Episode 24: Winter Watering Tips with Drs. Pereira and Knight

On this episode of the Maine Farmcast, Drs. Pereira and Knight sit down to discuss some winter care, especially, winter watering tips for livestock producers. 

Episode Resources

If you would like to learn more about Winter Care of Livestock, please visit:

• Cold Weather Tips for Livestock Farmers, UMaine Extension
• Winter Watering Tips for Swine (YouTube)
• Maine Farmcast Episode 01: Ventilation with Dr. Morgan Hayes

Automated Transcript

Glenda Pereira: 00:20

Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. This is your host, Dr. Glenda Pereira, an assistant extension professor within the University of Maine Cooperative Extension and an assistant professor within the School of Food and Agriculture. For today’s episode, we have our co host here, doctor Colt Knight. Colt, this is the second episode we do together and I’m looking forward to many more.

Colt Knight: 00:42

Yay.

Glenda Pereira: 00:44

I mean, can you be a little bit more excited about doing a an episode with your cohost?

Colt Knight: 00:50

I don’t know how I feel about this.

Glenda Pereira: 00:53

So, we we have, an episode today on preparing or thinking about how to prepare, for winter care.

Colt Knight: 01:02

So we’re gonna cut this and do it over again. I

Glenda Pereira: 01:04

don’t Why?

Colt Knight: 01:04

I don’t know how to start without, like

Glenda Pereira: 01:07

This was good. This is good. We’re keeping it.

Colt Knight: 01:11

We’re rolling with

Glenda Pereira: 01:12

the punches. But, we’re gonna be talking about winter care today. And

Colt Knight: 01:16

You know what this is like? You know when you’re you’re invited to speak at a different university and

Glenda Pereira: 01:22

Is it because I’m wearing my gopher wear?

Colt Knight: 01:25

Yeah. The gopher stuff is not helping at all. It’s distracting.

Glenda Pereira: 01:28

Today, I’m wearing, my University of Minnesota alumni wear. So Colt’s confused who he’s speaking with today. What what so go ahead. What were you saying?

Colt Knight: 01:43

Well, it’s it’s like when you go and you speak at a different university. And, of course, you have your first slide where you’re gonna tell about yourself and your title and your name and everything, but then the person introduces you just basically reads everything that you were gonna say. And then you’re just like, do I repeat what I would normally say? Or

Glenda Pereira: 02:02

No. We

Colt Knight: 02:02

just get right into it.

Glenda Pereira: 02:03

We’re gonna get right into it. So, Colt, what are we talking about today?

Colt Knight: 02:07

Today’s episode is on the winter care of our livestock, which is important because winter is a big part of living in Maine, and it’s a real pain to farmers to farm in the wintertime.

Glenda Pereira: 02:22

Right. So, obviously, as livestock specialist, there and me being the dairy specialist, we always think about the animal, but you mentioned something there. We also need to think about the farmer themselves as they prepare for winter, making sure they have appropriate clothing and, obviously, like, a process for when they do have a storm or how to prepare

Colt Knight: 02:43

for a Yeah. You have to have some kind of plan and a system. I mean, just our normal winter weather is a struggle. You know, keeping everything unfrozen, livestock healthy, drafts away, feeding. I mean, we have to have a plan for that to make our lives as easy as possible through the winter months, but there’s also some really key concerns when it comes to the the health of the animal.

Glenda Pereira: 03:09

So, Colt, as a farmer, what do you see are some of the main challenges, for keeping livestock, healthy, and, you you know, able to maintain their body heat and and grow, etcetera, here during the winter months?

Colt Knight: 03:26

The first thing that folks are always thinking about is water because water freezes. And and I think that’s usually on top of everyone’s mind is what are we gonna do about freezing water? But I think the most overlooked aspect of winter care of livestock would be proper ventilation and bedding for our livestock. Most people wanna anthropomorphize our livestock, so they wanna treat them like people. And when we build our barns and our structures, we think of it like building a house for a person and not building a house for livestock.

