Bovine Rhodes Scholar

Yesterday morning.

This young cow is inside the creep feeder, which is designed to keep cows out and let calves in so that they can gobble up some tasty nutrition. There was another cow in the other side of the feeder. I texted the owner, who sent his son out to evict the cows and adjust the opening height (by moving a bar down) to prevent such a thing from happening again. A cow getting into the feeder isn't a problem except she'll eat all the very expensive feed which she doesn't need but the calves do.

This morning.

You may notice that the bar has been lowered as far as it will go. I let her out, replaced the bar, and texted the owner. If I had to guess I'd say she re-entered the feeder as soon as the son drove away yesterday morning. I base that guess on how thirsty she was when I let her out. She went right to the tank and slurped up water for a good 10 minutes.

Who knows how it'll all end?

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Cattle are big animals. The range cows on the ranch average about 1,300 pounds. Like all animals, they need water, and as big animals, they need a lot of water. In the winter they'll drink 10 gallons per day; in the summer it's 20-plus gallons. Just like people, they can survive without water for a couple of days, perhaps three days, but it's not a good idea. Just like people they should have water available on demand. And that's why we have stock tanks.

At the moment we have 91 cows, 86 calves, and two bulls on the place. While the calves do drink from the stock tanks, they get most of their water from mama's milk, and only take a gallon or two of fresh water per day. So for guestimating total herd water consumption you usually count the cow-calf pair as a single unit. Makes the math easier. You also count the bulls with the cows; for practical purposes there's no difference in water consumption.

So to ballpark total daily water consumption we'll peg maximum consumption per head per day at 22.5 gallons. Thus 93 times 22.5 equals 2,092.5 gallons per day. Evaporation and spillage takes some of the available water away, so we'll say 2,500 gallons to be on the safe side.

The stock tank Rhody was drinking from is eight feet in diameter and two feet tall. How many gallons does hold? 2,500? Let's see if I remember my fourth grade math. To get the volume of a cylinder you do the pie are round, cornbread are square thingy. So pi times the radius squared times height. That's 3.14159yadayadaX48 squaredX24=173,717.5 cubic inches. There are 231 cubic inches in a gallon, so 173,717.5/231=752-ish gallons. Call it 750. It's a good thing that particular stock tank is connected to a well pump, because that group of cattle drink 3.3 times the volume of that tank every day.

In the pasture to the north, the 20 foot bottomless stock tank holds about 4,700 gallons, but it's supplied by a windmill-pumped well. When there's a reasonable breeze the well can easily keep up with cattle demand. When there's no wind, as is often the case in the heat of summer, not so much. Which is part of the reason that pasture has two windmills (the other one has a pair of 8'x2' tanks). In that pasture when it's hot and there's no wind a group of cattle numbering 93 mature animals with attendant calves run out of water in two days. That's not a problem for us, so long as we've got electricity to run the home place well. I just have to open a gate to give the cattle access to one of the stock tanks on the home place pipeline system. Which is a pretty good deal, all things considered.

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I was planning on writing more, but it's been a long day of physical labor in the hot sun and I'm all tuckered out.

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Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.