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Hello, I'm just down the road from you in Caroline county. Trying to establish about 20 acres of pasture on old worn out row cropped sand. So far, I've been lucky and have gotten some of those localized storms when it was much needed. However, I've been thinking of the same thing - how to irrigate. As a kid, working on truck farm, I remember occasionally seeing a tractor powering a pump with PTO - may be something to think about. Here are some things I remember from when I used to work with pumps, pipes and valves: Generally, an electric motor will produce twice the work per HP than an internal combustion engine. So, it takes a 10 Horse engine to do what a 5 horse electric motor will do. Yeah, I know a Horse is 550 Ftlb/sec, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Be careful about a condition called "runout". Pumps are designed to have a certain amount of backpressure on them. If you are just "free pumping", you could put a pump in runout where it would work too hard and eventually burn out the motor. I'm talking about big pumps here - the kind of pump you're likely to need to move that kind of water. It's way, way easier to push water than to pull it. If you could pull with the perfect pump, the maximum vacuum it could generate would be about 30 inches of Mercury. That works out to about 15 psi. Think of it as negative pressure. With the weight of water itself causing about .44 psi per foot of height, it doesn't take long before you've sucked it as far as you can. That's where jet pumps come in. I'm thinking your cheapest bet may be to pump it out of that creek (if you are allowed) and run it through black plastic pipe to your field. At your field, you may need a booster pump to get the head pressure needed for the nozzles. Probably could rent a big pump. If the creek has enough flow, there is a thing called a "hydraulic ram" that basically uses different sized cylinders to pump water for free, but it's low pressure and low flow. I've never seen one in person, only read about them. Windmill and really, really big bladder tank? The windmill pumps into the bladder until it's full. You add about 10 psi air pressure to the bladder. Use low pressure system to trickle irrigate from the bladder. Don't allow any kids with pins around (PoP!) Or maybe windmill and just move the trickle tape? Note that although I remember a few things about pumps from when I worked with them, I don't know jack about irrigation. Take what you want, throw away the rest.
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