Selling water

[cowman]

Maybe this should be labelled as "selling access to water"?
When the drilling rig comes knocking, looking for water, what is it worth?
The standard around here for a conventional well is $1500 but if they are hungry or in a hurry you can bump that up.
The standard for a coalbed well seems to be in that $650 range, as they use a lot less water and are only in for a couple of days...they are hard to deal with!
Now when you get the money do you pay tax on it? Do you declare it? That is a pretty gray area that you need to talk to your accountant about.
Unfortunately a lot of farmers don't know what the going rate is in their area and they get screwed. They would never want to share their money secrets with anyone else! The drilling consultant just loves these kind of guys!

[silverback]

Are you saying that they are buying water from your water well? or buying access to a slough or dugout on your property??

[poorboy]

I looked at a few vacs in the spring and demoed a brandt 5000ex and a walinga 7614. The brandt and rem vacs are a little cheaper initially and look to be a little cheaper to run long term. The brandt and rem are very fast on full bins but are slower on clean up. Both of these models are very dusty outside of the bin from the exhaust. If you are unloading bins from top to bottom with a vac at one time the brandt or rem are very good. The slow cleanup is offset by the fast loadout on the full bin.
I found the big walinga vac took more power, had heavier hoses and was pricy, but it was 2 or 3 times quicker on the bin bottoms. I tend to empty the tops of my bins in the winter with an 8 inch auger and then later on come and do all the bottoms at once. Full bin loadout was not an issue for me as I have trouble running an expensive grain vac when a good auger does the same job on a full bin. The walinga vac has less dust blown around the truck than a rem or brandt.
I have heard that the brandt vacs have a lot of canola blown out the exhaust pipe, but I have no first hand experience.

No matter which vac you buy, it is worth looking at the ULTRACART. It is a little skid steer unit which moves the hose around and you ride on it. It takes a little getting used to running but it takes ALL the work out of bending and carrying a heavy grain vac hose. On my walinga vac I was able to order the Ultracart and not get the standard clean up hose kit and I saved a lot of money. I have a bad back and bending over to move the hose or carrying the hose was too much. The hose carrier on the brandt and rem machines is a joke (yes you will carry the hose some). I would not buy a grain vac if it was not for the Ultracart because it would be more work than a hydraulic binsweep.

I have lots of neighbors that really like the circle king system. If you have all round steel bins then it is probably better than a vac. If like me you have lots of rented bins or square wooden bins then a good vac is nice.

[cowman]

Access to a dugout. A typical conventional well will need forty loads of water(4000 gal/load). Some deeper wells might go 60 loads. A coalbed well will be under 20 loads.
It isn't legal to sell water but it is legal to sell "access".

[FarmRanger]

I am on my 2nd Brandt grain vac, and have been happy with both. Seem to be pretty durable, and the new one is easy to clean out. I can fill a super B in around 22 to 24 minutes out of a full bin. It does slow down considerably in bin butts, but unless you are doing several butts to fill the truck you should still have him filled in under an hour. I have run this thing with a JD 2130, (67hp), but its working it’s proverbial rear-end off.
My 120 hp tractor has plenty of power to spare.
As far as canola going out the stack, this can happen, but you have to put the intake completely into the canola pile with no allowance for air intake. If you let it have a little bit of air, then nothing but dust goes out the stack.
I use that truss system wherever I can, and my trucker says that I’m the only one he knows of that uses it properly. Not sure why, but it sure makes it a lot easier in my opinion.
As I said, I’m on my 2nd one, because I got a good offer to trade mine for the new one. My old one had around 750,000 bushels through it in total, and I figure it was maybe ½ worn out. I did reinforce the top of the auger tube on the old one just before I traded it. That’s the place they show the most wear, but the new ones allow you to just replace that little section of tube at the top, so its not a big problem.
I'm not sure about the Walingas, my neighbor has one, and he has a lot bigger tractor on it than mine. Seems to load fine though.

[WoolyBear]

What about the old bartering system cowman......... 1 gallon of water, for 1 gallon of diesel for your tractor. Seeing as how we are bother relient on each others resourse (water for the coalbed and diesel for the chore tractor) I think it should be a fair trade!

[Riley]

I have to echo the comments about the UltraCart. We use a REM 2100 and have been very pleased with it. However no matter what brand of Vac you buy the hoses are heavy and cumbersome...especially the 7 inch machines. I wouldn't consider any Vac with the "Cart". If you've never seen one...here is a link...http://www.itfarmsales.com/index_files/products.htm

[Riley]

That should have read WITHOUT the cart. Sorry.

[cowman]

Well that would be nice but it isn't going to happen!
For one thing the municipalities will undercut you everytime! Try to raise the price and the oil companies will just go to town where they actually can get water for about $1200 for a conventional well. They would rather buy it as close as possible but have no problem hauling it a fair distance just to keep the prices to the farmers low.

[countryguy]

I've been using a Brandt 5000 for about a year now.Don't know much about the other ones but I do like this vac.

The only place I bother with the auger anymore is out of the hopper bins.I can load the semi in 12 min out of a full bin so I figure the fuel used between the tractor and gas guzzling auger isn't a whole lot different.It's alot easier for me to set up the vac than to drag around that heavy auger through the snow.

One of the upsides with this vac is that it blows alot of crap out of the grain and can actually increase your bushel weight.The downside though is with the wrong wind all that crap ends up all over your yard unless you have the optional discharge hose.

Any vac beats shoveling.You just have to find the one that suits your needs the best.Good luck.