Farm & Agricultural Plumbing in Gainesville, FL

You are not calling about a dripping faucet.

Rather text? Send a photo of the problem to 352-377-9447 and we’ll tell you what it sounds like.

Licensed Florida Plumbing Contractor CFC1430748

Locally owned, based in Hawthorne. We drive out to the rural properties. Hawthorne plumber

Flat to come out, waived on larger jobs

$ 69

Leak detection, find it or you don't pay

$ 375

Parts and labor warranty on our work

2 yr

Farm and agricultural plumbing covers the water system beyond the house: buried pasture and barn lines, frost-free yard hydrants, automatic horse and livestock waterers, wash-down bibs, utility sinks, well pressure and filtration, and outdoor kitchen and pool lines. First Choice Plumbing is a licensed Florida contractor, CFC1430748, based in Hawthorne and serving farms across Alachua, Marion, Levy and Putnam counties. Flat $69 to come out.

What Counts as Farm Plumbing?

Anything that carries water on the property and is not inside the house. Here is the honest list of what we do out there.

Buried water lines across pasture and paddock

New runs from the well house or meter out to a barn, a shop, a paddock or a second residence, plus repair of the ones already in the ground.

Frost-free yard hydrants

Install, replace and repair. Set in gravel with a proper drainage sump so the standpipe empties every time you drop the handle.

Automatic horse and livestock waterers

Set on a stable pad, plumbed off a buried supply line, with a shutoff you can actually reach when you need to service it.

Barn sinks, wash-down bibs and hot water

Utility sinks, hose bibs where you actually need them, and a water heater in the barn or tack room if you are tired of cold rinses.

Well water treatment for livestock and household use

Iron, sulfur and hardness are the rule on a private well out here, not the exception. We test free and we treat what the test finds.

Outdoor kitchens and pool lines

Gas and water for an outdoor kitchen, plus supply and drain lines for a pool. Gas piping is done under our plumbing license.

Why Rural Water Systems Fail Differently Than City Ones

In town, a leak shows up on the water bill and somebody comes looking. On a well, there is no bill. A cracked line under a pasture can run for months and the only thing that changes is the pump, which starts cycling at three in the morning for no reason you can see. That pump is doing the leak’s work, every hour of every day, until it burns out. Then you are buying a pump on top of the repair you did not know you needed.

The other difference is distance. A house has maybe sixty feet of pipe you would ever have to think about. A farm has hundreds of feet of buried line, four or five hydrants, a pressure tank, a filter train, and every one of those joints is a place water can leave the system. Add sandy soil that shifts, a high water table, and a tractor that crossed the same spot four hundred times, and things move.

None of that is a reason to panic. It is a reason to have somebody who understands the whole path look at it once, instead of chasing one symptom at a time.

What It Costs

It is $69 flat for us to come out. On a bigger job that fee gets waived.

Leak detection is $375 flat, and if we do not find the leak, you do not pay for the visit. Past that, farm work is priced on the job, because a hundred foot run to a paddock and an eight hundred foot run to a back barn are not the same project no matter how similar they sound on the phone.

What we will not do is give you a number on the phone and a different one in the driveway. You get the whole price, in writing, before anything gets touched.

Financing is available through Wisetack on jobs from around $500 if you would rather spread it out. Financing options

And if a $40 hydrant repair kit fixes what you called about, we will hand you the kit answer and charge you for the trip. That happens more than you would think.

Meet the Owner

Will Harrod owns First Choice Plumbing and holds the license, CFC1430748, as a Florida Certified Plumbing Contractor. He still runs the estimates himself, so the person who prices your job is the person responsible for it.

The shop is locally owned. Kim answers the phone and does the dispatching, and she batches jobs by geography on purpose, which is the actual reason a Hawthorne or Micanopy address does not sit at the bottom of the board all week. Mike handles service and drains. Ben is coming up behind them. Small on purpose, and you will know everybody’s name by the second visit.

Yard Hydrants and Automatic Waterers

Hydrants. A frost-free hydrant works because the valve is buried down at the bottom, not up at the handle. When you shut it off, the water in the standpipe drains out a small weep hole into a gravel sump under the valve, so there is nothing left up top to freeze or sit stagnant. That is the whole trick, and it is also where they fail. Set one straight into dirt with no gravel and the weep hole silts up. Leave a hose attached and the standpipe cannot drain. Now you have a hydrant that weeps at the base, a soft muddy spot that never dries, and a pump that keeps waking up.

Automatic waterers. A waterer is only as good as what feeds it. We set them on a stable pad, run the supply off a buried line at proper depth, and put a shutoff where you can actually reach it in January with gloves on. Float valves are the part that fails, and on iron-heavy well water they fail faster because the iron builds up on the seat. If your waterer keeps sticking or running over, the fix is usually the water, not the waterer. Iron and sulfur removal

Hydrant weeping at the base? Do not just tighten the packing nut. That is usually the drain hole telling you it cannot drain.

How Do You Find a Leak in a Buried Pasture Line?

