Having any animal as a pet, you must supply them with the basics and that includes water. Getting water to where we need it at the farm can be challenging at times. Our field was recently divided into two so my daughter’s new horse could have his own part of the field to ensure everyone gets along. This meant that we needed to adjust how we do water at the farm. Before we divided the field, we had a Ritchie self-waterer at the bottom and we had a 100-gallon Rubbermaid trough at the top of the field that we manually add water to daily. We wanted to have two sources of water, as a few years ago, a tree fell in the field and the horses were cut off water for a good part of a hot summer day.

So we added water to the top of the field. When we split the field, we wanted to continue this concept of two sources of water. So we added smaller water troughs to the two fields. But getting water to all these locations meant that we had to run a hose every time we wanted to clean out the trough and add water or just to top off the troughs. This or we had to shuttle water back and forth in buckets in the wheelbarrow.

To fix this, I was able to run a 100′ hose outside the field so we could easily add water to the other locations. Problem fixes.

Not only do we make sure that the horses all have plenty of water, but we also make sure that we have a small profile bucket for the cats and other smaller animals that may wander into the fields.

What makes all this more fun, is that Maya, my lazy draft mix, is so lazy that she often doesn’t drink water like she should or as much as she should so we have to add water to her grain in the evening as she has choked three times before and had to be tubed two of those three times. Fun times.

A few winters ago, everything froze and there was no water supply on the farm. So we had to fill 5-gallon jugs at home and cart them to the farm and carry them to the field, The next day we did the same thing, but we drove a tractor to the field and the water jugs were in the tractor bucket. After that, I purchased a water pump and some long garden hose and if this happens again, we will be able to pump water from the vehicle to the field making it all that much easier. I’m all about working smarter, not harder.