Yes, they leveled the ground, trenched the pipe, brought in the solar panel and storage tank, but the $587 is just for the concrete water trough and the delivery. We applied for a grant with the Texas NRCS and they paid for half of the entire project.
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Originally posted by bgleaton View PostThanks! I made the cottonseed feeders myself. I know a lot of the articles and people on here use "V" shaped horse fence, but that stuff is ridiculously pricey, so I just went with the rectangular shaped fence. The rectangle is around 1.5in by 4in or so. It works great and cottonseed doesn't fall out. I think I was able to make 4 of them out of one roll and it cost me around $50 or so. I just roll them so that there is around 2ft of overlap and then wire it all together.
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Originally posted by bgleaton View PostThey drilled down 400ft to get to good water. The entire cost for drilling, leveling, cost for concrete trough and delivery, storage tank, solar panel and everything else was $20,000 and the NRCS paid for 50%, so it cost us around $10,000.
The good news is our water table is between 60-80 feet for a 10-12 gallon a minute well.
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Originally posted by drslonghorn View PostThanks for sharing your info on the water project. I'm going to check with our water well guy and see what we can do. I have an old windmill well site and a 12 X 12 concrete trough that is adjacent to it that hasn't been in use for some time. I want to go the solar route this time to avoid the yearly maintenance cost of a windmill. I Will include, before and after photos if we can swing the deal.
The good news is our water table is between 60-80 feet for a 10-12 gallon a minute well.
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Well, we were able to shoot three more does this past weekend, which gives us 4 does total and one cull buck. We filled the three cottonseed feeders, filled the 1,000lb protein trough, set out 3 bales of alfalfa, rice bran, cottonseed cake and topped off a couple of the corn feeders so they run through February. Trying to help these post rut bucks. I took some pictures of some really nice young bucks and will post them as soon as I load them on my computer.
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12/19/2015 Update
So we were able to remove some more deer from our property last weekend (3 does and a cull buck) and filled up all of the cottonseed and protein feeders:
We got the game pole finished and the light is hooked up to the electrical.
Here is an 8pt that came in every evening, pretty buck. I couldn't tell his age, I thought his face looked like a 4.5yr old, but he had the body of a 3.5yr old:
Here is a view of the new water trough from one of our blinds:
We are hoping to plant a fall food plot in that field near the water trough next October.
We haven't seen several of the older bucks since late October, so I hope they are still around.
For 2015, we fed around 21,000lbs of protein, 9,000lbs of corn and around 4,000lbs of cottonseed. For 2016, we are hoping we can lower our protein to around 16,000lbs and increase our cottonseed to around 10,000lbs. We definitely need to remove a lot of turkeys and raccoons to help with the feed loss.
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1/1/2016 Update
Well, my dad was at the ranch this weekend and took some pictures of the cottonseed feeders, which are getting hammered right now. We filled these up two weeks ago. We also noticed that all of the cottonseed range cubes were gone as well as the rice bran and the majority of the alfalfa. I will post trail cam pics later this week.
I previewed the post and it showed two of the pictures sideways, which is weird bc they seem to be right side up when I view them.
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Here are our 2015 Feed Totals:
20% Protein - 22,625lbs
Corn - 10,825lbs
Cottonseed - 3,550lbs
Alfalfa - 10 square bales
Rice Bran - 480lbs
In order to try to save some $$ in 2016, we are going to try something a little different. In 2015, we ran our 1,000 All-Season's Trough and a small 300lb tube feeder near our house year-round and filled our 1,300lb Krivoman and 1,500lb Krivoman up with protein from January through August. This year, we are still going to keep the trough running year-round, but we are going to add the Krivoman timed unit to our 1,500lb Krivoman feeder (keep the timer open from 5am to 9pm) and we are going to throw corn/Mr. Buck out of our 1,300lb and 1,000lb Krivoman feeders year-round at around 4 seconds per feeding. This will help us save around 5,000lbs of protein, which will equate to around $1,000. We are also going to try to increase cottonseed to our 6,000lbs this year. We will see how this works. Again, we want to continue to feed our deer herd, but we are just trying to find ways to help save a little money.
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So I recently got the trail cam pictures back and they ate the cottonseed range cubes all up within 3 days (100lbs), so I guess they liked them. Also, they emptied our cottonseed feeders, which hold around 350lbs each, within 3 weeks. We are going to try to increase the amount of cottonseed we feed this year as well as add a Krivoman timed feeder to try to help our feed bill. We will still probably feed around 15,000lbs of protein, 7,000lbs of cottonseed and 9,000lbs of corn every year.
We have a couple of old bucks that we have seen every year since we purchased our property, which is going on 5 years and they were at least 3.5yrs the first time we saw them. These super old bucks disappear from Oct 1st to early January every single year. It's not like we overhunt the area, plus we never hunt our protein feeder because we wanted it to be kind of like a sanctuary. We feed protein year round in the middle of our property as well as feed a lot of other feed, but what else can we do to help keep these bucks on our property without putting up a high fence? We are going to to plant one or two fall food plots this next season, but we'll see how that goes. Just curious to hear yalls input on this.
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