Brainstorming for PEP: Animal care - Prove High Quality Animal Water

Hi everybody! Asking for some more brainstorming ideas and help for PEP.


This is for the Animal Care aspect, where Paul wants a PEP BB to show:

Prove that your animal’s water is clean/fresh/healthy

The Question:
What methods(s) do you think should be required to prove that a PEPPER's Animal's water is clean/fresh/healthy?

My understanding of this BB in the context of the larger structure of PEP is: for a person earning this BB to be well on the way to Paul's "disney-movie-about-a-girl-and-her-pampered-livestock."

(Please post each idea as a separate post. That way thumbs can be used to vote)

Ash Jackson wrote:
The Question:
What methods(s) do you think should be required to prove that a PEPPER's Animal's water is clean/fresh/healthy?

I think pictures could offer proof for water quality. For example, showing a stock tank that is clean and has clear water in it, and has no evidence of neglect or old water such as debris on the bottom, algae or other growths on the sides of the tank, no biofilm sheen on the surface as examples. I think as far a the quality of the water itself goes, a shared picture of a laboratory analysis would seem to me to provide the most concise proof that the water is safe and healthy and not contain harmful substances.

Edited for clarity

One of Paul's ideas:

If a person is willing to drink a pint of their animal's water, that is a sure sign that person thinks it is clean.

One of Ash's ideas:

Send the water off to be tested, the same way one would test drinking water.

I would be willing to post pictures, or to drink the water myself, but I wouldn't pay to have it tested.

Maybe put a goldfish or minnow in the water and show how the water is clean enough for it to live?  Not the nicest test for the fish...

I think it depends of the animals.

I don't know how they can prove it, I would just like to add some pics and descriptions, maybe it will help with the brainstorming.

Geese:

They need water in different way than all my other critters. Not just for drinking, but they need to bathe in it.

We fill a few big stainless steel dishes for them every evening in the pen where they spend the night. By morning, they look like this:




During the day they are free to go anywhere they want, and so many times you will find them here:




Chickens:

I fill a couple of big waterers for the chickens, every few days, to a week or longer, depending on the season. Chickens like cold water, and sadly, in the summer, that's not always available, but I do try to have their water as clean as possible.

When the water in the container is almost gone, it will look like this:



There is some gunk in there as you can see. This is when I take the thing apart, and scrub it inside and out, rinse it well, and fill it again.


Pigs:


For the pigs, I have their drinking water in a barrel with a spigot, so that the water they drink is clean. This barrel is moved wherever the pigs are moved, and set in a corner of the fence so the piggies can access it without the fence zapping them.

The pigs, especially in warm or hot weather like their mud baths, and will make holes and roll in it, even mine, the wooly Mangalitsas. I couln't take a pic of them doing it, they were sleeping at the time I was out there. Here are pics of the spigot and water barrel inside, you can see the water is pretty clear inside. I change the water in the barrel as needed, I just look inside and if there is build up of stuff I will dump the water, scrub it, and fill it up again.






Cows:

Cows, and goats for that matter, like their wather warm-ish. So, it's really good for them in the summer, and not so good in the winter.

Here is my dairy cows water through. It gets filled twice a day, morning and evening, and scrubbed every few days or every time there is something in there I don't like. You can see in the picture, it's not perfect, but not bad either. Tonight when I fill it I will scrub the sides well.




There are goats, too, but I don't have pictures. Right now the area the goats are in has a creek running through, so they drink water from it. And no, I am not worried of them polluting the creek. Goats don't like wetness, they will not spend enough time, if at all, in the creek to pee or poop in it.

When the goats are not in a vicinity of a creek, I have a couple of 5 gallon buckets, either filled from the well every day, or from a tote we leave outside of their area.

The cats and dogs are on their own with the water.

We fill all these throughs, and buckets and barrels with water from the well. We do Colilert test once a year for the well water.

Hopefully this will help with the brainstorming for the proving, and hopefully it's not too late.

How thirsty would you have to be to drink a pint of the goose-water?  :)

You make good points.  My water is clean when I put it out for them, but chickens kick all kinds of stuff into it pretty quickly.  Ideally, I would have flowing water all the time, but it isn't practical on my place.  And the dogs drink out of the toilet if someone (me usually) forgets to put the lid down, so...

Yes, I struggle with this one.  I completely see the idea of the water being clean enough for human consumption.  And I see how it should be fit for human consumption the whole time you expect your animals to be drinking it (up until you scrub it out and replace it).

Unless you have a flowing stream (of clean water) or a spring dribbling into a pool, I don't know of a way to have fresh clean water all the time.  I guess if you had your house water source running out through a hose to dribble into a drinking bowl and then it irrigates something that you'd be irrigating anyway it could work.  

