Bushland is home to a federal research lab that has studied its own Pullman clay loam since 1938. What it reports explains why water lingers on your acreage after a summer storm.
Tell us what the water is doing and we’ll call you back to set up a free on-site look.
Bushland is home to a federal research lab that has studied its own Pullman clay loam since 1938. What it reports explains why water lingers on your acreage after a summer storm.
Bushland sits on Interstate 40 about fourteen miles west of Amarillo, in southwestern Potter County. It began as a station on the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway, on land William Henry Bush had bought from the Frying Pan Ranch and gave for a townsite and right-of-way. He and S. H. Smiser dedicated the townsite on July 3, 1908.
It has stayed small, and the Handbook of Texas lists a grain elevator among its three rated businesses in 1984. On rural acreage there is often no storm sewer to hand water off to, so a drainage plan has to end somewhere on your own ground.
The USDA's Conservation and Production Research Laboratory is in Bushland. The Soil Conservation Service and the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station set it up in 1938 to fight wind erosion, and the Agricultural Research Service took it over in 1953. Its research list today includes irrigation, evapotranspiration and infiltration, which is to say how water gets into this ground and how it leaves.
The lab describes the dominant soil on its farm as Pullman clay loam: a moderately permeable surface soil over a dense, very slowly permeable clay. Rainfall there averages 18.7 inches a year, and 13.7 of those inches fall during the summer growing season. Most of Bushland's rain, in other words, shows up in the months your yard is in use.
The full range of fixes, chosen for what your lot is actually doing — start with why yards here hold water:
That two-layer profile explains a common complaint out here. The surface takes water readily, so the yard looks fine for the first part of a storm. Then the water reaches the dense clay, stalls, and spreads sideways along the top of it, surfacing in the lowest spot or creeping toward a slab or shop floor.
The NRCS description of the Pullman series fills in the clay side of the picture: 35 to 50 percent clay in the control section, and a linear extensibility of 6 to 9 centimeters in the top meter, which is a measure of how much the soil swells and shrinks as it wets and dries. That movement is why we treat foundation drainage and surface water as one job in Bushland.
On acreage, the outlet is the whole design. We look for natural fall across the property, even a few inches, and route a French drain or a shallow swale to daylight where the water won't cross a driveway, a septic field or a neighbor's fence line. Where the land is too flat to give us an outlet, a sump system can lift water to a spot that can take it.
Big roofs are the other half of the math. A shop or barn roof can put a surprising volume of water on the ground in a short storm, and on clay that moves water this slowly it needs a planned path from the eave to the outlet. We size swales and pipe to the roof area they actually serve rather than to a rule of thumb.
Call (806) 606-0904 and describe where water sits on your Bushland place after a storm, whether that's the house, a barn, a shop or the drive. The on-site assessment is free with no obligation, and we talk through options before anything gets dug; once you reach out, we'll get back to you to schedule it. We also serve Vega, farther west on I-40.
Free on-site drainage assessments in Bushland and across the Panhandle. Call or send the form and we’ll set up a time to look.