Well Irrigation need help

Hello everyone,

New here, first post, seems like you guys definitely know what you are talking about. Thanks in advance for any help you guys might be able to give me. Please know in advance that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing or who to ask.  

I've got 16 hectares/38 acres of dryland. Ive got a well with water at a depth of 16 meters or 52.5 feet. Well has production capability of 18.6 Liters per second or about 294 GPM. I am in the middle of no where in northern Mexico. I have no electricity. I want to use the water well for irrigation; water is good and sweet.

How can I do this? My first thoughts were to just purchase a gas self priming pump with a 300 gpm output and connect it to a couple of large Nelson sprinkler guns or even do flood irrigation. I just don't know if a small gas pump of that size can suction water from 52feet below surface??

An acquaintance suggested I get a solar pump. Also have 0 knowlegde of this. I just want to do something productive with it. Im stuck and I need help. If anyone out there knows anything about my next steps Id greatly appreciate some help. Land is currently used for pastures for cattle. If I fix this up cattle might be able to eat some green grass this year.

Thank you kindly!

A

To me it isn't cost effective to irrigate 38acres of rangeland in the desert to grow grass for cow. It makes more sense to buy haybales.
I would instead recommend sub irrigating just 2acres to setup a market garden of herbs and vegetables to sell at the local market/restaurant.

If I was living onsite I would irrigate another 1acres for a food forest/orchard + 0.5 acres for vegetables + 0.25 acres for a fish pond/irrigation pond + 0.25acres for a chicken run/pasture for a total of 2acres/1 hectare. I would also have a bee hive for honey. I would probable also raise 2 dwarf goats or 2 dwarf cow on the remaining 34acres, and supplement their diet hay.

But to answer your question directly about pump setup, you will need a submersible pump that lives down inside the well. Due to physics all pumps max out with a suction capacity of about 20ft, and your well is 52.5ft. After selecting a submersible well pump, I would them select a Solar powered pump, preferable direct solar pump like the slowflow pumps.

Now there are some other cool ways to "irrigate" your land. Have you ever notice how when it rains, so much water just runs off the land and into 'seasonal river bed'. Well you can trap the rain water that falls on your land and prevent it from all just running off your land. Not only that but you can watch as land uphill from you unknowingly send all of their rainwater down to your land so you can probably capture 2x the amount of rainfall. So by using swales/berms/ditches on contour you would be able to trap the surface flow and give it time to sink into your land thus watering the roots of your pasture/orchard/garden.

You can also use the above ditches idea to concentrate and direct the rainwater runoff from 34acres onto a smaller 4acre, that will now have lots of water stored in it's root zone. Alternatively you can use the swales/ditches to redirect water that gushing thru a concentating creekbed during a rain event, the swales/ditches can then spread the creekbed water to a much bigger area, thus giving the water time to soak into the ground for you plants to use it weeks and months later. If you are able to aerate the soil, the water will soak in even better and faster.

Then their is mulching this will cut down on evaporation rate, its alot easier to mulch 1-4 acres than it is to mulch 38acres. Another technique is to play with the spacing of your planting. There is also careful cultivar and species select for low water plants.

Most of the time plants don't actually want water, what they want is the minerals dissolved in the water. So the more nutrient dense your water is, with bio-available minerals, the less water your plants will need. You can make it more nutrient dense by increasing your soil life. All that peeing and pooping and decaying means you have a huge but tidy manure factory. And mushroom "root' are better than plat root at efficiently absorbing water and mineral from the soil, so let your plants trade sugars with them for water+mineral.

Hi Alfredo, welcome to Permies.

So it sounds like you have quite a challenge ahead of you.  I want to start out by saying that while I do have a tiny amount of experience with irritation, I am by no means an expert.

I am going to suggest that you try drip irrigation.  Drip irrigation works by sending water through a series of tubes that deliver a precise amount of water to a particular spot.

Now I do have to wonder what you are planning on doing with all that land.  38 acres is quite a bit of land for self sufficiency and in a dry climate like yours I personally would have difficulty justifying a center pivot type irrigator.  Whenever I see these in operation I am always amazed at how much water is pumped (under great pressure, requiring a lot of energy) into the air and then does not hit ground—much simply evaporated before touching ground again.  Center pivot is convenient in that one can easily cover a lot of ground, but it is wasteful in energy and water.

