“It’s getting to be a real issue,” said Herschel George, a K-State Research and Extension watershed specialist based in eastern Kansas.
“Here in eastern Kansas, our ponds are still relatively full, but as I talk to anyone in the Flint Hills, from Topeka and anywhere further west, it’s just a disaster situation waiting to happen.” George and other Kansas State University specialists have developed various common-sense approaches, many of them outlined in the publication, ‘Waterers and Watering Systems: A Handbook for Livestock Producers and Landowners.’ It’s available online at https://www.bookstore.ksre.k-state.edu/pubs/S147.pdf.
“I know out in central and western Kansas, solar pumps are being used more and more,” he said.
“The systems are available and they’re working well.
“We have a number of people that have gone ahead and put in a connection to rural water that may be passing by their farm, and installing a water tank,” George said, especially in low water times or drought situations.
Number two, it’s a water quality issue and you can actually get better quality water for your livestock if you have a tank downhill from the pond.” For ponds that are already dried out, George said one alternative may be to clean it out, though it is typically a costly process.
“Ideally you’d say, ‘well let’s just build a new pond instead of clean that one out,’ but in most of the cases the best sites for the pond were already taken with the first pond, so where are you going to put the second one?” George said.
At 20 hours of work, that’s about $6,000 just for moving the “slop and muck” out of the pond.
That means installing a watering line from the pond that falls at least six feet from the full water level in the pond to the watering site.
“I often encourage producers to go ahead and get that water line from their livestock water site back up to where they cut the slot in the dam (of the pond) installed early, because if not you’re likely to have 2-3 foot of mud sitting on top of where you’re going to want to build that water line,” George said.