Keeping shed drinkers clean

Muckit

Any tips on how to stop cattle crapping into drinkers?

Cavanjack

Muckit wrote: »

Any tips on how to stop cattle crapping into drinkers?

Don't put any cattle in the sheds!!
Having trouble here in one shed that's housed with bulls where the drinkers are at the back of the shed. Have barriers around them but they must be too close. One option is to put another steel tube a foot from the drinker but I think a hole in the wall and the drinker outside is the best solution.

patsy_mccabe

Tip over troughs seem the only solution. Projectile sh1te will go anywhere.

Cavanjack

patsy_mccabe wrote: »

Tip over troughs seem the only solution. Projectile sh1te will go anywhere.

''Tis the danger of going into the sheds with the Bulls that's the problem here.

Aravo

Are the drinkers at the back of the pen or at the front. Had to move some here from the back to the front. No more getting into pens checking drinkers. Seem to get less dirty at the front. If animals are scratching from lice then dirty more often.

Muckit

patsy_mccabe wrote: »

Tip over troughs seem the only solution. Projectile sh1te will go anywhere.

Perhaps if could be automated. If not it's just as easy bale out by hand. But l want to get to a stage where l can cut down on trips to shed and solving issue of cattle fouling water is a big one.

Mooooo

90 gallon concrete troughs here between two pens. If you put them at a height where they can drink but less likely to get dung into. Have a few not high enough and few heifers like to give themselves pedicures and step into to them the feckers. Now my pens are 11 foot slat at barrier and cubicles going back perpendicular to barrier with scrapers bringing dung to slats. Trough is at back of slats against the wall of the first cubicle iykwim. Generally clean enough unless late feeding as they will all be on the slats to get to barrier and not enough feed space to eat at once

wrangler

All my drinkers in the cattle shed have a nine inch step around them and drinkers never seemed to get dirty....just to clarify, a step nine inches high and nine inches out from the drinker, also had the same thing on the feeding passage, a step so they couldn't reverse against the barrier....a feeding passage that's nine inches higher than the level of the slats helps cattle to reach out further too

_Brian

Our shed is small enough, 3 bay, 10’6 slats.
Got sick of it all and moved the drinkers out onto the passage side of the upright girders that divide each bay.

No more ****e in them, wee bit of silage but it’s easily cleaned.

blue5000

Outside the feed barrier is where mine mostly are, but then they can be in the way of the loader. A bung in the bottom is probably easier than a flip over trough.

Seen a bull get up, stretch and do a projectile about 15 feet one morning, so the trough would want to be 2 pens away. The goldfish seem to be doing a reasonable job in one trough for bulls, but it's rainwater which on a wet day would be flushed out a fair bit anyway.

maidhc

This works well for me:

Base price

_Brian wrote: »

Our shed is small enough, 3 bay, 10’6 slats.
Got sick of it all and moved the drinkers out onto the passage side of the upright girders that divide each bay.

No more ****e in them, wee bit of silage but it’s easily cleaned.

We are currently retrofitting the slatted unit for calves. The old drinkers were beside the girders but most of them are broken/rusted away. Last year we used blue barrels in the feed passage as drinkers but I found that the calves didn't drink enough volume of water and I had to bucket it out to keep it fresh.
I'm going to go with an idea that I saw on a dairy farm where they used 25ltr drums as drinkers.
We are going to install them beside the girders (perpendicular to the slats so that they are out of the way of the tractor) slightly sloped so that they can be easily emptied into a bucket by opening the filler cap iykwim.

49801

I like thinking of using 20l drum and draining from cap.

Prefer location to not be at feed trough myself but cleaning is a disadvantage with this location

Be interesting if someone came up with a mechanism for tip over troughs that can be remotely operated from feed passage so you did not have to enter the pen.

Cavanjack

Wonder how the big feedlots do it. Can't imagine lads going into pens and scouping dung.out of troughs.

greysides

blue5000 wrote: »

The goldfish seem to be doing a reasonable job in one trough for bulls, but it's rainwater which on a wet day would be flushed out a fair bit anyway.

I've heard of that but never seen it.

Keepgrowing

greysides wrote: »

I've heard of that but never seen it.

Farm I worked on in holland many moons ago had goldfish in all drinkers

satstheway

Water at barrier here in a 96 shed.
All barriers good except for the one at the water.
Barrier and wood rotten around it.
I also find that they wet the silage aroind it and then wont eat it as well.

Never wrestle with pigs

I put my drinkers outside the barrier and I never have to touch them. In the cow shed I put them at the front of two cubicles that don't be used. First two in the shed, they never lye on them for some reason. They can't possibly sh1t in them.

Keepgrowing

This is our system

funkey_monkey

Did any of you try putting a curtain of those plastic strips that you get on a creep feeder around it?
If it is mounted high enough, they will not be able to pull it off the wall and if the strips are long enough, they will not be able to be pushed fully into the drinker.
Might be worth a try.