Catching Rain Water for the Animals!!!

When we purchased our main farm back in 2012 it was beautiful rolling hills piece of land with only one natural water source a small spring that bubbles out of the ground to form a four foot round little water hole. The farm also had city water, do not ask me how we have city water because we live out in the middle of nowhere but our county boast of the fact that every resident has access to city water and they are right we are the furthest farm, at the very edge of the county and we do have city water.

City water is ok but it is not cheap and when you are watering a few hundred head of cattle and goats it gets really costly. It is also not very sustainable. To remedy this over the past 5 years we have built 8 ponds on the farm and a rain water catching system off of our barn. I will write a post about the ponds at a different date but this post is about our rain water catch.

We built our pole barn about 2 years ago and last year we finally saved up enough funds to buy a 3,000 gallon water tank. We poured a cement pad, which the water tank sits on. We then use the guttering on half the barn roof to fill our tank. It is not the most elaborate set up but it works great. With every inch of rain water we collect about 960 gallons of water in the tank. We use this water daily for the chickens, dairy cow and for the garden. Whenever the cattle or goats are close enough to the tank we will also water them out of it. It also serves as a backup for our house water if we ever need it.

The question I get asked most often is why don’t you just drill a water well? The short answer is we have drilled three different wells on the farm. We even hired a geologist with all kinds of fancy equipment to find water underground for us. No water was found. We decided to just do the next best sustainable thing which is to catch some of the rain that falls.

This has been a great investment for the homestead, not only is it very sustainable. It has also noticeable helped with the monthly water bill. With the rain catching from the barn and the 8 ponds we have built, we are almost 100 percent rain water here on the homestead. It has taken a lot of time and work but we are slowing moving to being more self-sustaining here on the farm. That is one of our goals to use nature as much as possible to provide for the homestead.