Water control

I have had problems with run off from neighboring field Flooding my well pit in the garden barn.
I have to pump the pit every day to keep the water from running over the top of my well casing. A couple of days ago I started getting water seeping into my cellar also. The road ditch above my house has filled in and the water from the hillside is all draining down into the field next to me.The field was plowed last spring, first time in 55 years. Renter planted beans, but was unable to harvest a lot of the field because it was so wet. The field is in dire need of tiling to make it productive again. The owner tried to sub divide the field and sell it as building lots, but after digging several holes and failing perk tests that idea was abandoned. The town supervisor has told me that as soon as it dries out, they will dig out the road ditch.
Yesterday afternoon I climbed on my Kubota KX41 and dug a temporary ditch to divert the water away from my property. This morning there is a stream of water 16" wide and 2" deep running out the end of this diversion ditch.
Loren

We will make a Louisiana boy out of you yet. LOL.
With 60 inches of rain a year you learn water diversion early on or stay wet.


My property has a natural stream/ditch on one side.
The natural high ground is about 600 to 800 feet on the other side.
This caused all the rain water to cross my land as it flowed to the ditch.
I cut a ditch like yours on that side of my property and diverted all this water coming out of the woods next to me to the street.

If you're town supervisor is anything like mine, you will never see the day when they correct it. The road ditch behind my place is all filled in and I been after them for years to take grader and blade it out in to my field to form some sort of ditch. They said that is a good idea and they will do that in fall when I get my crop out.====That was 12 years ago.===

Wish you could E-mail me some of that.

Another thing that would help would be to haul in some fill and build up around your well pit area. That way, even rain runoff from your own yard will divert around the pit area.

As for your ditch, John said it best. Can't wait for others to do what they say. On the other hand, gotta be careful and fully document what you do AND "WHY"!! Otherwise, some yahoo out there might come along and fine you for making illegal runoff changes. Not sure what the laws are like in your area, but many...make that MANY farmers in our area have been fined and even gone to court because of their attempts to keep their farm fields less wet. Notice I did not say keep them "dry".

And one of the worst-ever things is when ditches next to worked fields have lots of erosion into the ditches, which fills up the ditches after a while. Good luck ever getting the county to dig those ditches out again, and Heaven help you if you tackle the job yourself. Sort of a danged if you do, danged if you don't situation.

I too have water problems. Road in front of the house dips down in front of my property. A low point in the road. There is no ditch in front of my property and the land slopes down from the road to my house. When it rains and is wet I get run off from the road and the front yard which is 200x 300. The water runs down a swail on either side of the driveway towards the house. There is a swail to carry water then to the field next to the lawn but isn't graded right. I end up with water in the cellar all the time. Yesterday I bought a 1 foot bucket for our 307 cat excavator and plan on putting a bunch of pipe in soon. I also have a concrete receiver I plan on putting in to catch the water before it gets near the house. I know where your coming from ! It's really frustrating !

I would make a swale around your property and put a tile in it to drain

Looks good.

Our MN govenor would want to throw you in jail for destroying habitat for his pheasant hunting buddies, big fines for draining wetlands which your basement clearly would be classified now.

Getting rid of water is a big problem around here too, I'm tiling as much as I can while they still let me in the fields.

Paul

David,
After 2008 12 inches in 24 hrs. I did just that, made a swale around house and pole barn. The drain pipe to send water into old gravel pit. If the two drain pipes are blocked, water an breach the top preventing water from getting close to basement. I had to move many yards of dirt. Then fine tune swale after rain.

Everything in basement stays dry. Just had 9.5 inches in 10 days. There were times my swale looked like a river. The water coming out the two pipes sounded like a water fall going down a 30 foot hill.
geo

Drainage is one problem I don't have with all the hills around here all water is headed to a creek or branch as it rains.

Be careful what you wish for , lol. I would e-mail you my extra too , and soon you would be in the same boat as we are . At least you have dry feet .

Looks like a couple of eyes (maybe Thomas the tank engine?) peering out of you shed in the first picture.

The pumping everyday would get old. Good job on the drain ditch. That should drain that field pretty good after a little time. Main thing is to stop the the water coming on you.

