Spoke with a very nice and helpful gentleman on the phone today�Jim VanDyke, with the Missouri Water Resources Center, a division of the MO DNR. Wow! Did this guy have a lot of information at his finger tips� If any of you need information about water and soil in MO, I would highly recommend calling this guy�super nice guy, and willing to spend as much time as you need answering questions.
He was able to give me a fair amount of good news. He said the soil in this are is some of the best for pond building in the state. He used a bunch of fancy words and terms I didn�t really understand, but then summarized it by saying the soil was glacial and to a fair depth, meaning it would be easy to dig a deep pond if I wanted to because I wouldn�t have to worry about running into rock. He also said that this soil had very low seepage�so much so that I shouldn�t need to line the bottom of the pond with clay or other materials to prevent seepage.
He pulled my property up on his computer and looked at the lay of the land for me. He said if I was planning on building a 3 acre pond on my property in the middle of my property, I would have an approximate 10:1 acre runoff ratio. If I moved the pond further east, toward the stream at the back of the property, that ratio would be closer to 15:1 (which he said is just about ideal�higher than that, he said, would lend concerns to dam erosion from over-topping). I expressed concern to him about building the dam too close to that stream, and whether that might create an opportunity for dam erosion when the stream ran high. He said it didn�t look like it would likely be a problem to him, but advised I double check with the Soil Conservation Service.
On the down side, he said this is not a good area at all to dig a well. He was able to pull up all of the wells in the area built since the mid 1980s. They all hit water at 70 to 100 feet depth, but the highest rate of GPM was 10�which ain�t much water flow. There was an oil drilling test site approx � mile from my property, and they didn�t hit any higher water flow rates than that when they drilled to 700 feet. Plus, the water in this area is highly mineralized, and would perhaps be conducive to irrigation of crops, but he would not recommend putting it into a pond as it would mineralize the pond as the water evaporated. His advice was don�t dig a well, dig the pond deep in order to retain volume of water as evaporation occurred.
Does all this sound right to you folks???