Colt Knight: 03:58

You know, the most crucial aspect of of that barn is ventilation. We need we need to keep the air moving in there so it doesn’t get stale. As the animals breathe, respiration puts humidity into the air. And if we don’t have proper ventilation, all that humidity just builds up, and then it falls back down on the animal. And so we end up with wet bedding, wet animals, wet stale air.

Colt Knight: 04:24

And it’s actually colder because of the temperature humidity index. So proper ventilation is key. Clean, dry environment that’s out of the weather. And I know sometimes folks are asking me, well, what’s the difference between keeping the wind out and still having ventilation? Well, we can set up our ventilation in certain ways that don’t allow the wind in, but still allows the airflow.

Glenda Pereira: 04:50

Right. So if we use, like, curtains or something like that, we can open curtains to a certain height. So it’s still allowing some ventilation in, but it’s keeping that really the the wind chill, which is what

Colt Knight: 05:01

Yeah. On our larger cattle barns and stuff, that’s a Yeah. That’s a easy way to do it. On some of our smaller livestock, like sheep, pigs, chickens, and whatnot, we can just use the the gables of our barns. We can have ridge vents, cupolas.

Colt Knight: 05:18

We could have, like, small windows. But if that’s allowing too much wind or cold air in, we can put louvers on it, and that’ll still allow the air to flow, but it prevents the the wind and the rain and the snow from coming in.

Glenda Pereira: 05:32

Yep. Yeah. No. Absolutely. So two things right off the bat, water, and, ventilation is really important when we’re thinking about, housing our animals.

Glenda Pereira: 05:44

So something, we we I wanna kind of elaborate on the water thing. So, we sometimes have, you know, outdoor waters where they freeze, and then so we have to maybe chip at the ice. But using tank heaters, is obviously a way to keep that water from freezing and so animals can access it. But that obviously requires that we have, you know, good electricity wherever we’re having that. So if we don’t have that as a possibility, obviously, just not keeping water overnight in where whatever bucket or area you have it, but refilling the water at least twice a day.

Glenda Pereira: 06:23

So maybe morning and the afternoon if you can. And, obviously, just keeping that water from being frozen is the constant challenge.

Colt Knight: 06:31

I like to think of it as how can we make this process easier from a day to day basis. And and the easiest way to do that is in install a proper water line with a frost free hydrant or a frost free self waterer on the other end. And to do that, we’ve got to dig below the frost line and have that water line, you know, which in Maine can be 6 feet or so, depending on where you’re at. It might be 4 foot. It might be 8 feet.

Colt Knight: 06:59

Whatever. But we gotta get that below the frost line, and then we take that to the hydrant. We use a frost free hydrant. The way that frost free hydrant works is it the water drains from the hydrant into the ground below the frost line. So when you turn it off, there’s nothing to freeze.

Colt Knight: 07:17

And that can make our life a lot easier even if we don’t have, like, a self water or something attached to that because we can take the water straight to the tank, and then we don’t have to drag a hose. You know, my first year of keeping pigs, I did not have my water lines installed yet, and I actually had a 200 foot hose. And I would have to fill that tank up every couple days, drain the hose, roll the hose up, and then I’d have to store the hose inside. So I had, like, a little cart that it would go on. Because even if I drained it and rolled it up, it still froze.

Colt Knight: 07:55

Right. The condensation would would freeze in there. And so that was a real pain. And then I got my water lines installed, and that led to another problem. Right?

Colt Knight: 08:05

Because half my property is ledge rock, and I only had a foot of topsoil on top of that ledge rock. And, I didn’t know what to do, so we were gonna rent an excavator with a hydraulic, thumb on the end, or not a thumb, but a, like, a rock pounder on the end. And I was gonna chip out that rock, And the guy at the rental place said, well, what kind of rock do you have? Because if it’s the typical shale rock that we have up here, that that it’s just gonna poke a hole through it, and it won’t chip it out, and you’ll end up breaking the end of the the hydraulic hammer off. And, you know, it cost about $1,000 to rent that thing, and they still have to even if it doesn’t work, they still have to charge you for delivery both ways and renting it for a minimum of one day.