I use nipples on my chicken water so it stays pretty darn clean.  I might be willing to drink it after 12 hours of being out in the coop.  But not from the nipple, from dipping it out of the pail.

Mike Haasl wrote:Unless you have a flowing stream (of clean water) or a spring dribbling into a pool, I don't know of a way to have fresh clean water all the time.

Unless. Maybe this is the unspoken ideal?

Ash Jackson wrote:

Mike Haasl wrote:Unless you have a flowing stream (of clean water) or a spring dribbling into a pool, I don't know of a way to have fresh clean water all the time.

Unless. Maybe this is the unspoken ideal?

I think that would be ideal. The problem I see is how do you create it? The idea of PEP as I see it, is to have goals that a person, with enough work, can achieve.  For many people, I'm not certain this could be. For northern climates, it would be even harder. Flowing water isn't really a thing here in winter. This is a really tough one.

Maybe they would need to take a picture a day for a week, to show that their water is clean starting every day. Duck water will get full of dirt and grass nearly instantly, but it's not stagnant, and the dirt and grass are all things that they eat. So, while we humans don't eat grass and dirt, ducks do. Their water is just like a soup for them. We humans eat soup....just not duck food soup! But, it needs to be changed daily so it's not stagnant with bacteria growing.

We tried filtering our ducks' water. The filter broke because the water just gets too gunky too quickly. If you tried to have running water for your ducks, you'd need to filter it, or have crazy amounts of fresh water coming at them...which would be a waste of resources unless you have a natural stream. And, most natural streams dry up in the summer. It's far easier to just dump the water every day, rinse the pail, and refill it. Then all the soil/feed/grass bits go on the earth to nourish the earth, and the ducks get clean water.  

Waterfowl - ducks and geese mainly can destroy clear water instantly. Muddy beasts! They use it a ton to wash their beaks out.

There is a distinction between clean and clear however. Both can harbor microbes and none shall know. Water can still be clean, even when its muddy. It all depends on how long its sitting there. Stagnant water breeds nasties. But as long as itnis changed daily, you should be fine.

It is going way too far to say that drinkable for a critter is drinkable for a human. We are far more delicate than they are. They can drink runoff, or stream water no problem. We cant though. The clearest stream water can harbor giardia or lead or other metals. That would murder a human. But a critter? Nah. Not so much. Our well has to be filtered for the trace amounts of lead in it. That could affect our kids. But our ducks? They dont mind.

Of course the other half of this is that the animals will drink runoff all on their own. So I think the reality depends on the animal, the general health of the animal, and the goal with raising them.

For instance the goal with our ducks is to have them forage as much as possible all day long. As a result they get more “wild water”.

So perhaps the question comes down to do they have enough, is it kept topped off, especially on hot days, is it refilled daily at least, and is there a cleaning schedule. I think proof of this is more about thinking through the whole process and having a written plan more than proof in pictures. Whats the schedule and plan, vs snapping a pic right after its filled

My understanding is the goal here is for a person earning this BB to be well on the way to Paul's "disney-movie-about-a-girl-and-her-pampered-livestock"

Ash Jackson wrote:My understanding is the goal here is for a person earning this BB to be well on the way to Paul's "disney-movie-about-a-girl-and-her-pampered-livestock"

Oh, would you say more about that? Very curious.

I don't know much, it's just something Paul's alluded to (I forget where I heard him talk about it, maybe in a podcast, or the Better World Book).

He sees in his mind a level of animal care that so superlatively good (highly pampered animals) that one could imagine Disney making a hearts-and-rainbows kind of movie about it.

From another post...

Mike Haasl wrote:We're trying to encourage people to care for their animals in ways that are better than 99% of all farm animals.  Per Paul and Shawn's Better World Book there are 7 levels of animal care and we're aiming for something approaching #7:

1. factory farms
2. organic factory farms
3. what most people do when raising their own animals
4. the animals are all set free
5. providing a life better than a life in the wild
6. pampered
7. something that would inspire a Disney movie about a little girl and all of her homestead animal friends

The source is the Better World Book, chapter 25 if you want to read more about it.

Thank you, Mike! I will.

I have built a chicken coop and used old tin roof panels from an old barn, which harbor their share of rust. Would a rainwater collection system be feasible for chickens with the roof in that condition? Or should I brush off the rust and then paint it? If so does anyone have suggestions on what paint would be safe?

(Sorry if posted this on another thread about water tanks in winter also).

Thank you.

This is the roof in question, by the way.

Is it tin or galvanized steel?  I'm not sure which would provide better water, that or something with home applied paint...

I'm not sure. I know the little barn it came off of probably dates back at the very least thirty years but could easily be older-- cut nails in the wooden clapboard siding, dimensional lumber...

Justin Rhodes does a running water system for his chickens that doesn't look too difficult to build yourself: