[NewLifeOnTheFarm]

Hi all,

Just doing some last minute prep before getting sheep in a few weeks, and wanted to check what height drinking water should be at for Shetland sized sheep? We have tin baths for horses, and was thinkin of putting some rocks in to enable lambs to get out should they explore too much! What does everyone else use?

Thanks

[Fleecewife]

We use the black plastic oblong drinkers with a ball cock, as supplied by our agricultural merchant for sheep. They are maybe a foot high, and have softly rounded edges. We don't have mains water, so these are connected up to a system of a 1,000 l barrel which collects rain water from a large roof, then the drinkers are filled by gravity via blue pipe (the water can flow uphill as well as down).  Works very well except in winter when they freeze solid as does everything, so then we use ordinary black buckets.  Not seen the lambs fall in, but they would easily get back out if they did, except when newborn and staggering around to find their feet.  We currently have only Hebrideans, but we have had plenty of Shetlands in the past, and Soay which are even smaller.  Lambs have long legs so they can keep up with their dams 

[Bionic]

We have similar drinkers to Fleecewife except that ours are square as opposed to oblong. Ours are fed by a well so we dont have to touch them. Although we aren't lambing now we didn't have a problem when we did Kim because if he height of the troughs.


When we move the sheep to a small field where we don't have the automatic troughs they have drinkers that hang over the fence. These are placed high enough up so that lambs can't get in

[Marches Farmer]

We have 5 ft narrow metal troughs with a mains supply on the ground in most fields and bowl drinkers attached to fenceposts in the rest.

[NewLifeOnTheFarm]

Thanks all, we should be fine with what we have got then. Will invest in some other drinkers once we start rotating to different fields.