Colt Knight: 08:52

So you end up spending almost all of that $1,000 just to get it out there to see if it works. So we didn’t do that. I dug up some old extension publications, and it’s really cool to think about how heat transfers through the earth. Because our water lines don’t freeze from the ground up. They freeze from the atmosphere down, and we can actually insulate those water pipes.

Colt Knight: 09:16

And the deeper you’re able to dig your water line, the narrower the insulation has to be on top. So if you you can only dig a foot deep, you need about 4 or 5 foot wide insulation on top because that cold will creep around the insulation. The ledge rock is to our benefit because the ledge rock conducts heat from the earth up better than soil does. So that actually helps us a little bit with keeping things from freezing. But, yeah, properly insulating that, and then just put dirt over it.

Colt Knight: 09:45

Turns out that rigid foam insulation, and then just put dirt over it. It turns out that rigid foam insulation, about every 1 inch of rigid foam insulation is equal to about 1 foot of soil. So if we needed it to be 6 foot deep, but we can only go 1 foot deep if we have 5 inches of insulation on top, that’s basically like having a Yep. A foot of soil. It’s expensive, right, to buy all that extra insulation, but it’s way cheaper than than humping water hoses and dealing with all that, freezing, and and whatnot.

Colt Knight: 10:21

Yeah. So once we got that water to the livestock barn, it’s like, well, how do we keep it from freezing from the hydrant to the waterer? And the easiest solution is to get one of those frost free insulated self water units. But they’re, again, expensive. And you have to kinda preinstall those while you’re doing your water lines, or or it’s a real pain to get those installed.

Colt Knight: 10:47

So if you don’t have those, the tank heater is an option. Yep. Yeah. It’s a it’s an option, or busting ice is an option. So if you do not have the the proper electricity to your tanks, you just gotta do it the old fashioned way, which is still easier than dragging the water hose every day.

Colt Knight: 11:10

Right? Yeah. But when you get into that, you’re gonna start your hatchet or your rock bar or whatever. You’re gonna break your tanks. Yep.

Colt Knight: 11:18

It just happens. It’s just part of the the experience. Right?

Glenda Pereira: 11:22

Right. But but it’s still important. And so some some people may think, you know, oh, I have a creek or a stream or some you you know, the animals have water access, but I wouldn’t necessarily rely on that. I’d make sure that they have, a a an appropriate water source. Because, again, you know, sometimes there’s bacteria or other organisms that can grow in, you you know, those water sources.

Glenda Pereira: 11:47

So it’s important that they have access within their pen that’s also readily nearby their feed. So I think so we talked about ventilation. We talked about water. We talked about dry bedding.

Colt Knight: 11:58

Well, you know, on the water, there’s still a few more things that you can do. One would be to insulate the water tank, and then that insulation will keep it from freezing as quickly. There’s some solar blanket type stuff that can capture the sun and then, you know, like those, space blanket type material that you can put around that that really helps insulate the water tank and, you know, can can capture some of that radiant energy from the sun. That’s a possibility. And then people are always wanting to know, like, what are the tricks to keep water from freezing?

Colt Knight: 12:38

And it’s like, there’s no tricks to keep water from freezing. Water, you know, freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Right? So if it’s below that, we’re gonna have frozen water issues. And, you may have seen, you know, some people will, like, fill water bottles halfway full, and they’ll, like, bob up and down.

Colt Knight: 12:54

And what that’s supposed to do is break the surface tension and keep it from forming an ice sheet on top. And that works at, like, the minimum freezing. Right? But when it’s minus 10 out, those don’t do do anything. There’s some drip water systems that restrict the water flow just enough to where that steady drip will keep the water warm enough from freezing.

