Water, the Forgotten Feed

In this episode of the AK podcast, Chris Radke and Mike Donaldson discuss the often-overlooked importance of water in livestock nutrition with Dr. Dave Jones. They explore various aspects of water management, including daily practices, the significance of water temperature, quality issues, and the impact of pH and minerals. The conversation emphasizes the need for regular water testing and monitoring to ensure the health and productivity of livestock. 

🎙️ AK Podcast Insights
🔍 Exploring the latest in livestock nutrition, science and beyond with the best and the brightest in the business. Brought to you by Agri-King, an animal nutrition company based in Fulton, Illinois.

💬 Follow us for more!
📸 Instagram and facebook | X | 💼 LinkedIn | 🌐 agriking.com/

📧 Have questions or suggestions? Contact us at podcast@agriking.com.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Water Management in Livestock
• 2:23 Understanding Water's Role in Livestock Nutrition
• 5:11 Daily Water Management Practices
• 9:32 Importance of Water Temperature and Availability
• 11:30 Addressing Water Quality Issues
• 23:15 Final Thoughts on Water Management
• 26:20 Water Space Clarification

Transcript

Chris (00:00)
Welcome to the AK podcast where we explore science and nutrition behind livestock care and management with the best and the brightest in the business. I'm your host, Chris Radke, part of the Sales Department here at Agri-King. And with me today is the Director of Field Services and a Member of the Sales Management Team, Mr. Mike Donaldson. Mike, how you doing buddy?

Mike (00:20)
Very well, sir, very well. How's everything going in your world, Chris?

Chris (00:23)
Pretty good, pretty good. When this gets dropped, it'll be after Christmas, so my kids will be coming down from that sugar high probably, so.

Mike (00:30)
Ha

I try to avoid that, I don't need any more sugar.

Chris (00:37)
Good, good. Mike, who are we with, who's with us today, and what are we talking about?

Mike (00:43)
Well, as a, as a, one of the leading companies in livestock nutrition, Agri-King has always paid attention to all aspects of livestock nutritional needs. And as Chris mentioned, this is being recorded the week before Christmas and through a lot of the Midwest, a lot of the country right now, when it comes to the topic of water, the number one thought is probably, I hope it's not frozen.

Or I hope it didn't break any pipes when it did freeze. And sometimes that's all the more attention water really gets. And in my own head, I kind of termed this whole podcast Water, the Forgotten Feed, because it does play an extremely important role. way, way back in the dark days, 40-some years ago, when I was in college, one of my professors said he had $5, which was a lot of money then he had $5.

for whoever could say what the most important nutrient, what the most important feed for an animal was. And different people said energy and protein. And after the room had sort of run itself out of ideas, he smiled and said, well, it's not exactly a feed or a nutrient, but the answer is water. So I've always thought it was worth paying some attention to. Today we have Dr. Dave Jones. He's the head of our Nutrition Department of Agri-King. He's going to talk a little bit about aspects of water.

and also some of the unique ways Agri-King looks at a farm's water. Dr. Jones, do you want to maybe give people a little bit of your background and we'll get going.

Dave Jones (02:21)
Sure. Well, I'm Canadian born. I did my bachelor's degree at the University of Guelph in animal nutrition. Through that, I found an interest in ruminants. So I pursued my master's at West Virginia University under Will Hoover in dairy nutrition. And I moved on to Ohio State, worked under Bill Weiss to continue working in dairy nutrition and joined Agri-King right at graduation. And I've been here ever since.

Mike (02:50)
Great, great. Well, like I said, we kind of calling this Water, the Forgotten Feed. What do you think leads to water being so often overlooked when we're troubleshooting issues of production or health on a dairy farm or a beef farm for that matter?

Dave Jones (03:06)
Yeah, I actually think the answer is quite simple. Water, it's out with the animals, it delivers itself. We don't formulate it, it's not on our rations. So essentially, it's out of sight, out of mind. So we forget about it when we're troubleshooting situations because it's not front and center. I think it's that easy, it's not managed.

Mike (03:29)
Okay. That makes good sense. Just to maybe bring some things into focus. How much water does a high producing dairy cow need to drink a day?

Dave Jones (03:41)
It's gonna range, so it's gonna vary between 30 and 50 gallons. That depends on production level, because water drives milk production and temperature. They're hopefully gonna drink more in the summertime when it's hot. So 30 to 50 gallons is pretty good. I'm sure there's odd exception to that that will drink more, and that's okay.

