Lebanon Pump and Drilling, Inc.
Owner: Mark Replogle
Location: Phillipsburg, Mo.
Company History: “I started in pump work in 1981 when I was in high school. Then I worked for my cousin for 11 years. In 1992, the owner of Lebanon Pump, Glen Hamilton, was ready to retire. He started the business in about 1960. So I bought him out in 1992. I ran a one-service truck for a few years, and then I had an opportunity to get into the drilling part. So I bought the equipment and got into the drilling in 1997. About that same time I started getting into digging the water lines for the cattle waterers. Mainly, I got into digging just to dig lines from the well to the house, but it just expanded from there.”
Products and Services: Drilling water wells, new installations, service work, repair work on older systems, water lines and installing the cattle waterers.
Explain the automatic cattle waterers.
“They are concrete waterers. To keep them from freezing, you have a valve you turn on in the winter that circulates the water, and you’ve got to have a drain. It goes out the drain. There’s no electricity required for the waterer. We had an idea, and so I put it together and started pouring our own. It’s easier accessibility to work on, if you need to, and to get to the valve to turn it on for winterizing, and easier to drain and clean. In the last ten years we’ve set hundreds of them, but really got serious about building them a year and a half ago. We’ve set 25 or 30 of the ones we’ve built.”
What's the best advice you'd offer a farmer?
“Plan ahead on coming into the winter. Make sure everything’s working properly. Winterize the well house. Get the heat in the well house. That’s the biggest problem. I recommend a heater over a light bulb, because the light bulb could go out. That’s most of our freeze-up calls. Most of our calls after the initial freeze are where light bulbs have gone out and it’s froze before they even know the bulb’s out. In the summertime, the water, especially coming from a well, is cooler and it’s cleaner. In the winter, it’s not down around freezing, like pond water.”
By Brenda Brinkley
