Water for Sheep

A long dry North Canterbury summer puts a strain on water resources.  This happens every year.  Our stock water comes from the neighbour through some scheme that I don't fully understand.  I believe he pumps it from the creek and stores it in tanks.  When it was first set up, there was a bylaw requiring you to provide water to your neighbours and I believe most of the neighbours were on the scheme.  This has gradually shrunk to be only us and the guy over the road who also has tanks to store excess water in.

We don't have tanks, we rely on water being available all the time.  It's been a source of many discussions and arguments and plans that have never come to anything.  We've never needed to do much, because while the water runs out every year, it's usually for a very short time and we manage to get by fine when that happens.

Until this year.

The neighbour who runs the scheme has a few health issues that have made him somewhat forgetful and confused a lot of the time. He does some odd things and forgets he's done them.  Between that, the drought conditions and the pump running when there's no water and subsequently burning out, we haven't had water in at least a month.

The layout of our paddocks and the site of our house tank makes running lines from our house water supply unrealistic. There is one trough running off our house water, because running a line from the scheme would mean expecting the water to run uphill for quite a distance - it just wouldn't happen.  That trough has caused us a few problems when it's leaked in the past.  There was another, but waking up in the morning to find we had no water because the pigs had ripped another ball cock arm off in their trough put an end to that one.

So we had to look at other solutions.  We have a big tank that we fill with rain water.  It's been there just over a year. We've argued and discussed what we're going to do with that rain water but rarely come to any kind of agreement.  It's just been there as a kind of back up.

With no water available to the troughs, I was worrying about our animals.  The cows in the front paddock were doing okay as I can fill their trough with the garden hose over the fence.  The cows in the gully would run out after a while, but they were doing okay for now with two large troughs at different ends of where they were currently running.

The sheep however were a different matter. 

Dry water trough for the sheep.

I carried several buckets of water to them.  I topped up their troughs from others in nearby paddocks since it was starting to evaporate anyway. This wasn't going to work for long.  The sheep are split into two flocks because Ramington is dead keen to fight with Ramuel and would probably kill him. Each trough takes six to eight buckets of water to fill and they will empty that in a day.  Carrying up to 20 kg at a time, walking approximately one kilometre each round trip was leaving me with no time to do anything in the evenings.  This was coming after a day of a physically active and demanding job and I was already rather shattered.

For a temporary measure, we moved an empty plastic water trough to about the halfway point.  It was in the run for the cows in the gully so also served as their water supply.  We managed to run a water line to the trough from the rain water tank and could fill our buckets from there, making it a much quicker and simpler task.

The line from the tank to the trough was cobbled together using every last little piece of irrigation hose we could find.  Plugs went into the holes where jets, risers and drippers had previously been.  Every joiner we could lay our hands on was pressed into service, when we ran out of straight inline joiners, we were using elbows.  This line kinked and bent and ran its merry way down the hill through the paddock to the trough.

We were still carrying buckets every night to water the sheep.  It was getting old very fast. 

We have several IBCs.  IBC stands for Intermediate Bulk Container.  They're caged 1000 litre tanks on pallets that are useful as movable water supply.  We have made plans to use them on several occasions but fittings from their taps to a hose of any sort have always eluded us.  Hubby has rigged up several things at different times but all have been leaky and somewhat unreliable.

I have a vision of having several of these in series in our shelter belts.  They will be both storage and able to supply our water troughs.  Our two flocks are currently in paddocks that come from the same water supply line, here was our opportunity to test my vision in part.

The first issue was fittings.

There had to be something available.  IBCs have become such a hot commodity lately and you can see them everywhere.  Someone will be making something.  I rang a friend who works in irrigation.  He gave us several options and told us where the best place to get them was.  One option is a fitting that screws onto the tap outlet at the bottom of the tank.  He mentioned that the taps can be notorious for not turning off properly and they are very stiff to work.  I agree, they take a fair bit of brute force to turn on and off.  The other option is a fitting that you poke through a drilled hole at the bottom of the tank.  It's made from rubber and will compress enough to go through the hole, and then open out and seal itself on the inside.  Unless your arms are a metre and a half long, you're not going to be able to reach inside to fit anything else to the bottom of the tank.

We rushed into the recommended store to get some before they closed.  Our rural supply stores still close at lunchtime on Saturdays and are closed on Sundays.  They had the tap fitting and other required bushes and connectors to bring it down to fit a 20mm pipe but had sold out of the others.  We left our name and number for when they have some more of the rubber type in stock because we have several more tanks to do, but took the other type to try for now.

We got the tank to the shelter belt where the water line runs.  Getting it actually into the shelter belt required pulling the staples out of two fence posts and lifting the deer fencing enough to squeeze the tank underneath the netting. 

Our next mission was finding the water line.  I carefully dug a trench across the whole shelter belt.  It had to be there somewhere right? I found an old irrigation line that was in very bad shape, but couldn't find the one we wanted.  Maybe it runs down the fence line on the paddock side? How much digging did we want to do?  We dug along and traced the line from the highest water trough back up towards where we wanted to put the IBC.  It snaked back and forth, it's certainly not a straight line, but I supposed time and earthquakes and all sorts of events could have caused that.  We moved where we'd planned to put the IBC to where we got fed up with digging.

Tracing the water line.

We didn't think we had enough hose to get all the way to the IBC so had placed another one partway as a staging area.  The plan was to fill it there and then use a pump to go from there to the one we were putting in place.  Hubby realised there were several old hoses in the back of the shed that were missed last time and we might be able to get all the way to the IBC.  He was setting that up while I was putting the fittings on the tank. 

There are three different fittings here.

Each time we thought we'd gotten close, the water would stop running.  We found a couple of leaks and places where the hose disconnected itself completely, but as it was getting dark, we had success.  I opened the tap and let it fill the troughs as the IBC was filling.

In place, all hooked up and ready to run.

Success!

We may have to fill the IBC this way once a week or so, but no more buckets!