raincover for a farm?

experiMental

Just out of curiosity, do farms need large raincovers that can be deployed within seconds? Are there any existing raincovers of this type? Are they practical?

I thought about this after my garden flooded for a while.

experiMental

experiMental wrote: »

Just out of curiosity, do farms need large raincovers that can be deployed within seconds? Are there any existing raincovers of this type? Are they practical?

I thought about this after my garden flooded for a while.

Not sure what you mean by raincovers???
Farms have barns to shelter equipment and animals from the rain!

Agriculture needs rain. Where climate control is needed, polytunnels are built.

Do you mean to stop the rain falling on the land! not practable in any form.

If you're thinking of having a cover to stop flooding, it won't work - water will flow in from surrounding land.

probe

experiMental wrote: »

Just out of curiosity, do farms need large raincovers that can be deployed within seconds? Are there any existing raincovers of this type? Are they practical?

I thought about this after my garden flooded for a while.

Ignoring the cost of the rain cover, what do you do with the rain that falls on the cover?

If you have a 10 hectare field, and cover it with plastic, and 30 mm of rain falls, you will have 3 million litres of water, which weighs 3,000 tonnes to dispose of. There is one part of England where it rained 32 mm of rain in 5 minutes!

It is not practical to assume the plastic cover is a big umbrella and let the 3 million litres of water drip off the edges! If you had a stream running beside the field, and you had your plastic cover sloped so that the water would fall into the stream, you would still have a flooding problem because the stream would probably be incapable of taking the water runoff when the rainfall got heavy.

This is similar to the problem of developing land - ie covering it with concrete - and not making adequate provision of the disposal of rainwater.

experiMental

good answers from all - thanks for the insight.

I was trying to avoid the problem of my garden flooding, as I'm growing berries. It appears that I should let the nature do its work.

I've just heard of the Chinese government, who could deploy aeroplanes to spray rainclouds with a powder that neutralises water vapour. Maybe here is a solution to slightly lower the amount of rainfall.

experiMental

experiMental wrote: »

I've just heard of the Chinese government, who could deploy aeroplanes to spray rainclouds with a powder that neutralises water vapour. Maybe here is a solution to slightly lower the amount of rainfall.

Cloud seeding, actually makes the clouds produce rain, what they do is make it rain (remove the moisture as rain) before the clouds go to where ever they don't want the rain to fall.

John_F

experiMental wrote: »

Just out of curiosity, do farms need large raincovers that can be deployed within seconds? Are there any existing raincovers of this type? Are they practical?

I thought about this after my garden flooded for a while.

just aswell its posted inn this fourm, fits in well.

not a prayer would it work as pointed out, plus who would pay for it, and would it look well in the country in fairness

maniac101

OP, flooding in a garden is a drainage problem, and not a rain problem. To prevent flooding you should tackle the drainage, not the rain. There's a good thread in the Gardening forum on how to dig a soak pit. (see here).

If you've a shed in the garden you could consider installing the water butt on it. As well as potentially reducing the amount of flooding, it can act as a water reservoir for your plants in dry periods.