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Adding a farm pond to your
property is probably the best thing you can do, short of building, to
enhance the appraised value of your land, but the potential benefits to
the landowner are far too valuable to express in terms of mere money.
If you have the right soil and location, you can provide yourself and your
great-grandkids with food, recreation and beauty for lifetimes to come.
On the other hand, if your
location isn’t right, you’ll be wasting machine-hire which can run $75 to
$150 per hour and destroy part of the ecology of your place in the
balance, so you’ll want to check your site carefully.
SOIL QUALITY
Most important is the soil
characteristics. In order for your pond to hold water, your soil
needs to contain enough clay. To test this, dig a hole down
through the brown to black top-soil into the sub-soil, which will be
yellow or red in most locales. Once you’ve dug down that far, pick
up samples and squeeze the soil in your hands. If it forms a firm
ball that doesn’t crumble easily, then this will make good material for
your dam core. If the ball crumbles easily, then you'd probably be
better off spending your pond-building money on something else.
TOPOGRAPHY
Obviously, you want a location
where you can build the smallest dam that will do the job so an area where
the topography forms as much of the sides of your pond as possible is
best, but you also want the basin to be as wide and as flat as can be had.
Try to keep your dam under twenty feet high, so as to keep costs down.
Once you've flooded the area, you'll want there to be enough water depth
to retard weed-growth.
Look carefully at the drainage
area above your proposed pond. If the slope is fairly gentle then
all you'll need is sod growing on your spill-way, but if the slope is
great enough, it will require concrete.
Do NOT attempt to dam a flowing
stream unless you are prepared to utilize prodigious amounts of concrete.
Continuously flowing water, even a small amount, can cause massive erosion
in only a short time and small streams can become large torrents after a
hard rain. At any rate, if fish production is important to you,
avoid building on any spring or stream that will cause the water to
continuously flow over the spillway as this will bring problems of silt
accumulation and weed control. Also, spring-water flowing into the
pond may lower the water temperature enough to hamper good fish production
and growth.
DRAINAGE AREA
The size of the drainage area is
also critical. Most authorities suggest that the ratio of watershed
area to pond surface area be about 10-15 to 1 if fish production is of
prime importance. (If the pond is to be used for irrigation or
watering large numbers of animals, add accordingly to the drainage field.)
Avoid sites that drain barnyards,
septic fields or roadways.
You can boost your drainage area
with the use of diversion ditches, but these should be used judiciously.
It's more difficult to maintain a sod cover in many situations, especially
at the ends of the ditch, and silt accumulation and erosion can quickly
develop.
POND CONSTRUCTION
The machine of choice for
pond-building is the bulldozer, although track loaders and even some
wheel-loaders are used. Most custom machine operators will charge
from $50 to $100 per hour for a bulldozer, depending on the size of the
machine. In my area the typical machine is the Caterpillar D6 and
the typical price is $75 per hour.
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