Livestock Watering with Solar

Livestock Watering with Solar. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

The great wide open west. We love the space with miles and miles of rangeland. But if you have livestock on that land getting water into the middle of nowhere can be challenging. John Wiley with NW Solar Electric in Tyler, Washington has a solution.

WILEY: Most people think of big projects with solar but the smaller projects can be very effective and this application it is small generally although it can be big too depending on how many cows you need to water.

It makes these systems stand-alone.

WILEY: The way it works is essentially is to be able to remotely power a watering system from a well or from a creek or a pond and water cows that otherwise would have to travel miles to find water. You know even more expensive than that some ranchers actually install AC well pumps where they have to bring gasoline out to a generator and operate an AC well pump and the generator so this would replace a more expensive way of watering the cows.

That of course saves a lot of time and money. These types of solar systems are also quite simple in design.

WILEY: We like to go with the simplest system we can which is a direct solar water pumping system. You simply have a solar panel that’s mounted on a pole or on a tilt up ground system and that then is directly wired to a control box that allows you to turn the pump on and off.

Wiley says for the most part these are summer watering systems and he says that while it is hard to put a firm dollar figure on the cost savings ranchers quickly see the benefits.

WILEY: When they see these systems in operation, they realize there’s a great time savings that occurs where they don’t need to haul water to a particular site; that they are very low maintenance requirements so I think that the savings are evident. The cost of running a generator or to bring in a power line out to a particular well site can be very expensive.

For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.???www.harvestcleanenergy.org