How often should a stock water trough be cleaned?

The short answer, for sheep or cattle held in a containment area or feedlot in Victoria, is every day or two. Agriculture Victoria's guidance for stock containment areas says surface material should be skimmed off the water daily, and that troughs should be completely emptied, cleaned and refilled every 1 to 2 days.

Why so often

Confined stock stand close together, kick up dust and carry feed on their muzzles to the water. Agriculture Victoria lists what makes stock avoid or reduce their drinking: water that is warm, stagnant, polluted with food residues, or has dust or straw floating on the surface. A trough in a pen hits all four within a couple of days in summer.

The MLA feedlot design manual makes the same point from the design side. It says the trough should provide a fresh, cool, clean, palatable and adequate volume of water, allow for easy and regular cleaning inside the trough, and that cattle hold grain on their muzzles after feeding and transfer it to the water, which is why troughs placed close to feed bunks need more frequent cleaning.

What it costs in time

Take one trough, cleaned by hand five times a week, ten minutes a time including walking there and tipping it out. That is about 43 hours a year for that one trough. Value your own time at $35 an hour and it is roughly $1,500 a year. Two troughs, double it. Our savings calculator lets you put in your own numbers.

Three ways to get the time back

1. Trough design. The MLA manual recommends long, narrow, shallow troughs over large deep round ones, because they waste less water when flushed and are easier to clean inside. A large outlet and a smooth internal profile make the tip-and-scrub quicker. This reduces the time per clean, not the number of cleans.
2. Keep the water moving. Solar trough pumps circulate and aerate the water so it stays cleaner for longer. Users of these report cleaning less often, not stopping. The sediment and feed residue stay in the trough until someone removes them.
3. Flush it out automatically. A self-flushing trough opens its drain on a schedule, a surge of water pushes the sediment along the floor and out, and the float refills it. The cleaning still happens every day or two, as the guidance asks, but nobody has to be there for it.

What we recommend

If you clean troughs by hand more than three or four times a week, work out the hours first. Then decide whether the fix is a better trough, moving water, or a trough that cleans itself. We make the third kind, and we would rather you test it on your own farm than take our word for it.