- 1 day ago
A frozen trough at 9 degrees becomes the starting point for a practical, hard-won lesson in winter livestock care: nothing keeps a trough from freezing, but plenty of things can buy time and keep animals drinking. The narration walks through what actually works without electricity, from bigger and deeper tanks to lids, wind protection, insulation under the tank, straw bales, black surfaces, warm water, and even using the ground itself. It also explains why cold water reduces intake, why snow is not a water substitute, and how underdrinking can lead to impaction in horses and other stock.
This is part farm advice, part field-tested winter guide, with clear warnings about what not to do: no antifreeze, no salt, no open flames in barns, and no shortcuts that fail when the power is out. It also covers frostfree hydrants, buried lines, drain holes, gravel around the base, and why a hose left on a hydrant can make the whole system fail. The tone is direct, practical, and rooted in years of breaking ice by hand.
Created for viewers searching for winter livestock watering tips, frozen trough solutions, frostfree hydrant advice, and homestead water management. It fits searches for farm maintenance, animal care in cold weather, and practical off-grid water system guidance for cattle, horses, sheep, and poultry.
This is part farm advice, part field-tested winter guide, with clear warnings about what not to do: no antifreeze, no salt, no open flames in barns, and no shortcuts that fail when the power is out. It also covers frostfree hydrants, buried lines, drain holes, gravel around the base, and why a hose left on a hydrant can make the whole system fail. The tone is direct, practical, and rooted in years of breaking ice by hand.
Created for viewers searching for winter livestock watering tips, frozen trough solutions, frostfree hydrant advice, and homestead water management. It fits searches for farm maintenance, animal care in cold weather, and practical off-grid water system guidance for cattle, horses, sheep, and poultry.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00It is a quarter past five in the morning, and it is nine degrees out, and there is a lid
00:05of ice on the trough an inch and a half thick, and I am standing over it with a maul
00:11handle in my hand, the same as I was standing there yesterday.
00:14I have no electricity running to that trough. I never have. So I have read a fair amount of advice
00:22on this subject over the years, and nearly all of it starts from the assumption that there is a socket
00:28somewhere, and the rest of it makes a promise it cannot keep.
00:31So let me say the thing plainly in the first minute, because it is what the whole of this video
00:38rests on. Nothing keeps a trough from freezing. Not a ball, not a bale of straw, not a black tank,
00:46not any arrangement you can build in a yard without energy going into it.
00:51Water gives up heat until it reaches freezing, and then it turns to ice, and the only thing that stops
00:58that is heat arriving faster than it leaves. If nothing is plugged in, nothing is arriving. Everything you do out
01:07there buys you hours. It does not buy you immunity.
01:11That sounds like bad news, and it is not, because once you stop chasing a trough that never freezes, you
01:18can go after the thing that actually matters, which is a different job altogether and a good deal easier.
01:25You want a trough that freezes slowly, that breaks easily, and that gets enough water into the animal. Three things,
01:33all achievable, none of them magic. And the third one is where almost everybody goes wrong,
01:40including me, including me for about four years, so let me take that first. I gathered the whole of it
01:46into a book at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long version. If you want it, it is there. I
01:54will not mention it again.
01:55Here is the part nobody tells you. An animal standing in front of water it can reach will not necessarily
02:02drink it, not if it is cold enough. A cow will drink a great deal less out of water near
02:08freezing than out of water with some warmth in it, and the drop is not small.
02:14A horse is worse, and a horse that quietly under drinks for four days in a cold snap is a
02:21horse heading for an impaction, which is a colic caused by nothing more complicated than dry gut contents, and it
02:28will put you on the telephone to a vet at midnight.
02:32Sheep the same. Poultry the same. So you can go out there and break that ice twice a day, every
02:39day, and be doing the job properly as you understand it, and still have stock going backwards on you.
02:45Feed intake falls off when water intake falls off, because an animal cannot work through dry forage without water to
02:54carry it, and then you are feeding hay into a body that is losing condition anyway and wondering why.
03:01And while I am here, snow is not water. An animal eating snow spends more heat melting it than it
03:09gets any good out of, and a creature already cold cannot afford that trade.
03:14I have heard people say the cattle will eat snow if they need to. They will. It is not the
03:20same thing, and it will not carry them.
