I hear ya, Joe. That farmer isn't doing us any favors, that's for sure! Will be nice when he gets something green growing in those fields again.
It truly is very hard to get everything we want/need out of a course at Brooksville right now. Everyone wants lots of runs, which means we need two cars on course to maximize use of time. But, the MAXIMUM amount of space we can ever have between those two cars is 100 feet, and that's only if we put both cars closer than 50 feet to the grass. So, unless we deem it completely unsafe (in which case, we'd have to go to one-car-at-a-time and about half the number of runs that people are used to), the "passing zone" will be a feature of almost every course.
And then... the struggle with THAT part of the course is that ideally we'd have both cars going straight so that there's no risk of them ever spinning into each other. But, doing that creates a speed issue. (we're talking 3-400 foot straights that you're already entering at a minimum of 25-30 mph... which will put fast cars easily into the 80's... and doing it twice on each course...) So, we have to put a slalom on one side, and usually something straighter on the other. It works... but it does put people closer to the grass.
That part of the course aside, due to the condition of the fields, lately we have been trying to keep the rest of the course a bit further from the grass. People seem to always find ways to go off, but from what I saw yesterday, almost all of them were just barely off, not much more than the width of their car. Matt was the notable exception, he went a little further off and right into a deep sand pit. (we had to find a tow strap to pull his car out) But, the slalom was not the only place people went off. In fact, I think most of the offs were NOT in the slalom. I saw people go off on the entry to the turn-around (which we anticipated at setup, and moved that turn in by 10 feet and made the angle of entry less so that the braking zone wasn't pointed right at the grass), in the return-side offsets, and at least one car lost it entering the figure 8 (which is in the MIDDLE of the course) and spun all the way to the grass.
So, yeah. Brooksville is not ideal at the moment. But, unless everyone wants to do courses that are single-car and stay right in the middle of the runway, we can't keep every car out of the grass/dirt. A car can slide 50' or more when somebody loses control at 50-60 mph. (SCCA regs say 50' is the minimum distance to an "object", our insurance says 75') If we viewed the grass as an "obstacle" to avoid, we couldn't do anything more than slalom STRAIGHT up the runway with about 68' of buffer space on each side. That would get old fast.
For now, we're doing what we can, and we're making it a point to clearly state during the driver's meeting in very specific and graphic terms the potential dangers of going off into the dirt. Brooksville being the site that is most available to us, and us being the sort who like to autocross a lot... that seems to be our best option right now.
) but I feel I wasn't giving too much up. This helped temper my fear that when I get good tires for my car I will still drive like I have all-seasons on.
Or I could have left the car's brain fully on and a blind person 
could have driven that course with a smart dog's help of course. I chose to let experienced younger drivers experience a raw fully setup stock car with ONLY ABS engaged and they all did well learning a lot from the feedback.