Eight Acres

I started a series on soil testing back here , in which I explained a few simple tests to work out the clay/silt/sand content of soil and the pH.  I was always going to come back and explain dispersion, but the truth was, I didn't really know WHY dispersion was important at that time.  I have since done a course on erosion management and it all became clear.  However, dispersion is not really important for garden soil or for farming, so I never came back to finish the series.  Dispersion is very important when it comes to using soil to construct things like dams and roads, and when you start to get erosion problems.  We just had a dam built, so I came back to dispersion and soil testing, so its time to finish that series! We asked our neighbour to come over with his buldozer and build us a farm dam near the house.  He thought that the soil wouldn't be any good where I wanted the dam.  So throughout the digging process we grabbed multiple sam...

When we buy our first mob of steers we want to keep them in the stock yards for a week or so, so we needed to set up water troughs in the stock yard.  There is a dam just near the stock yards, so we decided to install two 1000 L troughs and fill them from the dam using our dam pump.  In Australia, this type of pump is known as a "firefighter" pump , I don't know if that term is used in other countries as well.  It can be used for rural firefighting as you can just dump it into any dam, tank or swimming pool and suck out the water at a high flow rate.  It has a petrol engine, so it can be used anywhere, even if there's no electricity connected.  We usually leave it sitting next to the dam at "eight acres" so that we can pump water up to various troughs and old bathtubs that we use for stock water, but as we didn't want to buy a second pump, we put it on the ute and took it to the new property to fill the troughs.  It will live on the back of the ute while...