Mike (03:54)
Okay.

Any idea what a steered drinks?

Dave Jones (04:05)
Yeah, thousand pound steer is probably 15 to 25 gallons. I think temperature would be a big driving factor there for the higher intakes. So, half a dairy cow.

Mike (04:17)
What are some of the maybe mundane day-to-day things, aspects of water management that a farm should be paying attention to?

Dave Jones (04:28)
Number one for me is cleanliness of the water and that's got a couple aspects. They need to know the water quality going in. You know, is it actually clean water coming out of the ground? And what they can manage every day is the water in those troughs. There needs to be a protocol in place for cleaning. The water needs to be clear, not full of feed particles. It should probably have troughs disinfected.

weekly if not more, depends on the herd. And certainly I'm one if I'm walking through a barn and they've got a tank I can empty and I don't like the water I'll drain it and then we'll let it fill up again.

Mike (05:06)
Okay.

I think one of the things that sometimes doesn't

lot of dairymen can rattle off. Yeah, two feet of bunk space per cow is ideal, especially

a post-fresh or pre-fresh group. In a six row barn, we're going to live with 18 inches. I mean, they've got some of these numbers they carry around every day. But I don't know that everyone has a good idea what the linear space

of water trough should be per cow. What is that recommendation?

Dave Jones (05:45)
Well, they need for mature cows, two feet is the recommendation between cows. Two feet of space. Heifers, smaller cows, maybe a Jersey 18 inches would do. It is recommended that there's enough water space so that every cow in a pen can drink. Now we all know they don't all drink at the same time, but no cow should have to fight for water when it wants it.

and it should be at multiple locations, at least two locations in the pen because some pens are big. The bigger it is, the more locations it should be at because you cannot have enough water.

Mike (06:25)
So you were saying, so the two feet, that's a, that's the, it's a feed bunk, not the water trough, right? That's at the water trough.

Dave Jones (06:31)
No, that's the water trough. Yes.

Now know it's different because the feed bunks the whole run of the pen and water is not. But you'll have often more cows lining up to feed at one time than drink. They just need to, they can drink about a gallon a minute. So figure 30 minutes a day, give or take to consume their daily water consumption. There has to be enough water space so every cow can get that 30 minutes plus in.

Mike (06:38)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Dave Jones (06:59)
and it's going to happen at different times. After milking, know, cows coming out are going to drink, others are waiting, they're not drinking. So it's still the width at the trough is the same as what you hear at a feed bunk. They just drink at different times.

Mike (07:12)
Okay.

Now you see a lot of people make a real effort to run their plate cooling water back out. What's a cow's affinity for warmer water and is that more common during the cold times of year?

Dave Jones (07:34)
Yeah, I can relate to a cow on this level because I personally don't like cold water. I like it warmer. The plate cooler water has been warmed because it's taken the heat from the cooling system in the parlor.

Mike (07:37)
Okay.

Dave Jones (07:50)
rumen has a temperature that needs to be maintained. Cold water lowers that temperature and can shock the rumen. So I think the warmer water is preferred by the cow because it doesn't change that rumen temperature. So there is merit to doing that.

Mike (08:00)
Okay

Dave Jones (08:04)
In the wintertime it makes some sense because it just keeps the animal warmer in colder temperatures. Personally I tend to relate to

Mike (08:10)
Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones (08:14)
water is easier to drink than cold water.

Mike (08:17)
I also notice on when I'm on farms, a lot of people besides having especially, you know, engineered into their barn where the crossover alleys, the end of alleys where they put in drinkers, they'll take steps to have water available relatively quickly after cows come out of the milking parlor. What's the what's the reason behind that?

Dave Jones (08:45)
Yes, I think this is a great question because in this day and age when they're designing robot barns, they need to pay attention to this concept. Cows have gone in and they've milked. Milk is an excretion point for water. You've taken a lot of water out of their system. Maybe they've been standing waiting to be milked for a little bit. They're going to want to start to replenish the water. So it's really good when they come out of the parlor to have water first, get the drink they want.

then go and eat some feed, because now there's water back in the room, it's a wet environment in there. They can eat the feed they want, and then they lay down. And laying down is where they actually make the milk. So it's replenishing what we just took out.

Mike (09:23)
Okay.