Colt Knight: 13:22

And there’s some devices that you can put on your water hose that have, like, a wax plug. And so the colder it gets, the more water it lets flow. And I tried those out. I I did a a little bit of a study on those last winter. And then the the colder temperatures, when it got below 20 degrees, those things basically just opened up just like having to water hose just running constant.

Colt Knight: 13:46

And so I found they worked amazingly well.

Glenda Pereira: 13:50

Between 20 to 32.

Colt Knight: 13:52

Yeah. When it’s when it’s upper twenties and right at the the edge of freezing, those things actually work really well. And but when it got colder, they let too much water go. And, you know, if you were in a situation where you weren’t paying for water, like, you had your own well Mhmm. And maybe you had a creek or a drainage ditch nearby, it would work well because it’d be constantly moving water, and you’d have to set up, like, a an outlet drain to take it away from your livestock because you don’t want a big mud hole in the wintertime either.

Glenda Pereira: 14:25

Right.

Colt Knight: 14:25

But if you had a situation where you could do that or recycle the water, it would work. Yep. But if you were paying for water or you didn’t have anywhere to to put that overflow, it would it would cause more trouble than it was worth.

Glenda Pereira: 14:41

Yeah. And you said so there were a couple of other things to cover on water. So

Colt Knight: 14:46

Yeah. Insulation. Yep. If you insulate that stock tank, that will help more than you might think it would. It really does.

Colt Knight: 14:55

Some of those devices work in certain situations. Some of those bottle tricks and things work when it’s moderately cold, but not extremely cold.

Glenda Pereira: 15:07

Okay. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So, the open stock tank model works for lots of horses alike, but potentially not for your swine or your poultry animals, so your monogastrics.

Glenda Pereira: 15:22

So what are some considerations when we’re thinking about providing water or access to water for, monogastrics, small so small animals like poultry and chickens and swine? Mike?

Colt Knight: 15:38

When we’re talking about pigs, pigs like to drink from an open stock tank. Pigs also like to play in open stock tanks. They like to climb in them. They like to make a mess. And so when it comes down to the wintertime, they really will mess up their bedding if we give them an open stock tank or bucket type situation to drink from.

Colt Knight: 16:00

And I prefer to have my pigs on nipple waterers in the wintertime. And, you know, those nipples will freeze if they’re just left out in the elements unless we heat the stock tank. If we have a stock tank heater that’s really tall, it prevents them from getting into the the open water or a barrel or something like that. And we put the heater in there, and we attach the nipples to the side, then they can get to those and drink without it freezing. And it eliminates a lot of the mess that they would make.

Colt Knight: 16:33

Not to say that they won’t make a mess with nipples, because they will depress the plunger and let bunch of water run out so they can play in it, but not as much as if we just had open open waterers for them. Yeah. If you would like to see a way to make some of those tanks, we actually have a video published, the winter watering tips for swine. There’s a video and a fact sheet for that that we can attach a link for. And on chickens, most peoples will just go out and change the water morning night for their chickens, because you can use a rubber bowl.

Colt Knight: 17:10

You don’t wanna use a hard plastic bowl, because when you go to flip it over and knock the ice out, it would bust. But if you have those those black rubber ones, you can just flip those over and kick them, and then refill it. So that works out well. You can buy heated self chicken waterers, or you can just use a stock tank and and put a perch up to it, and put a stock tank heater in there. Whenever we’re talking about, though, electric heaters, it’s very important to think about electrical safety and electrical cord safety, because those a lot of those heaters draw a lot of amps, and they usually draw more amps than what extension cords are rated for.

Colt Knight: 17:55

And what happens, that electricity travels through the the copper in the cords. And if it’s not big enough to carry that load, it puts off a lot of heat. You know, all that energy has to go somewhere, and if it’s not big enough to conduct through the wire, then it conducts off as heat, and that will melt the insulation. And then the hot wires will will touch, which will create an electrical arc, which can start a fire. Yep.

