not a gimmick

Scale can be a stunt, and the honest question about Landmand is whether the size means anything. The case that it does starts with the site. The Loess Hills roll in long, soft folds, nothing like the sharp dunes of Sand Hills about 200 miles west, and a small, tight course on that ground would fight the landscape for 18 holes. King Collins went the other way. Wide fairways, enormous greens, room to play golf in the same proportions the hills suggest. A 150 yard wide shared fairway sounds absurd until you stand on it in a Nebraska wind and realize the width is the strategy: the far side is safe and long, the near side is short and angled, and the wind decides which bargain you take.

Par 73 works the same way. It frees the routing from the standard count of par 3s and par 5s and lets the ground set the card. On a 580 acre canvas painted this large, forcing the total to 72 would have been the real gimmick.

The greens deserve their own word. At an average of 14,000 square feet, a Landmand green is a putting surface with neighborhoods. Being on the green and being close are different events, sometimes 100 feet apart, and that restores a skill modern golf has nearly lost: the lag putt as a genuine shot, and the approach played to a section rather than a flag. The 17th, at 34,000 square feet, is the extreme case and the signature. Hit it and you have accomplished something. Hit it in the wrong county of it and your work has barely started.

Public, in Nebraska, on purpose

Landmand is public access, a destination course anyone can book, and that is the second half of its argument. Nebraska already had the proof that remote farmland golf can draw the world, and Landmand plants the same flag 200 miles east with a completely different visual language: green, rolling, river country instead of sand. Our Nebraska state ranking now has to hold both ideas at once, and the state is better for the argument.

The concession: scale is not subtlety, and players who love tight, tree lined, target golf will find Landmand's openness disorienting, even easy looking, right up until the wind rises and a 40 yard wide target plays like a doorway. The course also asks for a trip. Homer is not on the way to anywhere.

That is rather the point. A farming family bet 580 acres of Loess Hills on the idea that golfers would come to northeast Nebraska for a course built bigger than reason, and Golf Digest's top 200 says the bet is winning. Stand on the shared fairway of the first and 18th, with the Missouri River country falling away and a green the size of a pasture waiting at the 17th, and the scale stops being a statistic. It is the whole beautiful argument.