So going back sort of that idea you said, you

know, there's an entire bunk length of feed, but you'd like to get them a good drink first. So having some extra availability of water, when you consider that they've got maybe hundreds of feet of bunk space, being sure that they can get to a smaller amount of water as quickly as possible and enough locations.

becomes an important consideration.

Dave Jones (10:01)
Yes, and something outside the parlor is good. With the robot facilities, I like water right at the exit point of the robots. can just, the cat will make up her own mind, but she can decide to have that drink. I find typically they will if it's there, and then they'll go eat, and their creature's a habit. They'll get into a routine. So yeah, you can never have enough water. I said that before, but you can never have enough water.

Mike (10:09)
Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, I can actually growing up with a tie stall barn and a drinking cup broke there were there were times we had too much water that that was a thing at times but it mostly because it overflowed the gutters and was a mess so sure

Dave Jones (10:36)
Yep.

Yep, and you mentioned drinking cups, to, cause I don't want to ignore those. I've kind of been focused on,

on freestalls. We need to make sure the water is flowing in those cups. I've seen too many where I don't believe the cows can get the right amount of water they want. It needs to flow, easy access. The little push button needs to work, you know, so thank you for bringing that up. I don't want to be biased to one situation.

Mike (10:59)
Good points. No,

those are good points too. Well, we've talked a little bit about availability of water. Let's look now at aspects of quality. I know that a couple of the, one of the main ones people might look at is, is bacteria.

but then there's also some other things in water that need some attention paid. talking first about bacteria, what are the problems high bacteria can be causing? What are some of the things that need to be done to fix that problem?

Dave Jones (11:46)
Yeah, bacteria are a major problem. There's different kinds of bacteria. Typically when Agri-King tests a sample, we're looking at coliform bacteria, which is fecal contamination. I've recently run into a farm that has salmonella in their water and

Mike (12:04)
Where would they get salmonella from? Okay, okay.

Dave Jones (12:06)
It's a new one to me, but it really

is new. But it's true because the cows experience all the symptoms of salmonella when it spikes in the water and that happened two months ago. So I think it's in the ground somewhere, but I'm not a microbiologist. I'm a little lost on how it got there.

Mike (12:17)
My.

Dave Jones (12:25)
But in general, bacteria, if you're lucky, will put them off water intake. And I say that the way I said it because you can make a cow sick with bacteria.

So if they don't drink,

Mike (12:34)
out.

Dave Jones (12:36)
you're gonna lose milk production, but probably keep the health. If they drink it, like the herd did with salmonella, they will get scours and you'll see typical symptoms of something's wrong inside the animal. So bacteria is actually, it's a big problem. We sometimes think, well, they ate something. No, they might've drank something.

Mike (12:48)
Okay

What, and I we're, we're, we're a nutrition company. We aren't first and foremost, a water treatment company. What are some of the things that you've seen people do that seem to help when they have a bacteria problem in water?

Dave Jones (13:16)
Yeah, fortunately my own home water has to be treated so I'm experienced with some of this. But you can chlorinate the water. I've never done this myself but that means putting bleach down the well to disinfect. I would talk to a water person before I just do that but that's what some have done. The popular one right now is hydrogen peroxide. So that goes in, it kills bacteria, cleans up the water.

With chlorination or hydrogen peroxide, I asked people to pay attention to the load because the rumen is bacteria and that water is going to go in the rumen. And I did have an experience where this was with, it was a calf ranch actually, but we got talking to the company that sells the hydrogen peroxide because we had an additive in the feed that was being mixed in the water and I think the water was killing the additive. So they...

Mike (13:55)
Mmm.

Dave Jones (14:13)
The water companies, and rightfully so, are talking treatment levels for your water. So we have to try to connect that back to the rumen or anything else we're doing with that water that contains, say, positive bacteria. The other system that works really well are black lights, UV lights. I actually like these. Some might argue with me, but I like them because nothing touches the water. It runs through a clear tube that goes under the black light, kills the bacteria.

Mike (14:33)
Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones (14:44)
but you have to pay attention to your water. When those bulbs go and they're not working, that bacteria will come right back. So you have to pay attention, you maintain your system, which you should anyways. So those are probably the more, the three main approaches that I run into to deal with bacteria.

Mike (15:03)
from the second of my three areas to ask you about what about the pH in water? How do you see that? How does that affect animal nutrition?

Dave Jones (15:11)
should be.

