This spring we had to find a way to supply water to our baby calves. The pastures where we have our cow-calf pairs in the spring and early summer are fenced away from the creek, to avoid the risk of having a young calf swept away by high water. When we first moved onto this ranch in 1967, we lost a couple of calves when cattle tried to cross the raging water in the creek.
To avoid having any more calves drown, my husband and I fenced off the creek in those pastures. The cattle drink from water troughs instead.
In the pasture where we always have cows with young calves, they generally have access to two troughs, filled twice daily with a hose while I am doing morning and evening chores.
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One of those troughs is short enough that the calves can reach the water to get a drink, but over the years that trough developed some rusted-through holes in the bottom. We fixed it once by putting mesh over the worst holes and spraying a sealant over the entire bottom. That lasted about 10 years, but then the trough started developing holes again — which at first I was able to patch with a little mud.
This spring the holes were getting big again and we planned to clean up the bottom of the trough and re-spray sealant over the bottom — which would be a lot cheaper than buying a new trough.
The problem was cold weather; we needed some warm days for the sealant to set up.
While waiting for warm enough weather to patch the trough, we made a temporary calf watering creep next to the fence, near the big water trough for the cows.
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There was already an electric wire along the top of the fence, since one of our horse pens is next to that field; we have electric fence along the top rail of all our horse pens to keep them from chewing the fences.
So it was a simple solution, to set some short tubs along the fence. They can be easily filled with water when I am watering the cows. I used an electric wire and step-in posts to keep the cows away from the tubs. Otherwise, the cows like to drink from the tubs, rub on them, and tip them over.
This has been working nicely. The calves are curious and come check out the tubs and sample the water — and soon learn to drink from the tubs — and the cows respect the hot wire and can’t get close enough to the tubs to mess them up. The wire is high enough that the calves can easily walk under, while the cows stay out of that area. Now the calves have plenty of water until we get a chance to fix the old leaky trough.
