A Wet Summer

It has been quite a rainy summer.  It's always wet.  We average almost 70 inches of rainfall (almost 6 feet!) of rain annually.  This year, we are on pace to break rainfall records.  It rains every day.  It is a muddy mess.  Let's look at the positives, though.  We have plenty of water catchment containers.  On the back of the house, I have empty 30 gallon tubs on the drip line.  After a one inch rain, I can catch 300 gallons of rainwater just from there.

I also have big water troughs that catch rainwater falling off the barn roof:

It doesn't take much of a rainfall to fill them up.  The cows and goats drink from them.  

The chickens will fly up to the trough, stand on the edge and drink water.  It gets dangerous, though, and we check the troughs every day.  When the level gets low, the chickens sometimes fall in.  We have to rescue them from time to time.

These are the 30 gallon tubs I was telling you about that line the back of the house.   I'll take a couple of five gallon buckets and transfer the water from the tubs and to the water trough in the pasture.  I just pour it over the fence to re-fill the trough.  Cows will drink about 18 gallons of water each day.

Amazingly, I've never had to turn on the water to the animals this year!  They have survived just on rainwater.  That's never happened before.

Rubber boots are a must-have necessity around Our Maker's Acres Family Farm!

It'll dry up eventually, but you can tell the cows, goats, and chickens really don't like slogging and sloshing through the mud all day.