If grass is the most important crop/food on any smallholding/farm, then water is the most important thing you can collect. And indeed failure to collect it, can have all sorts of ramifications from overly wet land to empty water troughs!!!
We are slowly getting to grips with the water on our land. One of the easiest jobs we have done is to set up systems to collect the water that falls on the roofs of all our pole barns. The trough in the photo probably holds 30-40 gallons and after a bit of a deluge yesterday and some drizzle since, it filled over half way. Thyme and Parsley’s calf here can both be seen having a good long drink: cows drink a HUGE amount, from 1 gallon per 100 pounds of body weight during cold weather to nearly 2 gallons per 100 pounds of body during the hottest weather. Our cows weigh over 500 pounds so in a day this whole tough could easily be emptied.
Of course collecting water from roofs is fab because it is fresh BUT it is not a system to be relied on as rain is not predictable and regular and so access to regularly flowing water (e.g. via a tap) can still be essential. At the moment we use a hose pipe to manually fill a smaller trough for the cows, just in case!!
The other and better source of regularly flowing water is via a spring and it just so happens that in the bottom 3-acre field we have one, with a well sited above it. At the moment however, it overflows, giving the animals ‘fresh’ puddles to drink from but also VERY wet land and a high risk of liver fluke (a particularly nasty worm that destroys an animal's liver and whose life cycle involves using a snail as a host - hence wet land not being ideal).
We have a 'chap with a digger' giving us a quote to build a proper trough and drainage system so we can hopefully avoid all these problems and still provide fresh water.