Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Pond Boss Anybody's wells going dry?

No problems here (northeast Indiana) but I hear farther down state and in Northwest Ohio wells are going dry.

I'm still good Cecil.. Matter of fact my sump pump in the basement is still kicking on a couple times a day..

Man that scares me. We've been using our house well a lot to water trees etc. Thank goodness my second well should be running Monday.

My secondary well that I had a simple hand pump on was hitting water at 20 ft, now I have to go to 40
I know that is a very shallow well but still that scared me

Here's a scarier one
The town of cedar key on the coast has depleted its h2o supply to the point
That saltwater has contaminated the fresh water supply. They literally were having fresh water trucked into town

Forget about gold, invest in h20

But u pond guys already knew that

The well drillers are getting pretty busy down here.......dry wells have started showing up in the paper.

Update: just got 2 inches of rain. Came fast but will take what ever we can get!

As usual, the storms split before they got here, and reformed to the East. I got enough rain to make tiny circles in the dust and that's about it. Not 20 miles to the North of me it was red on the radar for around an hour.

Scot,

I feel your pain but at least I have better soils than you do for water retention. I hope you get relief soon!

There was a flood advisory today south of you!

I have mixed feelings about getting rain now. I sowed many $$ of seed, warm season grasses, flowers, etc. and none has germinated due to the lack of moisture. I'm afraid that if they germinate now, they won't mature before winter (especially the native wildflowers). The Dutch White Clover that I sowed germinated, got to have leaves that were about 1/16" dia then they dried up and are gone. 50# of that wasn't cheap.......

Makes sense.

That’s a sore subject in my area. Wells are drying up fast, the waiting time for a new well is two months. I have 2 forty footers and 2- eighty's, the forty footers are only good for about two hours a day.

Scott,

I almost second that, I frost seeded 2 acres of Switch and big and little bluestem in Feb. Very little showing do to the lack of moisture. I hoping it got enough moisture since it was frost seeded to grow roots down deep doing the typical warm season grass thing. My shallow water diffuser surface yesterday. It was placed in 3+' of water early last November. Really want rain for the beans and the pond.

Mark:

I planted an acre of Eagle indeterminate forage beans. The 1" of rain that we had the end of May was enough to get the beans to pop out of the soil that I had drilled in, but not the ones that I broadcast and dragged to cover. The ones that did germinate got to about 3" high and shriveled up. The 1/4 acre of Wildlife Institute Extreme is green, although I don't know how much of that is weeds..... Ponds around here that don't have supplemental water are down. Mine is down 3' even with the well running into it, the other ponds are down more than mine.

Hey Esshup alot of your warm season grasses and flowers should be fine if you do get rain and they germinate now. Not sure exactly what varieties you plant in your neck of the woods but around here most will not really bloom or put on much height their first year anyhow. As Lassig mentioned they are concentrating on roots their first year. Last year I did not even get mine seeded until August. The area I wanted to sow was in the runoff to the pond and I was afraid to till it up so I spent most of the spring spraying the cool season weeds then the warm season weeds. Looked terrible last year but it really put on a good show this year even with the lack of rain. Your perrenials should be ok but your annuals (if you planted any) are toast. My pond just hit 5' low and still no sign of the hsb.

WSG is Cave in Rock, Alamo (don't know if it will survive up here), Big and little Bluestem, and Indiangrass. Flowers are Sneeze Weed, Coneflower, Blaze Star, Coreopsis, Lupine, New England Aster, Brown Eyed Susan, Wild Bergamot, and Columbine.

No dry wells, but it sure is dry out.

The pond out back is a couple feet down, but the pond around the corner has got to be at least 6 feet down. It just don't look right.

The last rain we had was a brief shower about three weeks ago. We were supposed to have T-Storms yesterday and today, but not a drop.

I was reading a news story about a farmers irrigation system pumping the neighbors well's dry. One family has been without water for a good three weeks. The farmer basically told the family to live with it, because that is the way it is. This also happened 6 years ago with the same irrigation system. It is actually owned by a church and 6 years ago they shut the system down due to bad publicity. The corporate farmer leasing the property now, ain't gonna be so nice.

I look for this to become a very hot topic in the not too distant future. Unless of course you can prove that the aquifer you're pumping out of stops at your property line.

Well (deep subject) There is some going dry here in Warsaw I guess and it is because of the farmer with the 12" well. There is three that I heard about so far. They say the farmer will have to put in a new well for them.

According to the law in Indiana we are categorized as small capacity wells and large capacity wells. The cut off is 70 gpm. If you are under that you are small capacity and you are not responsible if a well goes dry in your vicinity. If large capacity you are responsible and you must provide water for your neighbor(s).

Years ago Campbell Soup made V-8 juice in a small town near me. They used a lot of water and the wells would go dry. Most people's wells around me are 30 to 40 foot deep. So I said to my farmer, what if this drought is permenate and the farms start irrigating, then who has the water rights?

That is the question of the day, and one that concerns me when it comes to drilling a well to keep a pond topped off. The last thing I would want to do is dry up a neighbor's well in the sake of aesthetics or my recreation.

Now if I was using the pond for aquaculture and that was my living... growing and selling fish, that would be a different matter.

If you went before a judge with a socialist slant, they would side with the farmer since the irrigation can benefit many... and that is their livelihood. You should sacrifice for the greater good.

A conservative libertarian judge would simply say the laws are written that what you get is what you get out of your own mineral rights, other people need not concern you since that is the way the law is written. If you run out of water, dig a deeper well, or have it trucked in.

Another judge in the middle would have the farmer either supply your water, or assist in digging your well deeper.

Now all kidding aside... too many people dipping from the same resources has historically gotten humans into some pretty ugly spots. Just pray the past few dry years is simply part of longer-term natural weather cycles. Climate change is making them more extreme, but shouldn't effect duration.

You make a good point liquidsquid, and I tend to agree with you. In this photo, you can see a little building right behind my son..... that's the pumphouse that sits beside our HBG pond. As the photo shows, the well is no more than 15' from the water's edge. It's a good well, it has power run to it, all it needs is a few feet of hose and I could possibly offset any further water loss, which is becoming a pretty serious issue right now.

Trouble is, I just can't bring myself to do it. In these parched times, I would feel terrible if my neighbors wells ran dry because of something I did. And I agree....if my livelihood depended on it, that might sway my way of thinking.

Right now, I'll just have to keep praying for rain.

As a side-note, we are using the pond water to irrigate a church community garden right now. One happy garden, one sad waterline.