03:23My grandmother taught me this, and she did it without telling me I was wrong, which was her way.
03:29I was twelve, and the ice breaking was mine that winter. There was a cold week in January, and I
03:36was out there morning and evening with a short bar, and I broke the lid every time, and I was
03:41proud of being reliable about it.
03:43But I broke it and left it. A slab of ice the size of a wagon wheel sat there floating
03:49in the middle of the trough, and I thought nothing of it, because the water was open round the edges,
03:55and I had done what I was sent to do.
03:57The heifers were off, not sick, just slow, and leaving hay, and standing about instead of getting on with it.
04:05She came out one evening, and she did not look at me. She reached into that trough with both arms,
04:12and lifted the slab out, and carried it to the fence, and dropped it over, and the cold of it
04:17had her hands red to the wrist.
04:20Then she went back to the house, and came out with two buckets off the stove, water with some warmth
04:26in it, and poured them in. And those heifers came to the trough, all of them straight away, like she
04:32had rung a bell.
04:33She told me there were two things wrong, and the ice was only one. The slab I kept leaving was
04:40taking up the room and giving the cold somewhere to live, and the water underneath it was cold enough that
04:46they would rather stand off it than put their noses in.
04:49Then she said the thing I have never needed to be told twice. Water an animal can reach is not
04:56the same as water an animal will drink.
05:00So, what actually works, starting with the things that cost nothing, because they give you more than the expensive ones
05:07do?
05:07The first one is volume, and it is the opposite of what people do. A big trough freezes slower than
05:14a small one. A full trough freezes slower than a half-empty one.
05:19All that water is heat in storage, and the more of it you have, the longer it takes to give
05:25it all up.
05:26So, in the coldest part of the year, when a person's instinct is to put out the little tank because
05:32the big one is a nuisance to deal with, do the other thing.
05:35Put out the big one and keep it full.
05:38A deep tank holds its heat better than a shallow, wide one, too, because what you lose, you mostly lose
05:45off the top.
05:46Which gives you the second free thing. Cover the top.
05:50Most of the heat leaving that trough goes off the open surface, so a lid with a drinking hole cut
05:55in it, big enough for a head and no bigger, changes the arithmetic more than anything else you can do
06:01for nothing.
06:02A sheet of plywood, a cut piece of board insulation, a scrap of rigid foam with a hole in it.
06:09Weight it so the wind does not take it, and so a cow leaning on it does not wear it.
06:14The third free thing is where it stands. South side of a building, in the sun, out of the wind.
06:20Wind is what takes water down fast, far faster than still cold does, and a trough sitting in the open
06:27on the north side of a barn in a January wind is working against you all day.
06:33Move it 20 feet, and you may buy two hours a night for the price of moving it 20 feet.
06:38And the fourth free thing is the one my grandmother showed me. When you break it, take the ice out.
06:44Do not leave the slab in there.
06:46Lift it, carry it off, tip it over the fence. It is cold, and it is the single easiest thing
06:53on this list to skip, and skipping it undoes a good part of the rest.
06:57Now, the things that cost a little. Insulation, and the part people get wrong, is the bottom.
07:04Everybody wraps the sides and leaves the tank sitting on frozen dirt, and the ground will take heat out of
07:10the bottom of that tank all night.
07:12So insulate underneath as well. A sheet of rigid foam board under it, or a pallet with foam between the
07:18boards, or six inches of straw laid down and the tank set on top of it.
07:23Round the sides, straw bales are the old answer, and they are still a good one.
07:28Stack them tight against the tank on three sides, and across the back, leave the drinking side open, and pin
07:35them so they do not shift.
07:37They are not there to warm anything. They are there to slow what leaves.
07:41The newer version is a tank inside a tank, with the gap packed, foam, or sawdust, or straw, or a
07:48plain box of foam board built round a stock tank and taped.
07:51Either works. The bales are cheaper, and you can feed them in March. Color and sun are worth having for
07:58free.
07:59A black tank takes up more of what the sun gives it than a galvanized one, and in a clear
08:04cold spell, that is real.
08:06And you can put thermal mass in there deliberately.
08:09Jugs filled with water, capped, painted black, floating in the tank.
08:13They soak up sun through the day, and give it back through the evening.
