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CLEAN WATER FOR HORSES

Clean water is a must.

One of the most common reasons that horse owners leave a barn is all about water. They've either found their horses without water or with dirty water. There are usually other complaints, such as shoddy fencing or irregular feeding schedules, but a lack of water or dirty water really sets them off, and rightly so.

Without adequate water, horses can develop dehydration, which has several bad consequences, including impaction colic. Dirty water discourages horses from drinking. It also provides a breeding ground for mosquitoes, increasing the risk of mosquitoe-borne diseases such as West Nile, and that's a risk for horses and people.

Providing clean water for horses is time-consuming, but it's a very necessary chore.

At our farm, the staff keeps a stiff broom handy strictly for scrubbing down the 100-gallon field troughs. They dump the water daily, scrub the troughs with the broom, rinse, then refill. The water in the troughs is sparkling clean.

For fields with just a few horses, water troughs are filled with an ample amount of water for the day, but they are not filled to the top, which makes it easier to dump for cleaning. (If water dumped from troughs doesn't drain off well and the ground gets soggy from dumping, the troughs will need moved around periodically).

The approach with water buckets in the barn is similar. The two buckets in each stall are dumped daily; one staffer slowly drives the tractor through each aisle of the barn while another empties each water bucket into the bucket of the tractor. Then the stall buckets are refilled with a long hose attached to a water pump in each aisle. They are scrubbed out as needed with a kitchen brush.

During late night check, we again dump buckets if needed and refill them. Each horse is to have at least one clean bucket, full of clean water, for the rest of the night.

If you don't let field troughs and water buckets in stalls get too dirty to begin with, they're easy to clean, and clean water means happier horses and horse owners.