Saving Money and the Family Farm Pond
Renewable wind power gives new life to troubled rural ponds, eliminating high energy and maintenance costs while reviving water quality and the health of crops, fish, livestock and family.
September 26, 2008
By Del Williams
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Surperior Windmill and Koenders WIndmills are two of the world's most experienced manufacturers of mindmill aeration systems. Models ship worldwide and typically range from 12 to 24 feet in height, with the hub and compressor pre-installed at the factory.
courtesy Superior Windmill
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Whether for crops, fish, livestock or drinking water, farmers, ranchers and rural landowners often rely on ponds or dugouts. The danger is that these can become stagnant, algae-filled nightmares as well as financial sinkholes.
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To clean up their ponds and dugouts, more and more rural landowners are turning to clean, efficient pond aeration run by renewable wind power. As energy costs rise across America, they're turning away from ever more costly electric aerations systems, which require a continuous supply of electricity and are more susceptible to breakdown than their wind-powered counterparts.
Landowners are discovering how pond aeration by windmill can boost the bottom line and improve quality of life by eliminating an ongoing source of energy use and costly maintenance, while reviving water quality and thus the health of crops, fish, livestock and family members who depend on it.
A pond gone very bad
"My time was spent raking algae from the pond, lots of algae," says Terry, a farmer in Miller Albion, New York, who found copper sulphate treatments ineffective. "The open surface would turn into a green and brown hairy mat. I would spray the algae, the algae would sink to the bottom and the cycle would repeat itself. The perfect pond we dreamed of had turned into a huge liability.
"Then came the hard winter when the pond was snow covered from November through early spring. Every fish, big and small, was floating on the surface when the ice cleared," Terry says. The cost of the fish loss was in the thousands of dollars.
Generations ago, pond aeration would not have been needed to clean up stagnant water – the wind and rain did the job, stirring up the water enough to keep it oxygenated. In the last 20 years, however, pollutants and fertilizer run-off, combined with an increasing lack of rainfall, has caused many ponds and dugouts to stagnate. Medical costs for livestock that drink from algae-filled ponds can be thousands of dollars. The costs of maintenance and filters for irrigation pumps can also be thousands of dollars per year.
Saving the pond
The only way to save these ponds and dugouts is with bottom up-water aeration, which gives the water the strength to burn off the excess chemicals and pollutants that cause algae, weed growth and stagnation. The water becomes significantly clearer and clean when a supply of air, diffused into tiny bubbles and transported by tube, is continuously pumped to the bottom of a pond or dugout.
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