The problem is where you send the water. There is alot of flooding downstream because of it. I don't pheasant hunt and I'm not a buddy of the governor, but I'm very happy with the new buffer laws.

Buffer law is theft.

The idea of scientifically controlling some issues would be wonderful.

Ditches 'here' were dug through the fields and the spoil piled up beside the ditches. So there is a lip, water never runs into the ditch. Have to run tile parallel to the ditch 80 feet away to drain. Don't need 3 feet of buffer there, pointless.

Some areas 50 feet of buffer isn't really enough.

Go to a meeting, and the buffers benifit everyone in the state; but the landowner is responsible for seeding the buffer, and will lose the land, and it's up to the county if they want to reduce taxes on it or not,

No science to the governors lunacy. No fairness. It is theft.

125,000 to 300,000 acres of farmland, just take it away from landowners for nothing.

No hunting on my property, turned 2 away last year. Hate to, but if the Pheasents Forever are so anti farmer to be on this theft, they can go hunt the governors back yard.

Theft is what it is.

Paul

X2! Just another land grab, from those that have no skin in the game. Where is the compensation for the taking of our property? Pheasant hunting gov? Bet he needs double ear muffs to keep the big bad noise away on the one day he goes out.

"Go to a meeting, and the buffers benefit everyone in the state; but the landowner is responsible for seeding the buffer, and will lose the land, and it's up to the county if they want to reduce taxes on it or not,"

Around here there's a push to clean up anything that drains into the Chesapeake Bay. You can put riparian buffers into CREP (Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program) but that's a carrot and stick. Enroll the ground and you get paid rent, don't enroll and they are watching - big fines if there's any indication you disturbed the ground.

All I did was dig the dead furrow a bit deeper. The road ditch is the real problem. It has filled up and all the water in field above drain down it and the water overflows out into the field adjacent to me.
Loren

I see a general trend in the whole world to try to "over control" water. I know that it is hard to have your property flooded, but there is a need for more thought and restraint. Look at the Mississippi. Whenever it floods, everybody is trying to protect their own area at the expense of everybody downstream. Look at LA. They build a concrete river network to contain the rain water so that no water can get into the ground, then when the water table drops a little, no one can get water. My land is fairly high, but I direct water from the road onto my land over more than half of my frontage, so that it doesn't stay in a ditch and cause wash-outs. Our local highway department is afraid to clean a ditch in front of a house, so the water erodes a six inch wide cut, and undercuts the pavement.

The real problem that brought on the buffer law is the soil erosion and runoff going into the rivers and lakes. Very little or no progress was being made to control erosion, runoff and resulting water pollution. The buffers are only stop gap to try to control the water pollution produced by intensive farming. Eliminate the erosion and water pollution and there will be no need to keep the buffer laws. Unfortunately, too many farms feel it's their right to pollute and "tough luck" to anyone down stream.

Paul, is your group doing anything to find new ways to reduce erosion and water pollution that work better than the buffers? If you can develop a better alternative, the buffer laws might be repealed. Until then, if a group of business (farms) are making a profit from polluting the lakes, rivers, and ground water, shouldn't those business be the one responsible to pay for the clean up?

I do understand your frustration with the buffer law, but the water pollution is a problem the farms have created by themselves. So far, buffers are the cheapest and easiest solution that has been proposed. Please find a better alternative before criticizing the buffer law. Thank you for listening.

(quoted from post at 06:12:00 05/17/17) The real problem that brought on the buffer law is the soil erosion and runoff going into the rivers and lakes. Very little or no progress was being made to control erosion, runoff and resulting water pollution. The buffers are only stop gap to try to control the water pollution produced by intensive farming. Eliminate the erosion and water pollution and there will be no need to keep the buffer laws. Unfortunately, too many farms feel it's their right to pollute and "tough luck" to anyone down stream.

Paul, is your group doing anything to find new ways to reduce erosion and water pollution that work better than the buffers? If you can develop a better alternative, the buffer laws might be repealed. Until then, if a group of business (farms) are making a profit from polluting the lakes, rivers, and ground water, shouldn't those business be the one responsible to pay for the clean up?