08:17It is not a heater. It shifts a couple of hours of freezing from the night into the next morning,
08:23and a couple of hours is sometimes the difference between a skin of ice and a lid you need a
08:28bar for.
08:29Getting the tank into the ground helps more than any of it, if you are willing to dig.
08:33Below about three feet, the ground never freezes here, and it sits somewhere around 50 degrees all winter.
08:39So a tank part buried, or set into a berm with earth banked round three sides, is drawing on that
08:47the whole time.
08:48This is the whole principle behind the proper frost-free waterers, and you can have a rough share of it
08:55with a shovel and an afternoon in October.
08:58And the plainest one of all, carry warm water out at the right time of day.
09:04Not boiling, just water with some warmth in it, and do it in the afternoon rather than the morning,
09:10so that what you have added is still in there going into the cold of the night.
09:15Two buckets will not keep a trough open.
09:19Two buckets will get your stock to drink properly in the 20 minutes after you pour them,
09:24and that is the thing you were actually after.
09:28A word on the floating ball, because somebody always asks.
09:32A ball in the trough does very little by itself.
09:36The theory is that it keeps a hole open by moving in the wind,
09:41and in a mild frost with a breeze, it will sometimes keep a patch clear.
09:46In nine degrees, it freezes in place and becomes an ornament.
09:51What a ball genuinely does, is give the animal something to nose down and push,
09:57so that stock which have learned the trick can open a thin skin of ice themselves.
10:03That is worth having, and it is not nothing.
10:06It is just a long way from what the pictures suggest.
10:09And if you have money in this, and you want it solved properly,
10:14the thing to look at is an energy-free waterer.
10:18A heavily insulated unit set into the ground with a small opening,
10:23drawing ground heat from below, kept open by the animals using it.
10:28No power to it at all.
10:30They are not cheap, and the plain word on them
10:33is that they want enough stock drinking regularly to keep working,
10:37so they suit a herd, and they do not suit two goats and a pony.
10:43The other thing to know before you buy is that they need the ground opened up to get them in,
10:49so that is a job for September, and not for the week you need it.
10:54But they do what the rest of this only approximates,
10:57and if you are going to be doing this for twenty winters,
11:00it is the one purchase I would not argue a man out of.
11:04Now breaking ice, because there is a wrong way, and it will cost you a tank.
11:11Use something blunt and heavy.
11:13The butt of a maul, a steel bar, a hammer.
11:17Hit it in the middle and let the crack run.
11:20Then lever the pieces up and out.
11:23And here is the part.
11:25A polyethylene tank in deep cold is not the same material it is in July.
11:32Plastic goes brittle as it gets colder,
11:34and a tank that would have shrugged off a knock in summer will split in nine degrees.
11:40So do not swing an axe at it.
11:43Do not strike anywhere near the wall or the rim,
11:46and work in the middle where there is water under the ice rather than tank.
11:51And never pour boiling water into a frozen poly tank to free it.
11:57The heat goes in one place.
11:59The plastic moves in one place, and it cracks.
12:03The never list, and these are short because they matter.
12:08Never antifreeze.
12:10Not a drop, not ever, not thinned.
12:13It tastes sweet, animals and dogs will drink it by choice,
12:18and it kills them through the kidneys.
12:21People still suggest this.
12:23It is the worst advice in this subject.
12:26Never salt the water to stop it freezing.
12:29The amount it would take to lower the freezing point enough to matter
12:32is an amount that will do your stock real harm,
12:36and they cannot choose not to drink it if it is the only water there is.
12:41Never a combustion heater in a closed barn to look after a water line.
12:46No kerosene, no propane burner, nothing with a flame,
12:52not in a space with animals in it and the doors shut.
12:56Carbon monoxide puts livestock down in a shut building quicker than it does people.
13:01And do not count on heat tape and a cord run out there,
13:06which is what half the internet will tell you.
13:09Not because it does not work.
13:11Because the day you need it most is the day the power is off,
13:15and a system that fails in the exact weather it was bought for is not a system.
13:21Which brings me to the line,
13:23and this is the half of the subject that costs real money when it goes wrong.
13:28A buried line only survives on depth.
13:33It has to sit below where the frost reaches,
13:35and here that is 30 inches at the least, and I would rather be at 40.
13:40But do not take my number because it changes by a great deal across this country,
13:46and your county will have a figure for it.
