The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Equipment => Topic started by: SallyintNorth on March 20, 2021, 05:40:12 pm
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We use the black plastic troughs in the grazing fields and I am bothered by the amount of algae growing on the water surface.
Should I be?
How do we prevent or control it? If we had only sheep, I could envisage "sunhats" for the troughs. but the cattle and ponies would just demolish anything I can think of...
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Unless it's blue green I wouldn't bother. I'm sure there's more animals drinking out of troughs with algae in than are drinking crystal clear water. Nearly all my fields are watered by a large water bowser and they always have algae in after about a week and in 30 years it's never seemed to have any ill effects. I'm sure no one checks long standing puddles for algae before they let their animals drink. Algae has been around long before the advent of field troughs. :thinking:
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Thanks both, I shall sleep now... And get some apple cider vinegar on Monday :)
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Chicken waterers had some brownish algae in them, I just wiped them off with a damp cloth. No ill effect. Animals seemed to prefer the ones I hadn't cleaned yet. Oh well. Some kinds of algae are edible. There's little fish you can buy that will eat it out of tanks. There's also an aquatic snail that eats algae. They usually put the snails in ponds and the fish in tanks. If I had a big stock tank instead of little feed pans I'd throw a couple of these little critters in there to deal with it for me.