Did you know that water is the most important nutrient for beef cattle? Cattle must consume high quality water each day to remain in good health. As you can imagine, providing water year round can be quite the chore, from cleaning water tanks to thawing frozen water in the winter. For several years now we have been looking into adding automatic drinkers to our farm so fresh cool water can be provided year round without added stress and worry. In the summer, water tanks have to be checked multiple times each day to ensure there is water in them. In the winter, we sweat bullets if there are multiple days in the teens/single digits because everything freezes up. I am super excited to say that the water lines have been trenched, automatic drinkers have been purchased, and before too long we will have a wonderful set-up for water! Here are a few photos from the recent progress this summer:
We hope that everything will look similar to the photo below once the project is complete. One change is that we will have fencing over ours so it can water two pastures at once.
This may seem like a small project but for us it is huge! We are not able to graze certain pastures (the way we want to) due to water limitations and like I said, we stress a lot over water because it is so important for cattle. I cannot wait until they are completed!