Not by digging. Digging is the last step, and if it is the first step you are paying for somebody’s guess.

We start by isolating. Shut valves section by section and watch the pressure, and the system tells you which leg is losing water before anybody touches a shovel. From there we use acoustic listening gear and line tracing to walk the run and pin the spot. Wet ground, a green stripe in a dry month, or a pump that cycles with everything shut off are all clues, but they are not the answer, because water under sand travels and surfaces where it feels like it.

Leak detection is what we are known for. It is $375 flat to come out and find it, and if we do not find it, you do not pay. That is the same offer we run on a slab leak in a Gainesville house and on a buried run across forty acres. Read more about how we do it: Leak Detection in Gainesville, FL.

Why Does the Barn Water Smell Like Rotten Eggs?

Because you are drawing from the Floridan Aquifer, and out here it comes up through porous limestone carrying iron and hydrogen sulfide with it. That is the rotten egg smell. It is not dangerous at the levels most wells show, but it stains everything it touches, it builds up inside pipe and float valves, and animals will back off water they do not like the taste of. A horse that drinks less in July is a real problem, not a cosmetic one.

Iron brings a second issue: iron bacteria. It forms a reddish slime that clogs waterer valves, filter screens and pump intakes, and it is the reason a lot of automatic waterers get blamed for something the water did.

A private well is not regulated and nobody tests it for you. Florida’s health department recommends testing yours every year. We test for free, we tell you what the numbers actually mean, and then we size treatment to the results instead of selling you a package off a shelf. Air injection and chlorine-free systems, softeners, and a gas-off tank for sulfur. Water testing | Iron and sulfur removal | Water softeners

Get a free water test. No charge, no obligation.

Free water test

We test for free, we tell you what the numbers actually mean, and then we size treatment to the results instead of selling you a package off a shelf.

Iron and sulfur removal

Air injection and chlorine-free systems, and a gas-off tank for sulfur. That is the rotten egg smell handled at the source.

Water softeners

Iron, sulfur and hardness handled by the same shop that ran the line.

Water your animals will drink

Animals will back off water they do not like the taste of. A horse that drinks less in July is a real problem, not a cosmetic one.

Do You Need a Permit for Plumbing on a Farm Building in Alachua County?

Sometimes, and the answer surprises people, so here it is straight. Florida exempts a nonresidential farm building from the building code, but the exemption is tied to the parcel carrying an agricultural classification from the Property Appraiser. It is not tied to your zoning, which is the mistake most folks make.

And here is the part that catches people: even when the structure itself is exempt, plumbing can still require its own permit through the county building department or the utility, filed separately from the building. Where you file also depends on your address. Unincorporated Alachua County goes through the county’s Growth Management Building Division, while anything inside Gainesville or another municipality goes through that city’s building office.

We deal with this every week. When the work needs a permit, we pull it and we meet the inspector. When it does not, we will tell you that too, because we would rather you keep the money.

The Difference Is in the Details

What Matters On A Farm	First Choice Plumbing	Typical City Plumbing Company
Will they drive out	Based in Hawthorne. The rural corridor is where we live, not an outer edge of a map.	Rural addresses get pushed to next week or declined outright.
Well systems	Pressure tank, distribution, filtration and every line past it, plus free water testing.	Trained on city water and city pressure. Wells are somebody else's problem.
Buried line leaks	Isolate, listen, trace and pin it. $375 flat, find it or you don't pay.	Dig where it looks wet and bill the hours either way.
Price to come out	$69 flat, published right here, waived on larger jobs.	Not published anywhere. You find out when the truck is in the driveway.
Water quality	Iron, sulfur and hardness handled by the same shop that ran the line.	Referred out, so nobody owns the whole problem.
Septic on the property	Locating, installs, drain fields and decommission, in house.	Separate company, separate trip, separate scheduling.
Who shows up	A local crew. The owner still runs the estimates himself.	Whichever tech the dispatch board assigned that morning.
Warranty	Two years parts and labor, manufacturer warranty on top.	Commonly one year, sometimes ninety days on labor.

None of that is a knock on city plumbers. They are good at what they do all day. It is just that a farm is a different animal, and the fastest way to spend money badly out here is to hire somebody who has to learn your property on your dime.

What to Expect

Tell us what is not working and what you run.

Three horses and a hydrant, or forty head and a wash rack. It changes the answer, so we ask first.

We come out for a flat $69 and read the whole system.

Pressure tank to the last hydrant. You get the real diagnosis and the whole number before anybody starts, not a range that grows.

We do the work and stand behind it for two years.

Parts and labor, with the manufacturer warranty on top of ours. If we cut a hole in something, a professional patches it.