By contrast, drip line irrigation requires much less energy, wastes nothing, but is bit more time consuming to set up.

Regarding your pumping needs, seems to me that you have two options, both pretty obvious.  First though, you will probably need to go get some type of well pump.  These are typically designed to be installed at the bottom of a well and be submerged.  Once you have the pump, you will need to power it and given your situation, I really only see two options.  The first is to set up some type of gasoline or preferably diesel setup for running power.  These will work well, are mature technology, will run day and night, during broad daylight or the cloudiest of days.  So they will work and will probably be quite reliable, but you will have to keep buying fuel for them.

The second option is to have a solar setup.  Given your location, solar might well suit your needs.  I have not priced out solar lately, but the last time I did it was painfully expensive. I have heard that solar has come down in price considerably so please don’t just throw the idea out based on my unfortunate experience.  Your location suggests that solar will both work better for your location and fuel for gas/diesel pumps will be both more expensive and harder to get than if you were near a less remote location.  A final concern that is worth pondering (but still, don’t rule solar out) is how much ground are you going to cover up by putting in solar panels?  I would imagine only a few square meters, a drop in the bucket compared to your 38 acres.  But you will need to calculate the power load needed for running your pumps.  Further, do you plan on living on your land?  If so, you need to find out how much electricity you need for your household.  This is all perfectly doable, you will simply need to calculate the total power needed for your home and pumping, just make sure that you give yourself a little bit of extra capacity as something always prevents 100% operation (clouds are obvious, not so obvious is dust or bird droppings on the pane—some basic cleaning probably should be done at least daily).

I will conclude by saying that I suggest starting small and work up.  Maybe try just 1/4-1/2 acre to start—a large garden but nowhere near your entire plot.  Obviously I favor drip line irrigation, but you make the decision yourself.

Please, these are just my thoughts and if you think differently, by all means change whatever I have recommended.  And also, please keep us updated on your progress.

Eric  

Alfredo,

I had a thought regarding trees (think food forest).  Certainly, you can water these with a drip line.  In fact, the company I have used (dripworks.com) even has a tree kit.  Basically it is just a mini 10ft line that branches off the mainline and wraps around the tree at the drip line (of the tree that is).

The other option is to invest in some 5 gallon buckets.  In this option, drill just a tiny hole in the bottom of the bucket (I would start with the smallest bit you have).  Place the bucket (or 2,3, or however many you want) near the tree, fill with water and let it slowly soak in over the course of several hours.  This will give your tree a nice, gentle sip of water which will go almost entirely into the ground.  

An alternative to this is to purchase a tree watering tube.  These are fairly cheap, expandable tubes that wrap around the tree, hold something like 20 gallons of water and slowly drip into the ground.  I have seen a local park district use these to water newly planted trees during a drought.  All you need to do is fill it once per day.

Again, these are just ideas, and I hope they are helpful.

Eric

Some info on how you will use the water would be good. If you will use it in the immediate area for gardening i might suggest a water tank and use gravity from tank to plants. The pump energy could be regulated and intermittent, used just to fill the tank.

Alfredo,

Wayne has a good point about using a raised tank for water distribution.

If you are simply moving water through a hose and don’t worry about pressure, this will work fine.  

Some driplines have a minimum pressure requirement (5 psi is somewhat common for low psi systems).  For every 2.3 feet of elevation (about 16 inches) you will get an increase of about 1psi.  Therefore, to get at least 5 psi, you will need to elevate by about 80 inches or about 6.7 feet.  More pressure will be better so if you can get that water tank up 10-15 feet, you should have better luck.  But if you build a platform 15 feet higher and place a water tank on it, please build it very strong as even just a 100 gallon tank will weigh over 800 pounds!  This probably needs to be both a strong and wide so as to be both sturdy and well balanced.  Getting a higher head or larger volume of water will require a very sturdy structure.  I am not saying that you cannot do it, you can, but it must be built very strong.

Good Luck,

Eric