WATER!

If you have livestock your animals need water. As we raise sheep, the water required is far less than with cattle. Nonetheless, I find our sheep go through between 4 – 5 gallons a day per sheep when our temps go over 100F. We are running 6 mature sheep presently so that means 24 – 30 gallons per day. (still far less than the 50 gallons we’d have to provide just one heifer).

In the past, we were filling 2 or 3 gallon bowls by hand. It was a lot of work and not pleasant when the temps are high. We had to go out of town for a week recently and since we had plenty of planning time ahead of that week, we made some investments this August that, in retrospect, I wish we had made sooner.

I call it semi-automatic watering. We have a 55 gallon water barrel in the barn that we fill once a week in cooler periods and twice a week when it’s really hot. We connect hoses to the tank and connect those to auto filling water troughs. This system works with gravity only although we do use a pump to fill the 55 gallon tank. (Note, we have a 2nd 55 gallon tank that my husband keeps in his pickup bed that he fills from the house and drives down to the barn. It’s that water transfer that we use the pump for.)

We also have a 90 gallon water tank on the back pasture. As is the case with the barn set up, we use hoses to connect. The pasture tank is set up to capture some rain but we find we use the same filling process to fill the pasture tank. Because the hoses have to run significant distances, we have a pump powered by a small solar panel that keeps the water pressure up high enough to fill the water troughs.

What I noticed once we deployed is that the sheep immediately looked better and were dealing with the heat like champs. They had always done fine before but you could see that the heat was not bothering them at all.