13:48Ring them or look it up because that one number decides
13:52whether you are digging once or digging twice.
13:56If you are putting in a tap out there,
13:59put in a frost-free hydrant rather than an ordinary one,
14:02and understand how it works,
14:04because the understanding is what saves it.
14:07The valve on a frost-free hydrant is not up at the handle.
14:12It is down at the bottom, below the frost line,
14:15and when you shut the handle,
14:17the water left standing in the pipe
14:19drains out through a little weep hole at the bottom into the ground.
14:23That is the whole design.
14:26The pipe above the valve is empty all winter,
14:29so there is nothing in it to freeze.
14:31And that weep hole has to have somewhere to weep into.
14:35It wants a good bucket or two of coarse gravel
14:39packed round the base of it when it goes in.
14:42If it is set straight into clay,
14:44or if the gravel silts up over the years,
14:47the water cannot get away,
14:49so it sits in the pipe,
14:51and the first hard night,
14:52it freezes and splits the standpipe underground
14:56where you cannot see it and cannot reach it
14:59without digging the whole thing up again in February.
15:03If you have a frost-free hydrant that keeps freezing on you,
15:07that is almost always why,
15:09and almost nobody will tell you.
15:12Same if you find it still runs for a second or two
15:15after you shut it,
15:16or if the ground round the base stays soggy,
15:20or if you can hear it draining away
15:22for a long while after the handle is down.
15:26Those are the signs,
15:27and they are telling you
15:28the bottom of it is sitting in mud rather than stone.
15:33One more on hydrants.
15:35Never leave a hose screwed onto one over winter.
15:38A hose full of water holds the drain back
15:42exactly the way it does on a housetap,
15:45so the standpipe cannot empty,
15:47and the design stops working,
15:49and you will split it underground,
15:52having done everything else right.
15:55Two more things on lines.
15:57Insulating a pipe does not stop it freezing.
16:01Insulation slows the loss of heat,
16:03and if there is no heat going in,
16:06then all you have done is make it take longer,
16:09and a cold night is long.
16:11A pipe that must not freeze
16:13needs depth or drainage or heat.
16:17Lagging on its own is a delay, not a cure.
16:21And a pipe does not burst when it freezes.
16:24It bursts when it thaws.
16:26The ice makes the split,
16:28and the water does not come through
16:31until it melts,
16:32which is why people find the damage
16:34on the first mild afternoon
16:36and think the thaw caused it.
16:39If you have had a hard freeze
16:41and something was frozen,
16:42go and look at it while it comes back,
16:45with the tap open,
16:46and be there when it does.
16:48The hose off the outside tap,
16:51the shut-off valves,
16:52and the right way to thaw a frozen pipe
16:55are all in the hard freeze video,
16:58and I will not go through them twice here.
17:01I have been doing this for 30 winters,
17:04and I still break ice twice a day
17:06in a cold spell.
17:08That is the part no video wants to end on.
17:11The bales and the lid
17:13and the black jugs and the sighting
17:16do not take the job away.
17:18They turn an inch and a half of ice
17:20into a skin I can push through with a boot,
17:23and they turn an animal standing off the trough
17:26into an animal drinking.
17:28That is all they do,
17:30and it is worth every bit of the trouble.
17:33Water an animal can reach
17:35is not the same as water an animal will drink.
17:38Tell me something in the comments.
17:40How cold does it actually get where you are
17:43in the worst week of the year,
17:45and what do you have drinking out there,
17:47because two goats and 40 head of cattle
17:50are not the same problem at all,
17:52and the answers split along that line.
17:55And if you have had a frost-free hydrant fail on you,
17:59say so, because I would like to know
18:02how many of them were the gravel.
18:04Next time, the cased well.
18:06I have promised that one more times
18:09than I would like to admit,
18:10and it has not come,
18:12and it is the next thing I make.
18:14When the pump has no power
18:16and the line is frozen,
18:17there is still water down that casing,
18:19and there is a way to get it up
18:21with a length of pipe,
18:23a cap, and a rope.
18:25I am Elias Yoder.
18:27I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
18:29In winter, the whole place comes down to water,
18:32and the animals do not care
18:34how clever your arrangement is.
18:36They care whether they will put their nose in it.
18:39The people who built this country
18:41with their hands knew that,
18:43and we are only just starting to remember it.