Solar watering station available for area farmers
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has partnered up with area farmers to use a solar powered livestock watering station — one that is entirely portable. Video by Laura Peters/The News Leader Wochit
MOUNT SOLON - On Alston Horn's family farm, they are using solar energy to become more efficient in getting water to their cattle herd.
With the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Horne has been using a solar powered livestock watering station — one that is entirely portable.
He's sectioned off 15 acres of Buck Hill Farm and split it in half, allowing 50 head of cattle to graze on either side (one, during one week, and then the other half the next).
The solar watering station pumps five gallons a minute and his setup can accommodate 50 cows, Horn said.
The mobile unit, which has several water holding tanks and a solar panel attached to a trailer, uses the sun's energy to pump water from any nearby creek or pond. The holding tanks stores reserve water, when there isn't sun available to pump water from the pond into a trough.
It's especially beneficial for farmers who rent the land they farm. This set-up, which costs about $6,000, can be setup in a separate location in just over two hours.
It costs less than a permanent system or installing a well, both of which can run well over $20,000. The mobility allows the system to travel between fields or to entirely new farms almost seamlessly. In doing that, livestock can graze new areas, which improves the overall health of the soil.
The portable water unit also gets livestock out of streams — a key thing the CBF is trying to accomplish — which makes for cleaner water. The main question that arose from getting livestock out of streams was, how do you get the water to the livestock?
"The key to really good grazing or the missing link is often water," CBF Watershed Restoration Scientist Matt Kowalski. "This unit provides a way to drop a pump into a spring, a pond or a river where you can get some good clean water and get the livestock out of that."
This way, you'll get more efficient grazing, he said. Cattle don't like to walk much further than 800 feet, maybe 1,000 feet from water where they are going to graze.
"So, if we can put water located in the middle of the field, we can maximize the efficiency of their grazing, relative to the water," Kowalski said.
There are a few of these systems setup in the Valley, Kowalski said. The CBF is allowing farmers to try them out, in hopes they will build their one.
Plus, with many of the farmers in this area renting land, a majority of them don't want to shell out extra cash and invest in property they don't fully own.
"Much of the agricultural land in Virginia is rented," Kowalski said. "If a farmer doesn't have a permanent or long-term lease with the landowner, they are going to be really reluctant to make a significant investment in that piece of property. This allows them, at a relatively low cost, to build one of these systems where they can provide clean, mobile water. If they should lose the lease on that particular piece of property, it's portable, so they can pack it up back up and take it with them."
On Horn's farm, the water is pumped from a spring-fed pond about 600 feet from where the whole set-up is. The solar energy pumps the water into a 700 gallon trough. If there's no sun, there are 900 gallons of reserve water on the trailer. The reserve water is gravity-fed to the trough.
“By being able to contain the cattle in one field and not making them go to another field for water, we can now allow those other paddocks time to rest,” said Horn, who is also a CBF field technician. “When there is adequate forage we can move the cattle back to those fields.”
The watering station also reduces nutrient pollution from livestock to local rivers and streams. Healthy buffers of native plants, shrubs, and trees along waterways help absorb and filter waste from livestock before it can run off into streams, according to the CBF. The watering station means cattle don’t have to get close to waterways, keeping waste out of streams and allowing these buffers to thrive.
CBF is now accepting applications for farmers who would like to try out CBF’s demonstration unit on a temporary trial run in 2018. Those interested in applying can contact Kowalski at firstname.lastname@example.org or 540-233-1066. Two other solar watering stations in the Shenandoah Valley are in use under a pilot program by Virginia Cooperative Extension.