Long life lifestyler

HI there, my name is Glenys. My partner and I have 11acres near Hamilton. I spent quite a few years with my now ex-husband on 20acres, then moved back to town, met my partner and once the kids were teens decided to get back to horse riding. Eventually that led to moving to a block again.

We have horses, a beef cow and 10 ewe's who have lambed well this year along with a couple of pigs and chooks. We aim to be as self sufficient as possible meat wise and are fortunate to have mature tree's for fruit, walnuts and citrus, also firewood.

Our land is quite steep in parts 50% of roughly, too steep for hay and one huge paddock on the flatest bit that we do make hay on each year. The biggest challenge is water for the stock, which we get via ground water. We have managed throughout 5 summers, but right now we've gone dry. June was our driest ever. So we are about to undertake some changes to increase capacity and it's with this in mind that I decided to use the forums.

Hi Chaz, welcome to the forum, we are also on a blocknear Hamilton at TePahu, about 10km from Whatawhata, we have 5 acres. We use 2 x 35,000L tanks and also have a well but haven't had to use it thus far which can top up the water tank for the stock.
What are your plans for the new water source?
You will find plenty of experience on here!

Welcome. We have a spring, roof water off a hayshed and off the house, which feed into 70,000 litres of storage. Our hayshed tanks are about 150 m from the house and 40 m above the house, so the water gets pumped from the household and spring storage up to the hayshed tanks. Then we have enough pressure from these higher tanks to give us good enough pressure in the house.

We have a large tank off the house roof that deals with the household needs. Above us in the next paddock we have two shipping containers, between these is a large carport and off this we have a 5000l tank. The theory was that this I could use for wetting the pigs and giving the horses a hose down after rides etc.
We have a pump that raises ground water approx 30M upto a stainless open topped tank (was probably a milk vat or similar). This then gravity feeds our troughs and this is where we are short.
We have just secured two 1000l cubes (as we can fit two up next to the existing tank (with some retaining and filling to level). The plan is to pump roof water from the carport tank upto the vat with overflow into one tank and then the next, there by increasing our holding capacity. We have to then re-jig the pipe work to feed from the last of these into the return to the troughs.