Yeah, should be neutral. Again, I like to give real examples because it gets a point across. So I've run into this. First and foremost, low pH water is more detrimental than high pH water. I've run into pH at 10 from a, it was rural water. So it was pH at 10. There's literature out there that will suggest that high pH is not a problem. And that's what we found. It was not a problem. The low pH we've run into of like five.

Mike (15:41)
Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones (15:44)
That was a problem. And it was a problem in transition cows. So what happens when cows are eating, they're naturally producing acids and lowering the pH of the rumen. If you put in acidic water, pH of five, which is too low for a rumen, that's a severe acidosis at five, they're gonna eat, they're gonna drink that water, you're gonna keep the pH down, lower than it should be for longer. And we experienced transition problems with that. wouldn't.

they go off feed essentially is what they do. If the pH was higher, it's working the opposite direction to the pH of the grain. The grain's pushing pH down, the water brings it up, you don't get really any effect. So low pH is a problem. I will argue if it gets below six and a half, you need to think about that.

Mike (16:15)
Mm-hmm.

Let's take the instance of pH being low. At what point does it go beyond your ability to adjust the ration to help reconcile that? When do you need to have a water treatment specialist come in and get that up?

Dave Jones (16:50)
Well, that's why I use six and a half as a benchmark. I think they need to start looking. That situation out of five, honestly, we couldn't get the ration adjusted. We did. Our V.P. of Research and Development at the time developed something that helped. So sometimes in those situations, we're able to find an approach. It's beyond adjusting the ration. It's an addition to the ration. And it helped. But really, if that pH is low,

Mike (16:54)
Okay. Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Dave Jones (17:18)
get someone in, look at it, get the pH up. That's what we need to do.

Mike (17:22)
Okay. So then my third question is about things in water, aspects of minerals. And

as this relates to pre-fresh cows, but even just in it from a general herd standpoint, what are some of the minerals that are commonly in water at levels that cause issues that mean the ration has to be adjusted around that?

Dave Jones (17:50)
Yep. So there's five that come to mind right away. And there's several we look at, but five come to mind. Iron, manganese and sulfur or sulfates. So the first three I look at. Iron and manganese do not take a lot to become what we call elevated beyond normal. Iron is a good example. It ties up, interferes with the absorption of other minerals. Copper is a great example. You have a high iron content in the water.

Mike (18:14)
Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones (18:18)
that creates a high iron intake and the cow shows you a copper deficiency because the iron impeded the absorption of the copper. So iron's a big one for me. Manganese does similar things. So I've watched that one really close. They also have a metallic taste, right? So it can affect intake. Sulfates is a little different. And we do have some farms with high sulfate water. If we think of

Mike (18:38)
Okay.

Dave Jones (18:48)
This affects the beef industry too. Diseases like polio, which are thiamine deficiencies. In the rumen, there can be what's called thiaminase produced that destroys thiamine, you get polio. High sulfur water can initiate that process and we have lots of issues with it. So when those things are happening, we've got to pull, for example, sulfur out of the diet. That's the only thing we can do and sometimes it's not enough.

Mike (19:15)
Okay.

Dave Jones (19:16)
Yeah, some other some negative effects there. So those are the three big ones, but I look at sodium and chloride as well I rarely have an issue with these to be honest with you But in our part of the world where we treat the roads with road salt you can get I think they're using calcium chloride You can get chloride leached into some shallower wells and it'll spike the chloride in your water And we just we need to watch that because we're going to have to adjust the diet around it

Mike (19:38)
Okay

Now is that especially an issue in a pre-fresh diet more than a lactating cow diet?

Dave Jones (19:50)
I'd say both because it's a but I get your point. It's an anion. So it's going to start to lower your dietary cation and I indifference which for those familiar with pre-fresh diets when we do that we're trying to acidify a cow's blood. We don't want to do that with the lactating cow. So in some ways I could argue it's more detrimental to the lactating cow if we don't adjust for it. But it can be detrimental to the pre-fresh cow.

Mike (19:53)
Okay.

Right, okay.

Dave Jones (20:18)
if we're already adjusting for a low, a high chloride, low DCAT diet and we haven't paid attention to our water.

Mike (20:25)
Well,

I know at Agri-King for being a feed company, we do spend a lot of time. We actually have our lab set up to be able to do water testing. What's a rough protocol that we want to have

people doing when they take water samples? And then, you know, maybe go into just the littlest detail, how that affects you and the other nutritionists as you're consulting on a farm.

