How PVC helps Farmers Save Time, Money, and Water

Jay Thomas, executive director of the Vinyl Sustainability Council, talked with Jack Thomas from Pineland Farms located in New Gloucester, Maine about the benefits of using PVC filtration and piping systems when it comes to irrigating fields. Moving water around and being able to water the crops is a big deal to farming in general. Jack talks about the PVC filtration and piping systems help save time, money, and water.

 

Pineland: Most of the time in farming, you want somebody focused on making sure everything that has to do with the operations and of irrigation goes smoothly and making sure the crack fields get watered at certain times.

VSC: We talked earlier and I learned about this PVC Filter System, if I’m calling it the right thing. I came to realize its importance actually just this week because I just had a well installed this week. The landscaper, the guy who installs the sprinkler system said, “Oh, you’re going to want to put a filter on that at the end because if you don’t, you’re going to clog up your heads and then it’s going to be a mess.” I said, “Okay. Well, you’re the expert.” Is that sort of the same concept?

Pineland: Yes. We have multiple water sources. We have a bog, we have a brook and just like yours, wells. As with any water source, it’s not going to be pure distilled water. It’s going to have some material in it, whether that’s sand, dirt or animal products, we’ll call them [laughs], byproducts, and so it helps to have some filters. Primarily, especially actually I should say, if you have drip systems in your irrigation system. If you get any small sand particle in those tiny holes that are a drip system, they’ll completely clog up and you have no idea where they’re clogged up in the system.

You have no idea that maybe a portion of the field isn’t even getting watered because it got clogged and there’s just no way to fix it once something gets through this system. The filters are really important. Primarily with the PVC filters, they use something called disc filters which– no, sorry, the sand filters, we also have sand filters but sand filters are for primarily like what you’d see in a pool cleaning system, but these are, what you’re looking at right now, those are disc filters, those big black filters.

VSC: Where does this go? You’ve got the water source and then does this go right after the water source? Does this go closer to–?

Pineland: This will connect directly into– depending on what source we’re using. If it’s a pump, then it’s going into the pump or it’s going directly into the wellhead. It depends on where we’re at. Yes, so it goes through, I don’t know how to orient it, [laughs] to show you, but it goes through one end and you’ll see those red valves on the right hand side, and that essentially– we want to keep them all open when we’re running the water through, it’s going through both those filters and out the other end. The reason there’s more than one valve is the other valves manipulate the flow of the water so it can go out those tubes sticking up on the top. That allows us to back flush and that’s essentially way quicker than having to take the whole filter apart, which you can, and pressure wash them.

VSC: I see. That’s a way of cleaning them out after so many hours or whatever.

Pineland: Right. You can redirect the water and it depends on your waters source. If it’s coming from a well, you don’t have to back flush as often. If it’s coming from a brook or a bog or anything, then you have to probably do it every day. You’ll see, I don’t know if you’ll be able to zoom in, but on the top of one of those big filters, there’s a pressure relief valve.

That’s there just in case, for whatever reason it probably won’t happen, but we designed it so that the pressure relief valve is shooting straight up so that from a distance, we can see if we blew a valve, if the system’s running too high, which it shouldn’t be, but it’s there just in case so it doesn’t break the whole filter and or the pump or something disastrous like that. That’s primarily why we have it like that because a lot of pressure relief valves, they don’t point them up, and we were like, “Why not? Why wouldn’t we want to do that so that we can see it from a distance?” Because you’ll see it. [laughs]

VSC: My understanding is that part of what you were trying to achieve here, and I think maybe these are two different versions, but you’re trying to use, one of the reasons why you use PVC was because of the weight. Is that right?

Pineland: Right. The one on your left is common for New England that you can purchase from a couple retailers. Essentially, it’s not heavy but it’s cumbersome, and so it’s really hard for one person to move it around because we do try to move these filters around to the different water sources so we don’t have to build or buy 20 of these. We can move them around when we need them, where we need them. We redesigned, based off of that original model, to a 2.0 version that’s more compact and it’s much lighter and one person can move it.

Actually, you’ll see on the left hand side that there are some valves there that are brass, I believe most of them are brass, and it’s pretty heavy and on top of that, unfortunately these filters break all the time. It’s a farm and things get bumped, moved, jostled, and they break. If it’s a brass part that breaks, that’s really bad because the brass parts are like just one of those valves you can see there is a couple hundred dollars. Whereas we replaced in this new 2.0 version, we replaced all the pieces with just PVC pieces and that’s fine for what we’re doing. We’re running a hundred PSI or less on most applications. We’re not running super high pressure, so the brass is overkill and very heavy.

VSC: You’re saving weight and you’re saving money.

Pineland: Significant amount of money, because the other benefit of using these parts is two-inch, three-inch parts are used all over the farm for not just this but for a bunch of other applications, and so it’s just nice to have a box of three-inch valves that if it breaks and sometimes PVC breaks, we can just replace it really quickly and a lot easier than working with valve, the brass valves, I should say. The brass valves are extremely difficult. If the PVC breaks inside the brass valves, it’s really difficult to repair. With the PVC valves, we don’t have to try to salvage it. We’ll just be like, “No, just chop, chop, insert new pieces.”

The other thing that’s great about the PVC pieces is that instead of screwing in things, like everything’s threaded with the brass parts, we don’t necessarily have to use threaded parts. If, say, that filter on the left was all of some metal material and you wanted something to be solid and not threaded, you’d have to weld it and that’s not practical really and some farms don’t have that capability. Essentially, using PVC primer and PVC glue or cement, you’re essentially doing plastic welding on a chemical level and anybody can do it.

VSC: Yes, interesting. How many of these do you have on the farm?

Pineland: Currently, we have two. We’re transitioning away from the sand filters, even though the sand filters are more efficient as a filter, they weigh, I don’t know, like a ton or two, so you need a tractor to move it around. Like I said, I think earlier, sand filters are used in pools and hot tubs, and that’s really small scale, but these are big scale. They’re all made of steel. They’re not the funnest thing to clean out.

We’re trying to transition from that system into these systems that are both portable, light, affordable to fix, relatively speaking. We’re planning, I think, on having three now. I’m going to build one more of those two point 2.0s. There’s just a couple pieces that I’d like to replace. It was a bit of a learning curve to figure out what worked and what was more stable.

VSC: Any other advantages of using the PVC over some of these other parts?

Pineland: If these filters were made of steel or something, we might have to deal with rust. With the PVC, we don’t have to worry about that. Then, in contamination from rust.

VSC: How do you move the water around the farm? I guess in some cases, you got to move it pretty far from the source to where you’re using it.

Pineland: Yes. We do have wells strategically placed, not just because of the amount of water we need. We also use multiple sources because of convenience of location. The property at Pineland, or at least the produce division, I should say, is split by I-95. We can’t exactly run water across highway. That’s why we have so many locations for water sources, but yes, we move things a distance. I know there is some steel piping involved that gets installed underground. From my experience at previous farms as well, it’s not cheap, just getting quotes on to install those steel pipes in the ground, not to mention the price of those steel pipes at a great distance, adds up.

VSC: Sure. Excellent. All right. Great. Well, really appreciate your time and giving us a little bit of education about these filter systems, why they’re important and great to hear about what you’re doing there at Pineland Farms.

Pineland: Thank you.