Program Item Details
TITLE: Jim and Jackie Anderson, Frost Free Nose Pumps Inc, Rimbey AB
SUBJECT: #109 Watering Cattle With All Year Round
SYNOPSIS: ..
AUDIO: Download Audio (mp3 format)
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro: Winter can be a hard time for watering cattle. Dugouts freeze up and solar-powered pumps power out because of shorter days. And with gas and electrical charges going through the roof, farmers are looking for cheaper alternatives to water their cattle.
That’s where Jim and Jackie Anderson come in. For the last four years, this ranching couple from Rimbey have been perfecting and marketing a handy little pump called the Frost Free Nose Pump.
During the summer I travelled to their farm near Rimbey, and with Jackie making sure I didn’t step in any cow pies, I got up close and personal with their cows so I could see the Frost Free Nose Pump in action.
Jim Anderson
JA: Well its very old technology. It’s basically the old-fashioned hand pump with a downhole cylinder. And we usually hang that cylinder in the neighbourhood of ten feet from the surface. That’s subject to or depending on the water table within that culvert. But in most cases ten feet is adequate. When the cattle push on that pendulum, they’re basically doing the same thing as the handle did on the old-fashioned well.
CC: WHY DO YOU CALL IT A FROST FREE PUMP?
JA: Well, we call it a Frost Free Nose Pump because it will not freeze in the winter time. Of course, it works in the summer, too. But the real attraction of this nose pump is that doesn’t freeze up in the winter. And we don’t require energy of any form to achieve it. Electricity or natural gas or heat of any source. What we’re depending on is geothermal heat to keep the water temperature just slightly above freezing and we’re able to achieve that just with some of the principles that we’ve come up with the installation.
CC: WHAT DO YOU DO? DO YOU HAVE TO GO DOWN VERY DEEP? JA: Well we like to see a deep culvert vertically in the ground to capture what we’re after is the geothermal heat. And with our experience so far, we find that a 7 meter culvert, that’s 23 feet, if we can sink that in the ground vertically, the whole thing except 2 feet above ground, and we like to see no smaller than a 24 inch diameter culvert. And then we insulate that culvert. We show people how to insulate that culvert. And of course we have a drain hole in there as another source of defence against freeze-up because when the cattle aren’t pumping it, the top 5 feet of that pipe are empty.
And the other things we is a cement pad around there to prevent the compaction from driving the frost deeper. And we even encourage people to lay Styrofoam around the culvert, again in an effort to keep the frost from going deeper. And the last is a little detail about how to pour cement up against a steel culvert. We want a frost break at that point as well as a water seal. And all of this stuff is low tech stuff, user friendly. You know, it’s not a sophisticated system. And most of this stuff can be done on the site without elaborate equipment and fairly low cost, too.CC: WHERE DID YOU GET THE IDEA? HOW MANY SLEEPESS NIGHT DID YOU HAVE?
JA: Well the original concept came from a friend of ours and we’ve worked along with him. And he has since deceased. And we have taken the frost free aspect and refined it. We worked with the Alberta Research Council on this project for a year using one of their engineers just to fine tune the whole design, the whole mechanical thing. And the rest of that is just come up with common sense ideas about geothermal heat, frost breaks.
And the whole thing is motivated by not having a need for electricity onsite. That really opens up a whole bunch of new management opportunities for ranchers and cattle owners as far as grazing in remote areas or even especially drawing water from a dugout without the limitation of electricity.
CC: HOW WOULD YOU DO THAT WITH A DUG OUT?
JA: Well the dugout installation is really an attractive installation. And I really encourage people with dugouts to do with. Because with the use of a Frost Free Nose Pump alongside a dugout, you can make that dugout become a year round water source without being limited by electricity, without having to chop ice in the winter time and without risk of getting cattle out on that ice to access that water below the ice.
And quite simply, all we do in a dugout installation is trench a line from that dugout to wherever you want to locate the Frost Free Nose Pump. The water flows through that line from the floor of the dugout into the culvert. And the Nose Pump simply lifts the water up the culvert, up from below the bottom of the culvert.
And the only energy required is sponsored by the cow. If she wants a drink of water, she pushes on the pendulum with her nose.
CC: HOW HARD IS IT TO PUSH?
JA: Well the one we’re looking at right now is a 40 foot well. The static water level is 20 feet below surface. And this measures 65 pounds. So it takes 65 pounds on that pendulum, to move the pendulum and produce water. We have another installation that we’ll look at. And we had to go 20 feet to access water there. The water came within 10 feet of surface within that installation, and that one only takes 35 pounds to move that pendulum. So it’s there’s a direct relationship. The force required to move the pendulum is dependent on how much vertical lift you’re making the cows do.
CC: I KNOW I MIGHT HAVE TROUBLE WITH MY NOSE, BUT LOOKING AT THE SIZE OF THOSE COWS, I DON’T THINK THEY WOULD HAVE ANY TROUBLE.
