is 1.5 gpm enough for small farm?

hello! a 200' well with 1.5 gpm. negligible rain water collection. will that be suitable for a small farm? no animals. thanks!

daniel petersen wrote:hello! a 200' well with 1.5 gpm. negligible rain water collection. will that be suitable for a small farm? no animals. thanks!

If I had a spring producing that much water in the deep desert, I'd feel rich.

That would be 15,000 gallons per week. My irrigation system, in the desert, is designed to deliver 0.6 gallons of water per square foot per week. Therefore, at my place, if I had 1.5 gallons per minute of water, I could farm a little over half an acre.

You say "small farm, no animals".  What will you be using the water for?  Irrigation I presume.  How many acres, what crops, what type irrigation system?  @1.5gpm that is 90gph. The 1.5 gpm figure should be your recovery rate.  You have a 200ft well with water standing in it.  How far from the top does the water come to?  With a 6 inch typical well pipe you will have about 1.5 gallons of storage per foot of pipe.

As Walt said there s not enough information to give you an answer. I can however give you my experience.

I have a well that is 215 feet down, comes within 17 feet of ground level, and has a recovery rate of 2 gallons per minute. Despite having a farm with many sheep, it has never gone dry. This included last summer in one of our worst droughts on record. Other homes in my area went dry, but ours didn't so I think we are okay. Sheep are not heavy water drinkers anyway, especially in the summer, but we always keep their stock tanks full.

I am not sure I would fill a swimming pool, nor would I want to leave a hose accidentally on and set timers when filling the tanks so we remember we got water on.

As Walt said, it is all about depth, recovery rate and consumption. The deeper you go, the less of a recovery you need because the more you have in reserve. Well drillers have parameters they have to go by when drilling wells because of this. Here is the math on my place because it is so close to the math on your place:

Depth: 215 feet, with the water coming within 17 feet of the surface, that is a water column of 198 linear feet. At 1.5 gallons per linear foot, that is 297 gallons of water storage. Typically a family of 4 consumes 150 gallons of water per day, so it will only use half of this water storage capacity, and that is before we calculate in recovery rate.

A garden hose is about the biggest water flow a typical home and small farm has, and its about 5 gallons per minute. Your well pump cannot kick out much more water than that per minute. So with a recovery rate of 2 gallons per minute, you would have to run your garden hose for over an hour and a half at full stream before it ran dry. Put another way, you could fill a 500 gallon tank in 90 minutes without going dry. Then after a 2-1/2 hour wait, do it all over again. If your needs are short of that then you will be fine.

Now if you had a well that was 50 feet deep and got 1.5 gallons per minute; we would be having an entirely different conversation!!

thanks for all the awesome replies! the property we're looking at is 3.75 acres, probably .5/acre will actually be garden space. eventually having mostly forest garden orchard and perennials is the goal, with some annuals of course. so yes, irrigation. we have ducks and will have a pond and fertigation setup. it sounds like this won't be an issue as long as we do it right thank you!