I do understand your frustration with the buffer law, but the water pollution is a problem the farms have created by themselves. So far, buffers are the cheapest and easiest solution that has been proposed. Please find a better alternative before criticizing the buffer law. Thank you for listening.

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Interesting comment. The mighty Mississippi has been full of silt and colored red since long before farmers ever cut the first sod. The Mississippi delta did not grow to be 100 miles long in 100 years.

It is now recognized that levees increase flooding, again evidenced by the Mississippi being channeled by levees. Disturbing the natural order of nature causes unintended consequences, and like it or not, soil erosion is a natural order of nature, like forest fires. Don't classify soil erosion as pollution.

If the greedy farm businesses making a profit (read that eking out an existence) offends you I highly recommend you boycott their products. But please don't fish out the oceans when you get hungry.

You know, these last two posts sorta open up this discussion on a whole new level. Let's take first of all the smale-scale mining community. In many areas (and nearly everywhere on the Wrong Coast!), dredging is banned. Even sluicing. Why? All someone is doing is running river gravels through a device to sort out the gold. Mother Nature does much worse during flood events. Not trying to get a discussion on the rights or wrongs of prospecting, so will leave this here.

The other thing that came to mind is something that still happens up in Canada; don't know about here in the lower 48 though. There are also strict mining laws up in Canada, but still enough money to be made (barely) where there's enough tax $$ coming in that the gov't doesn't ban the practice there as well. However, over the past few years, there have been ever increasingly rigid water clarity laws put into place. And yet, many municipalities up there and even some larger towns have (and still do!) dumped raw sewage into the rivers! Yes, you heard me right - RAW SEWAGE!! The link below is just one of the MANY news stories covering this subject. In this one news report, it states how more than 54 BILLION GALLONS of raw sewage had been dumped into Canadian rivers in 2015!! Fortunately, a search of sewage in American rivers turns up sewage entering the waterways via storm drains and sewers during large rain events. So maybe not quite the problem here as our northern friends.

Now I realize this is getting off the original topic a bit, and I also know that gov't isn't supposed to be discussed here, but there are aspects and results of gov't that directly affect the farming communities and our daily lives. But the next time you hear about some farm getting shut down because their operation smells too bad or the new fancy houses that just went up don't like the all the cow and pig and tractor sounds, just keep this in mind.

The "real" threat to the farming community is the constant threat of over-regulation. Yes, some regulation is good. It's there for the Aholes that just don't give a rip about other people or the environment. But for the small scale farmer struggling to get by, and doing their level best to keep their operation going as it has been for over a hundred years maybe, AND without harming the environment one single iota, much of this over-regulation is slamming the lid on a lot of lives and an entire lifestyle, not to mention a widespread source of small business economics.

I apologize for the anger that shows within my words, but not for the meaning. It's a touchy subject for me. I'll end this here.

I don't intentionally pollute, but a stream runs through my property. And my cattle occasionally cross the stream. And they may pee or poop while doing so. Horrors. But the fish love it.

Raw sewage has been dumped into rivers a long as people and animals have been on the earth. Until it gets concentrated it is not a problem, and is actually beneficial to aquatic life. (fish do it in the water too, bad bad bad)

So far there are no riparian laws here, but when it comes I'm old enough to give up cattle and let the deer have the place. I'm hoping the government will keep their deer out of their streams.

If we succeed in getting all the cattle and hogs into enclosed factories I'm not wanting to eat any of it. Hopefully PETA can shut that down and we can just all go to the grocery stores to get our food that comes from...

It's a given that pee and poo end up in waterways. I mean, wild animals gotta do it during Winter, right? It's not like they hold it for the 5 months the ground is frozen solid! :shock: So, in the Spring thaw, there's a lot of not-talked-abouts that end up in the runoff. But it's a different story when you have a town or city dumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into a river all at once. Yes, Ma Nature will take care of the problem, but in my less-than-revered opinion, urban areas should be set up to process their waste - not just dumping it out into the wild "when the tanks get full". By golly, at least have the decency to just let it flow out as it comes to ya' - not stockpiling it until it makes headlines in the papers.