Watering livestock sounds simple until you map a real farm: a borehole at the homestead, four troughs across a kilometre of pasture, and cattle that drink more in a heat wave than on the day the system was sized. It is a pressure problem, a distance problem and an animal-welfare problem sharing one pipe.
Start with the herd, not the pump
Beef cattle drink around 40 to 60 litres a day, more in heat and when lactating. Multiply honestly, then check the refill rate: troughs must recover during the herd's drinking window, not over the whole day. A system that takes six hours to refill a trough emptied in twenty minutes fails the animals every afternoon.
Distance decides the equipment
Long pipe runs add friction head that domestic pumps cannot afford. For runs beyond a few hundred metres, the choice usually lands on a submersible at the source pushing to an elevated tank, with gravity feeding the troughs below. Height does the work that pressure would otherwise pay for every day.
Reliability is the spec that matters
Animals cannot wait for a service visit. Dry-run protection, a float valve that cannot jam open, and storage sized for a cloudy weekend are worth more than any efficiency figure on the datasheet. Where the well is remote and solar-powered, we now default to two or three days of trough storage for exactly this reason.