JA: And that’s one thing we have to remind people. I mean, we encourage people to come and look at these Nose Pumps and you know, push them and kick them and whatever. And invariably people go up to the thing and push it, and say oooh, that’s a pretty hard push. But I have to remind people that we’re not water people. We’re watering 1400 pound cows that have a neck on them the size of your body. They’ve got on the ground and 1400 pounds behind them. and so what we as humans consider a hard push for a cow is a piece of cake.
CC: WELL, I’M JUST LOOKING AT JACKIE HERE. AND SHE’S HAVING A TWIRL. AT IT.
JA: Well it does depend. You see, she’s pushing on the high point of that plate there. If she pushed on the low end of it, it makes a big difference. It’s a physical pump. It’s strictly physics in this pump. And the we have that built, it’s a 2 to 1 mechanical advantage. And we have a two position hole in the hood, we can improve the mechanics from 2 to 1 to 3 to 1 which will reduce the power it takes to swing the pendulum. And some instances we encourage people to start their cows on that because it is easier for a cow to push and therefore easier for them to learn it. And then once they’ve learned it, Oh, to get a drink of water all I have to do is push that black plate, And you can return that swivel point to the front position. And the problem with the swivel frontis that it is a softer push but it yields less water on the stroke. So on the front position with every stroke it delivers half a litre of water. So once a cow learns that by pushing the nose on that black plate you’re not going to stop no matter how hard you try. If she’s thirsty, she’s going to push it. And so you might as well put it in the front position where it yields the most water.
CC: WHERE DO YOU MANUFACTURE THESE?
JA: Well we have the welded hood and pendulum built in Red Deer, and then we bring those to our farm at Rimbey. And we build the cylinders. We assemble the hood itself, the pendulum, and box everything up. And at this point we’re marketing right off the farm here.
Jackie Anderson
CC: JACKIE, I’LL ASK YOU A COUPLE OF QUESTIONS. YOU’RE INVOLVED IN THE MARKETINGSIDE OF THIS. DO YOU EVER GET ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THE NAME OF THE PUMP?
JA: Yeah we do. That’s always a fun aspect of it because we have people calling. Well today, we had somebody calling form Statistics Canada. And they wanted to know what a Frost Free Nose Pump was. So the name does conjure up all kinds of images with people who don’t even know it’s associated with livestock. So it’s an opporuntiy to explain what it is.
CC: HOW FAR AND WIDE ARE YOU MARKETING THIS?
JA: WELL, mostly in North America. We are doing marketing in Canada and the U.S. right now. And we have had some interest shown from Argentina. And that was someone who had seen it on the internet andthat was a fellow who thought it would solve a problem that he had. So, we certainly welcome the world, but we’re concentrating on North America.
CC: THIS HAS REALLY BEEN A TEAM EFFORT ON THE PART OF YOU AND YOUR HUSBAND. WHAT DO YOU SEE AS BEING THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF GOING THROUGH THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPING AN INVENTION AND THEN TRYING TO TAKE IT OUT AND SELL IT?
JA: Probably biggest thing is believing in what you’re doing. It’s pretty hard to sell something that you didn’t feel good about selling. And that’s one area that we don’t have any trouble selling because we certainly believe in what the pump will do because we’ve been using it ourselves for four years on our own ranch. So we know it’s helped us and we know it will help other people.
CC: WHAT DIFFERENCE HAS IT MADE TO YOU?
JA: Well, we’ve been able to change some of our management practices. We are able to feed the cattle out in the remote areas in the winter time, leave the manure out there and haul it out later. And since we’ve been able to do that, we haven’t treated a single calf for scours. We bring the cattle home to clean paddocks to calve, and then get them right out again. And we’ve found that’s made all of the difference in the world.
Jim Anderson
JA: That’s one of the things that gives us so much confidence in marketing the Frost Free Nose Pump is that we have a working farm here at Rimbey. We have 135 cows and we have four of these Frost Free Nose Pumps installed at our farm at various places. And we use them at different times of the year for different reasons. But because we have our own herd, we test stuff. And we’ll make a change in the Nose Pump and we’ll put our cows on it and they’ll use it. And if something’s not working or didn’t work out the way we anticipated, we change it. And then we put our cows on it again. They are our guinea pigs. And so it’s not as though we are a theoretical company.
Our salesmen are our cows. If our cows won’t work it, I can’t expect anybody else’s cows to work it. But if our cows will work it, I don’t say why anybody else’s cows won’t work it. So that’s when we go to market, that’s when we can talk with confidence because we’ve done it.
CC: THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
JA: Well, thank you.
JA: Your welcome.
Jim and Jackie Anderson are a husband and wife team from Rimbey who have developed the Frost Free Nose Pump for watering cattle all year round.
Interview starts at 12:05
FEATURED LINK: Frost Free Nose Pumps website