Windmill Aeration Helps Cattle Farmers
I'm sending you this letter because I lost a bet, but I will get to that in a minute. I own a beef cattle farm on 900 acres. Like my father and grandfather, farming is all I've ever wanted to do and after 40 some years thought that I knew everything there was to know about raising beef. That is until Rick came along to work for us.
Last spring I had to advertise for a little extra help and when Rick came to apply I knew right away he was the man I wanted. Not that he said much mind you. It was more the way he carried himself and seemed genuinely interested in our farm. Said he had been working on a ranch out west for seven or eight years but wanted to move back home to be closer to his family. I hired him on the spot.
Let me get to the point here. We have six ponds on this farm and depend on all six to keep the cattle supplied with drinking water. If the ponds go dry, grow pond algae and pond scum, or just get really skunky - all of a sudden, we have a full time job on our hands hauling and pumping water. There is a stream down back that runs full time and all the water has to be hauled or pumped ( with a portable gas pump ) from there. It's a long way back, its time consuming, and expensive.
Well late last summer it turned pretty dry and sure enough , the lower the ponds got , the greener the water and we started hauling before they even dried up. That's about when Rick asked me why I didn't aerate our ponds like the place he worked out west. I told him running power to the ponds would cost too much and I didn't much like the idea of giving more money to the power company either. That's when he told me about Aeration Windmills. That night he brought over some Xerox copies with all the products that you sell. Told me he looked all over and we could get everything we needed right there in one spot. We could aerate the ponds to keep them from greenin up (growing pond algae).
Rick said we could pump pond water into troughs so the cattle wouldn't keep contaminating the ponds and eroding the banks down getting in and out to drink. On a dry year we could even pump from the creek and stop running those gas pumps. He had some pond aeration - government studies that he got from you to show me what other farmers had done. I didn't think the price was bad either and told Rick to order whatever he thought we needed.
"But if this doesn't work we're taking the thing down and sending it back" I told him.
"What if it does work the way its supposed to" Rick asked me.
It was right then that I told him "I bet it wont, but if it does I'll buy two more".
That's why I'm writing you this letter Terry, I need two more of those windmill aeration systems along with the water pump setups. I guess I don't need to say anymore.
- Taylor Stillwell
Western New York
© 2006
Windmill Aeration
