Contractor finished up a week ago with the dividing levee and the brush guards around the drain pipes. Power company set the new pole with transformer and provided service. We went out last weekend, connected the service from the power company to our panel, set two more poles with panels, finished setting piles for our deer blind/duck viewing platform, and seeded the rest of the levees. Except for the electrician coming out to install the VFD and program it, we are completely done.

Power to meter and graveled a parking lot.




Dividing levee finished:


Setting pole at center of dividing levee for panel to run power to our East pool blind. Little pucker factor using augur around buried #4 wire that services our VFD and provides power to the pump:


Pole set and view of dividing levee North:


View looking South from pole in center of dividing levee:


Pano shot standing at the intersection of the dividing levee and South levee looking Northeast into the East pool:

Brush guards around the drain pipes:





Didn’t get any pictures of the brush guards around the East pool drain pipes. Also forgot to mention the contractor put in the WCS last week as well. This is the one in the dividing levee. I didn’t get a picture of the one in our East Pool.



If you look North of the inlet pipe here you can see the WCS in the dividing levee. We decided to put a WCS here in case of years with little water we could flood the smaller pool (West pool) first and if the ducks ate all the corn out we could pull the birds to flood the East pool and hopefully have water later in the season to completely flood it in dryer years.


This is a series of pictures of putting in the telephone poles for our deer blind/duck viewing platform form. One of the legs holds the junction box to provide power to the deer blind and service to the VFD for the pump.

Contractor did quite a lot of work to reshape the borrow in the East pool help with drainage, build up in front of the blind so it was more shallow for the kids to wade/help put out decoys, and bring in top soil to plant corn. Very happy with the work he did here. We will end up having 100-120 yards of water to the East of our blind where we originally were thinking 60-70 yards at most when we were shooting elevations during our planning stages. Hard to really show this in pictures.



Also had the contractor come back in and reshape the drainage on the south side of our low water crossing and [censored] some rock. I like the way it turned out.

Some aerials of the completed work:





Hopefully this will give a little perspective. Red lines are our levees and the dots show the current locations of our skid blinds. The East pool blind will pretty much at where it’s at. The West pool blind spot would change after we hunt it a couple of seasons to see how the ducks use that area in different winds.



If you haven’t noticed by now the levee in the East pool doesn’t run all the way to the tree line and leaves 3-5 acres of open field to the South of the levee. We decided to do this due to the depth needed to get to clay to build the wetland and the amount of additional crop it would give us bs the amount of money to build the levee further South. It just wasn’t worth the cost to us. So, that area will become a late season food plot for deer. That’s the area in blue. The green dot is where the deer/duck blind will be. Right now the plan is 16’X8’ enclosed blind at 15’ with a platform underneath at 8-10’ for viewing ducks when the weather is nice. Still spit balling the final plans on that which will be built next year. Should be able to come in from the South thru the low water crossing and slide into the blind to watch the duck in the afternoon and deer hunt without disturbing anything.

Cool. I either missed it or forgot since you started, where will you get your water? Is there a river nearby?

Creek when we aren’t going thru a historic drought!



Hopefully we get some much needed rain this week! (Fingers crossed)

Just curious Barney. With the money you guys are spending. Why not just put a well in and run off electric? Or did I miss that? I’d think over time, the creek irrigation will silt in that pipe. But could be wrong.
Love what you guys are doing though. I built mine several years back and it just keeps getting better. We are thinking of expanding and adding more area and another well. But don’t really want to change anything since it’s working.

But watching your post makes me want to levy more more land. Lol.

3.1" over last 2 days here in South KC. I come here often hoping for water pics. Hope you're getting some.

You did miss it. Water is a premium for agricultural water rights. If you don't currently have a well dug into the aquifer and grandfathered in, you aren't getting granted permission to dig one much less for recreational water rights is my understanding. We are running our pump off electric. Costly in the front end, but will more than pay for itself over the long haul vs a diesel pump and having to babysit it every day or other day. Our wet well is version 2.0 with my partner and his first wetland. A lot of thought and lessons learned went into this design. Our pump can handle 3" solids. The holes in the pipe are 2", so it will eat anything that gets inside our well hopefully. The pipe is 24" off the bottom of the creek and has a fall of 18" from the creek to the inside of our wet well. When the pump is running at max RPM it will clear any silt that gathers in the pipe. Only time will tell is all our planning and lessons learned were correct or not. You only know what you know right? Also, we went in to this knowing on dry years we might not have enough water to pump to hunt. Based off historical records that would be every 1 out of 10 years. On the flip side, if we were on a major river then you are going to get your crops flooded out ever 1 out of 10 years or more and not having anything to hunt. Not to mention all the levee repair from the flooding. As my buddy says, your greatest asset is your greatest liability as well. This is property #3 my partner is involved in. One of the 3 is on a major river that should always have water. The other two are on creeks that won't have water during dry years, but hopefully won't flood during wet years. Between the 3 the thought is all the owners can be generous enough to always have quality hunting.



I'm hoping I can be involved in one more project about this size. Been a great experience. Always nice to see your sweat equity pay off and hopefully leave something valuable your kids/grand kids can enjoy for years.

Seems all the rain has gone to the North of this property. Only 1.5" so far, but hopefully we get some of the runoff in the basin to our North.

My partner has another property not far from KC they are putting a pump in on the Marais Des Cygnes River. That 3.1" will hopefully help them get enough flow in the river to pump since they only have Junior Water rights.

A few pics of that pump system:





We got the blind moved and setup on that property a couple of weekends ago. They have a great stand of corn. Should have a good season there.