Dave Jones (20:51)
Yeah, so are you talking how to take the water sample or the procedure for how many waters a year do you take and that sort of thing? okay.

Mike (20:58)
probably both, but I think

especially the idea, on one hand, if you, if you take it out of the milking, take it out of the parlor, what if that's not the cow, the water, the cows drink, if you dip it out of a feed trough, is it going to, going to give you a bad, bacteria number or how do you get, what would you tell me to do to get a

good consistent sample that will mean something.

Dave Jones (21:29)
Okay, so let's break it down. Forget problems for a moment. Routinely, should probably test the water at least once a year. And I'm going to argue twice, summer and winter, because the water tables can change a little bit. So that's minimum. When you take the water sample for routine testing, lot of people forget to run the water for a few minutes and flame or heat up the nozzle that the water is coming out of to sterilize it.

You know, so you get an accurate sample of what's in the well, for example, not what's in the pipe and not what's contaminating the nozzle. Now, if we're troubleshooting, this is different. We may need to take water from the trough. It will have bacteria in it. know, cows are drinking out of it. It's going to have bacteria, so it's going to be high. But we may be wanting to compare that back to...

Mike (22:22)
Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones (22:26)
the water source that's leading into the trough and then we can find out which line is bringing the water into the trough and take a proper sample of that so we can see the quality of the water before the cows have access to it and maybe look at what's happening to it when it's there in the trough. And we can start to troubleshoot some concepts, whatever we think is happening.

Mike (22:49)
Good. Well, what?

To bring us to a close, what are your final thoughts? What would be your one or two things to advise? I don't mean someone who's having trouble necessarily, but give a farm advice. What are the two or three things that you'd want them to pay attention to when it comes to the water their animals drink?

Dave Jones (23:12)
Yeah, first and foremost to go with the title of your podcast, Don't Forget About the Water. Every time you have a problem, it needs to be part of your thought process. Make sure it's clean. Just check it. And if everything looks okay, don't assume it's not the water. And I'm going to give you a real brief story again, but this one caught me by surprise.

It's never happened to me again. It probably will never happen to me again. But we had a herd that was only drinking 15 gallons of water. They wouldn't drink water. We couldn't figure it out. The water tested okay. So what we did, our lab is looking at nutritional

stuff. We're

a full blown water lab. We didn't assume the water was not the problem, even though we couldn't find it. We did have the water sent to a

proper water lab and we tested for everything. Because they'll ask you what do you want to look for? I didn't know what I was looking for. Everything.

The

thing that showed up in that test that was out of specs was boron. I don't know anything about where boron should be in the water or what it does to an animal. But it was the only thing. So what we found, their well was a 50 foot well. So I think it was getting boron leached in off the alfalfa fields.

Mike (24:35)
Okay.

Dave Jones (24:35)
We dug it

to a 300 foot well, no more problems. The cows went up 15 gallons of water and 20 pounds of milk fast. They started to drink. The reason I think it was the boron, and this is where you gotta pay attention to everything, the producer was having some health issues and his physicians couldn't figure it out. He himself, because he was drinking the water. When we found the boron, they weren't able to get him

Mike (24:44)
Yeah?

He himself was having some health. okay. Okay.

Dave Jones (25:05)
some binders, whatever they do for people. And honestly, I found one paragraph in the literature about the symptoms of boron toxicity on people and it matched his symptoms. I learned nothing about what it would do for the cows. I found what I could and ran with it and the problem went away. So my point with that is don't give up if you haven't tested everything, pesticides, whatever. We found boron.

Mike (25:33)
Okay.

Dave Jones (25:33)
And

it didn't happen overnight. It took time. It was hard. But we found something.

Mike (25:39)
That's interesting. Well, Dr. Jones, thank you so much. This has been very informative. Chris, what did we learn today?

Chris (25:47)
couple things. One of them is just to pay attention to the simple things of water, which we kind of forget about. Also that Dr. Jones and rumans liked their water warmed up. Hey, if you like what you heard, hit us up on any of our socials at Agri-King. And if you have any thoughts or things you'd like us to discuss or questions, you can email us at Podcast@agriking.com. Thank you, Dr. Jones. Thank you, Mike, and have a wonderful day.

Dave Jones (25:56)
What?

Mike (26:15)
Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Dr. Jones.

Dave Jones (26:17)
Thank you Chris and Mike. It was a pleasure.