Colt Knight: 18:24

Basically, that’s how it works. You know, those cords get overheated, melts the insulation, shorts out, sparks, causes a fire. And that’s that’s the worst thing. We don’t want that to happen. Right.

Colt Knight: 18:37

Right? That’s that’s and then the other thing is make sure it’s plugged into an appropriate outlet. So a couple rules. Use the proper size extension cord. And the ones that carry more amps are more expensive.

Colt Knight: 18:49

They’re bigger around. Make sure they’re plugged into a ground fault indicator circuit outlet. Those are like the ones you have in your bathroom or your kitchen that have, like, little breakers that trip. Make sure you use one of those. And, you never plug an extension cord into another extension cord when it comes to heaters.

Colt Knight: 19:11

You always wanna use one continuous extension cord if you’re gonna use that. Yeah. And if you’re gonna use heat lamps to keep water warm or livestock warm, make sure that you hang those. First thing you should do is throw the clamp away that comes with those and hang those from the ceiling. Make sure that they’re clean.

Colt Knight: 19:31

They don’t have any cobwebs or dirt because they will catch on fire. And if you’ve got the extra funds laying around, I would buy one of the, Premier 1 plastic encased heat lamps because they’re way safer in a barn environment than those aluminum ones.

Glenda Pereira: 19:50

Yeah. So those were, really good tips, for maintaining, water and access to water. So for folks who are curious about grant funds that could potentially help expand your water line or even implement proper water on your farm. There are some upcoming grants that folks can take advantage of.

Colt Knight: 20:17

Yeah. The two that come to mind Yeah. Right away is the American Farmland Trust and the Food Animal Concerns Trust. It’s abbreviated as FACT. Yep.

Colt Knight: 20:27

And, I was actually able to get those on my personal farm, to put the water lines in on my place. And that’s how I was able to to rent the equipment to dig the water lines and and buy the the hydrants and the stock tanks and things for my farm.

Glenda Pereira: 20:41

Yeah. No. Absolutely. So for the folks who are thinking about applying for grants, this FACT grant that Colt just mentioned, the deadline for applications is actually on December 8, 2024. So, obviously, you know, the grant would be funded for, the 2025 season.

Glenda Pereira: 21:01

So you’d work on installing water lines, obviously, next summer.

Colt Knight: 21:04

Yeah. I think they would notify you at the end of January. K. And then they issue funds before the spring hits. So when the the ground thaws Yeah.

Colt Knight: 21:13

You could you could take that money and and dig your water lines. Or

Glenda Pereira: 21:17

Good. Yeah. So, yeah, for folks interested, there’s there’s some grant funding out there for you to take advantage of.

Colt Knight: 21:25

Yeah. And I believe NRCS will do some cost share stuff with water too, but you have to contact your local office. The fund availability and and project availability always changes season to season and office to office.

Glenda Pereira: 21:39

Yeah. Well, thanks, Colt, for, giving our listeners a lot to think about when it comes to water and water accessibility. So we even though in the winter, we think, you know, everybody’s cool, we’re not respirating, we’re not, exerting a lot of, you know, energy to keep cool, animals still need water. And water access in the winter sometimes is more critical than in the summer, because we often think we we don’t, need it need to rely on it as much.

Colt Knight: 22:15

Yeah. And we wanna we wanna keep those water sources contained so that we’re not getting super wet bedding or wet animals or mud because that just puts humidity into the air and compounds the the issue.

Glenda Pereira: 22:30

So with that, thank you so much again, Colt, for, what you shared on this episode. And if folks have any comments, concerns, or questions, or if you’d have a suggestion for a future episode, don’t hesitate to contact us by email extension.farmcast@maine.edu.

Colt Knight: 22:54

Yay.

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