Where We Work

We are based in Hawthorne, which puts us in the middle of the farm country instead of on the far side of Gainesville from it. Our core area is Alachua County and the rural corridor around it: Hawthorne, Micanopy, Windsor, Waldo, Archer, Newberry, High Springs, Williston, Melrose and Keystone Heights. We also run north Marion County, including McIntosh, Citra, Sparr, Anthony and Fort McCoy. Marion County plumbing

Alachua County alone has close to 188,000 acres in agriculture and better than a third of it in pasture, and almost none of the plumbing pages written for this market say a word to the people farming it. Not sure if you are in range? Call and ask. Alachua County plumbing

What We Do Not Do

Saying this up front saves everybody a trip.

We do not drill wells and we do not pull the pump out of the ground. That is a licensed water well contractor’s work and it is a different license than ours. We handle the pressure tank, the pressure switch, the distribution, the filtration and everything downstream of the well head, and we will happily point you to somebody good for the rest.

We do not pump out septic tanks. We do the locating, the installs, the drain fields and decommission work, and pump-outs go to a company we work with. Septic services

We are not a general contractor, we do not do tile, and we do not paint. We do not do backflow certification, and we do not do electrical or HVAC.

None of that is a limitation we are embarrassed by. It is just the honest edge of what our license covers.

Small horse operations

Three to fifteen head, with hydrants, waterers and a wash rack that have to work every day.

Cattle and hay owners

On 10 to 100 acres, with long buried runs, troughs and a pump that should not be cycling at night.

Hobby farms and homesteads

On well and septic, where iron, sulfur and hardness are the rule, not the exception.

Rural homeowners with outbuildings

Shops, outdoor kitchens or pool lines that need water and gas run under a plumbing license.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is farm plumbing?

It is everything that carries water on the property outside the house. Buried supply lines running out to barns, shops and paddocks, yard hydrants, automatic livestock waterers, wash-down bibs, barn sinks and hot water, well pressure and filtration, and outdoor kitchen and pool lines. Same license, same code, much longer runs and no water bill to warn you when something breaks.

Do you install automatic horse waterers?

Yes. We set the pad, run the buried supply at proper depth, plumb the unit and put a shutoff somewhere you can actually reach it. We install owner-supplied units and we can source one if you would rather we handle it. If you have picked a brand already, tell us which and we will size the supply line for it.

Why does my hydrant work but the trough fills slowly?

Usually restriction somewhere between the two, not a bad hydrant. The common causes are a partially closed valve, a float valve fouled with iron, a kinked or crushed poly line, or a pressure tank that is waterlogged and not holding a proper cut-in. It can also be a leak upstream bleeding off pressure. Those get diagnosed differently, which is why we read the whole system instead of guessing.

Can you find a leak in a buried water line under a pasture?

Yes, and without digging up the field to look. We isolate the system valve by valve to find the leg that is losing water, then use acoustic listening and line tracing to pin the spot. It is $375 flat to come out and find it, and if we do not find it, you do not pay.

Do I need a permit for plumbing on a farm building in Alachua County?

Possibly. Florida can exempt a nonresidential farm building from the building code, but only when the parcel carries an agricultural classification from the Property Appraiser, and that is separate from your zoning. Even on an exempt structure, the plumbing can still require its own permit through the county or the utility. Unincorporated Alachua County files through Growth Management; city addresses file with their own building office. We pull the permit when the work needs one.

Why does my barn water smell like rotten eggs?

Hydrogen sulfide, and it is common on private wells here because the Floridan Aquifer runs through porous limestone that carries sulfur and iron. It is a taste and odor problem more than a safety one at typical levels, but it stains, it builds up inside pipe and valves, and animals drink less of it. We test free and treat based on the numbers.

Do you work on well pumps?

We work downstream of the well head: pressure tanks, pressure switches, distribution lines, hydrants and filtration. Drilling the well and pulling the down-hole pump require a licensed water well contractor, which is a different license than a plumbing contractor's. If that is what you need, we will tell you straight and point you to someone.

How far out will you come?

Alachua County and the rural ring around it, plus north Marion. Hawthorne, Micanopy, Windsor, Waldo, Archer, Newberry, High Springs, Williston, Melrose, Keystone Heights, McIntosh, Citra, Sparr, Anthony and Fort McCoy are all normal for us. If you are not sure, call and ask. It is a short conversation and nobody is going to sell you anything.

Get the water working and get back to the actual work.

Hydrants that turn on. Troughs that fill. Water your animals will drink and you do not have to think about. That is the whole goal, and it is a phone call away.

Tell us what is not working and what you run out there. We will come read the system for a flat $69, give you the whole number in writing, and stand behind the work for two years. Book Online

First Choice Plumbing. Leaks don’t stand a chance.

Tell us what's going on and we'll take it from there

You get a real person, a $69 visit, a flat price before we start, and a company that patches what it cuts and answers the phone when you call back. If a smaller fix is the right call, we’ll tell you that too.

First Choice Plumbing is a locally owned, owner led plumbing company working Gainesville, Hawthorne and Greater Alachua County. Leak detection, repipes, water heaters, drains, trenchless lining, well water filtration and septic. We find it, we fix it, we guarantee it.

Florida Certified Plumbing Contractor CFC1430748

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