Winter Water Line Repair

This week we had some not-so-fun issues with broken water lines. We use fresh water from one of our ponds for our cattle water troughs throughout the farm. Most troughs are fed via gravity but there are some that we have to pump water over hills to. This week we discovered that we had a significant leak that we think actually started a long time ago when the utility company put in new posts but the freezing/thawing of the ground slowly made the leak worse and worse until we had a major leak that drained a lot of the water out of the primary water source.

So that meant we had to not only fix the water line but also pump water from a different pond back into the primary pond so that we could keep the water level high enough so that the water stayed nice and clean. The water is pulled from about 2-3 ft from the surface (via floating pipe) because that is the cleanest part of the water (vs. the muddy bottom or top of the water).

Thankfully we were able to get everything taken care of before the really cold weather came in - would have made things a lot more challenging!