Month or so ago we knew we had missed the window of the native grass seed germinating and growing, so we over seeded the levees with winter wheat. Nice to see some growth with the trace amounts of precipitation we were getting.




Finally got some rain and run off this week. Good to see the creek flowing again and water starting to accumulate in our wetland!






With the severe drought we were going thru we made the decision to not have the electrician come out and install the VFD since there wasn’t enough water supply to set all the parameters. We knew we’d have to pay them to come back out and program it when the Creek had enough flow to run the pump at full speed. With the creek flowing, the electrician is set to come out Thursday to install and program the VFD. Fingers crossed we are pumping water by the end of next week!

I'd probably already had a spread out in that water you backed up in the woods.

Looks awesome.

Maybe you will get some snows on there, they love that winter wheat.

AwesomeJob you guys have done. which County are is this in if you don't mind my asking

Thanks. Woodson

This is beyond impressive. The attention to detail and foresight is quite commendable. That first greenhead is going to be such a sweet feeling all said and done.

Several questions:

What have the financials of this scale of a project looked like? Don't want to pry too much of your personal dollar and cent investment but more along the lines of "property was x% of total investment and improvements made up y%."

Are yall planting and maintaining the corn yourself? Or do you have an agreement with a local farmer? This may have already been discussed but I found myself having to skip over most mention of "corn" to actually follow the property development aspect...

Appreciate that and yes several of us are very much looking forward to the first time we can get in the blind and kills some ducks. My son especially.



Well, I can tell you it hasn't been cheap. I haven't really thought of it in terms of overall percentages, but sitting her roughly going over numbers. All in turn key the price of the land was roughly 66% of the final cost with the development we did being 34%. Had our grant been funded those percentages would have drastically changed as we would have been refunded dollar for dollar on our development. We are in round 2 applying for a different ground with $0.50 on the dollar being funded. Also looking into an endowment. There are options out there to reduce the cost.



The previous owner is a farmer. Due to personal circumstances with him needing money, he had to sell the farm. So it ended up being a good deal for him as we aren't farmers. He still gets to run his cattle on the land in the winter and cash rent the farm ground from us. In trade, he plants and maintains the corn in our wetland for us. Works out for both parties in the end.

Update: The last piece to this puzzle was the VFD. We had ordered the VFD back in August with specific requirements on what we wanted. Come to find out the electrician over promised and under delivered. They were quite as familiar with the programming as they made us believe. It really wasn’t too big of a deal as we had no water to pump anyway until we finally got a big rain right before Christmas. We lost the potential to pump several acre feet of water; but they finally installed the VFD so we could run the pump. I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to see water finally discharging into our wetland.







At max speed, we can pump 850-900 gallons/min as long as we have that much or more flow in the creek.



At the time of install, there wasn’t enough flow in the creek to run at max frequency, but we did verify our inlet design and low water crossing. If the creek is flowing at any rather under 900 gallons/minute, once programmed correctly our pump won’t let on drop of water by which is a major win. Lots of planning and lessons learned went into this. Was nice to confirm the design worked.



The bummer was we couldn’t leave the pump on and in standby mode waiting for another rain as we weren’t confident the parameters in the pump were programmed correctly to keep from damaging the pump. Our suspicions ended up being correct, and I’m glad we turned the pump off.

Finally the week before Christmas, we got some good soaking rains in the area that saturated the ground and gave us good run off into the creek. The problem was the pump was on and in standby so it could immediately start pumping when it sensed water in the creek, so we lost a day of pumping until my partner could get out to the pump to turn it on.

Water over the low water crossing at this level is around 2000 gallons/min or more, so we can run wide open without a problem.



After 3 days of pumping, the wetland was starting to look like a wetland!



Since we weren’t convinced the programming was correct, we keep going back each day to check the level of the creek. I think this was day 3 of pumping, but you can see the water has come down. Still enough flow to run wide open.

By day 4 running at max speed, we had pumped 11 acre feet of water which is around half of what we need to fill our smaller “west pool”, but at 11 acre feet it puts enough water in front of our blind to hunt and floods corn!





By the 4th day, the creek flow had slowed down to around 450 gallons/min. The good news was the pump had slowed to match the flow of the creek. It’s hard to tell here, but if you look at the right hand side of the pic you can see the water running in, but you can obviously tell by the inlet pipe being visible the pump isn’t letting any water by our low water crossing.



At this point we checked some parameters on the VFD and confirmed our suspicions that the pump wouldn’t operate correctly if the flow of the creek slowed below the lower limit of our pump. In stead of going into standby the pump would just cycle off and on as the pit would fill with water which is not what we want. So, at this point we weren’t comfortable leaving the pump on and again lost some water that night as it was trickling over the low water crossing by the time we returned the next day. This time we had someone with us familiar with VFDs that helped us figure out which parameters were set wrong and how to change them. We finally got to a point where we feel comfortable leaving the pump on to come out of standby mode when there is enough water to pump and going back into standby when it’s pumped all the available water. We were able to confirm this by putting a camera in the discharge pipe. You can tell even though there’s no water coming out of the pipe at some point the pump has cycled on and off.




Still some more things to work out with the VFD, but at least at this point we won’t lose any more water down stream when we get a rain. Now all we need are ducks and more water!

awesome, congratulations

This thread is beyond Great! Such a fabulous project. Congrats to y'all.

The pump setup is awesome...very impressive.

think its cool now!!! Just wIt until the 55 gal drum of Bubble bath I just ordered shows up!

Venmo sent for 1/2