I’ve been spending a lot of money turning a grassy field into a productive CSA vegetable farm, and my largest single expense has been developing water on the site.  We have long dry summers here, and while a few crops can be dry-farmed, most need irrigation.  My property doesn’t have a well, but my neighbors Jim & Kim have a well right on the property line that they are generously letting me develop and use.  My system goals were to get 80GPM at 40PSI over about a 1/2 acre at a time through aluminum hand lines, as well as 20GPM on-demand flow for drip lines, the wash station, etc.  The following is a breakdown of the costs:

Well Testing

Removing rusted-0ut old pump & drop pipe - $600

Testing well production - $1,000

Testing water quality - $350

New Pump Installation

All parts & labor at the well - $12,490 (including 5hp pump, 4 pressure tanks, drop pipe, valves, fittings, wiring, etc)

Hooking in to the Grid

PG&E hook-up costs (dropping a line to a new meter) - $940

Customer-owned service pole - $445

Underground wire from meter to well (250 ft, parts & electrician labor) - $1,20o

Aluminum Field Lines

4” Mainline (900 ft, used) - $1,350

3” Hand Lines (1350 ft, used) - $1,450

Fittings (Valve openers, tees, end caps, etc) - $1,075

24” risers (35) - $525

Rainbird 30H heads (35) - $820

Low-pressure system for drip, wash station, greenhouses

1.5” LayFlat (900 ft) - $405

Misc Fittings - $275

1/2 ” Poly tubing for headers (1500 ft) - $140

T-tape (10,000 ft roll) - $350

Fittings, Filters, Pressure Regulators for drip - $150

Total - $23,565 ...Whoa

We are off-grid at our farm and we will continue to be so.  That means we collect our water and generate our power on our own.  We have a nice Grundfos submersible well pump that gets us 5 gallons per minute from our well that has its static head (depth of the water from the surface) at 180 feet.  All in all, not a bad bit of engineering.  Put another way, ever try to slurp an Odwalla Carrot Juice through a 180 foot straw?  You’d need some help. The help comes by way of… Read the rest of this article »

Like Dan said, we had a good billet of jobs this time around. While Dan was putting in the last of the seeds I was finishing up the drip irrigation work. Both orchards and the test field are now set for timed drip irrigation. The trick was figuring out how much water to give them. This I figured out before we came out on the field. It is based on local evapotranspiration, which is a cool word guaranteed to clear a room at any hipster gathering. In short, evapotranspiration is the amount of water… Read the rest of this article »