Moving Water From Roof Rain Capture

I am working with a land owner that has started a project that includes growing basketry willow, coppicing existing and newly planted trees on the property for a variety of uses, and an experimental tree grove that will test the suitability of some native tree species in the building of wooden canoes and small water vessels. They are located in North Central Indiana (newly 6a) and rain in the growing the months is variable. The property has a well.  They would like to install a rain capture system to capture rain falling on the roof of their pole barn and use the water for irrigation, especially of the newly planted trees, during dry spells first year or two of growth.  Installing the rain capture system is simple enough and modular. There will be no problem capturing and storing several hundred gallons. Moving the water to where it will be used is a bit more tricky.  We can install a pump by the pole barn to move water out there one needed but we are also wondering about the feasibility of installing a cistern out in the center of the field and trickle pumping the water from the rain collection area to the cistern using solar powered pump and then simply gravity feeding water to the trees. The cistern would be about 100 yards from the pole barn. Over all water would not need to be moved more than 200 yards (considering paths that hoses would need to take). The land is basically flat. If we put cisterns in the field would probably elevate them a movable platform we have access to.

Your last sentence is confusing.
Some questions
- What volumes of water are we talking about?
- Trickle irrigation can be time consuming
- what tank / cistern volume will you have
- what size pipes do you have in mind

How do they plan on watering? Drip irrigation, walking around with a hose, etc.? At my property in Lafayette, Indiana I just put IBC totes up on concrete blocks as high as I could next to the building and did gravity feed through a garden hose for watering. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. If I was going for a 200 yard run, I'd probably have part of the section run through drain pipe or PVC to help out with the pressure.

We use a utility trailer and one of those IBC tanks to water our food plots.  We use a Harbor Freight water pump and several long garden hoses.

Then we move the trailer and tank with our Kawasaki mule.

Before we moved here we used that IBC tank set on a platform about 3 feet tall to gravity-feed our garden.

John C Daley wrote:Your last sentence is confusing.
Some questions
- What volumes of water are we talking about?
- Trickle irrigation can be time consuming
- what tank / cistern volume will you have
- what size pipes do you have in mind

The last sentence should have read we will move a platform out to near to where we will need to water and put the cistern on the platform. We would fill the field cistern with a pump of some sort. We would drip irrigate from the  field cistern via gravity using the proper emitters or simply drip/holes in a hose. Not sure about sizing the system. That is partially why I am asking questions here.

Anne Miller wrote:We use a utility trailer and one of those IBC tanks to water our food plots.  We use a Harbor Freight water pump and several long garden hoses.

Then we move the trailer and tank with our Kawasaki mule.

Before we moved here we used that IBC tank set on a platform about 3 feet tall to gravity-feed our garden.

How many gallons would you use at a time?

I can't say how many gallons at a time.

The IBC tank was the one that is something like 3'x 4' square.  We sold that one when someone was in a pinch.

The usage also depended on the size of the food plot and weather conditions.

All I can say is we watered till the tank was empty and refilled as needed.

I had a garden I wanted to drip irrigate one time and all the little rainbird plastic drippers were one-gallon per hour, but I did not have enough water to feed them at that rate. If i just let water at low pressure run into the irrigation hose, it would all drip out at the lowest elevation drippers. If I fed the water at pressure, I would need a timer and switch. I found a non-electronic solution that I think others might also be able to use:

I made a super-sized "deer scarer": This is a Japanese-garden feature popularized by one of Kill Bill's final scenes. A pipe closed at one end is mounted on a pivot. Water drips into the open end and when enough water accumulates, the pipe tips and dumps its water all at once. I had the irrigation hose connected to a feed tank, and the feed tank was periodically filled by the giant deer-scarer. The dripper rate was not nearly high enough to feed all the individual hose drippers, but they all were fed evenly from the feed tank when it would be periodically filled. Eh? You like? It also sounded cool when the water dumped into the feed tank.