Any inforrmation on home made or smal water pumping windmils

Hello Permies

Does any one have first hand experiance with windmills and would like to share it ?

Is it worth the mony ?

do they break often ?

etc

I have a smal 2.5 hectare farm in the south of hungary flat sandy and if we have rain graslike we have a lot of ground water but pumping with electricaty seems to be the only thing i have seen people do around here and after watching pdc a few times i can't keep on doing it !
I have been gathering information on vertical axes windmils and rope pumps for some time and am going to build one next spring
I was just hoping to speak to some people that have experiance with windmills
I saw a lot of above ground water storige on farms here with sand dyke wal types with plastic foil over the ground and wals 1.5 meters high for gravety water feeding but no windmills anywhere ? I think this is the best way for water storage on sand ground or at least the cheapest
And then last but not least the iragation it self i wan't to make a realy big foodforrest 1 hectare minimum so i was thinking about underground drip pipes
but they are not cheap either 1 euro the meter does any one have alternate ideas we have the most sun hours of whole europe so above ground iragation seems imposible ? We realy had almost no rain now for 2 years so iragation is a must.
any help or idea's are welcome

Thanks

Danny,

You can get good information on windmills for water pumping here: http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ah810e/AH810E10.htm

This is the search result for "windmill" at the FAO documents site: http://www.fao.org/documents/jsp/empty.jsp?cx=018170620143701104933%3Azn2zurhzcta&cof=FORID%3A11&q=windmill&search_radio=docRep&x=0&y=0

When you say you haven't received much rain, what has been your minimum precipitation per year? Less than 250 mm?

How deep are the wells? Are you on a shallow water table?

Drip irrigation can get very expensive. Other than irrigating a small kitchen garden, unless you anticipate earning a lot of money from your land, it probably is not worth it.

Have you researched hugelkultur for conserving water? If you don't have ready access to logs and other tree waste, you could use reeds. You would need to rebuild/replenish the beds more often, as the reeds would break down sooner.

Thanks for the info it was realy interesting what i have seen until know on youtube is that if you conect it to a rope pump it can be cost efective
if it works i wil put some pictures on here