Caprine Hydration Station

We have three of those store bought, big, black, rubber-like buckets for watering the animals.  The goats have used them, the chickens use them, the mule & mini-horse use them.  Although I admire their durability, I don't so much care for their prices.

As we have gradually added more and more critters to our homestead, we were in need of additional water containers.  We purchased two of the blue plastic 55-gallon barrels and Paul cut them up.  The taller bottom sections became our gut buckets (wonderful for deer & chicken butchering time as it's simple to hose out) and the bung hole on the smaller top section was epoxied to make it water-tight and those became water buckets for the mule and chickens.

Gut bucket on the left, mule water bucket on the right.
The chicken water bucket is about half as high as the mule bucket.

Since our goat herd keeps increasing, I've been having to haul water out to their pen more frequently, especially with the warmer weather creeping up on us.  If I'm not in the mood to wrestle with the unholy knots that magically appear in the 100' of hose, I'll just take one of several 5-gallon pails we have laying around the homestead and haul water from the faucet to the goat pen and dump it in the blue and black buckets.

At one point I just started leaving the 5-gallon bucket in the pen instead of transferring the water from one bucket to another.  And then I noticed that the prissy goats were only drinking from the white buckets.  Not that I blame them.  The water in the white buckets doesn't get as hot as the black or blue ones, and the fact that the chickens have a nasty habit of stepping in or crapping in the more shallow buckets is probably a bit of a turn-off to the goats.

Uhm, please refill our buckets with water exactly 68 degrees.

I now just keep four of the white 5-gallon buckets filled with "goat water".  They won't even touch the other buckets now.  But this is fine with me.  The blue & black ones get some sort of funky almost-impossible-to-scrub-out algae growing on them in the warm weather, but the white ones are easier to scrub out.  And the fact that the chickens don't drink from the white ones eliminates the elimination factor.  I still keep the other blue/black ones for the chickens though.

So if you're a keeper of goats & want a cheaper alternative to store bought water containers, try looking for some free 5-gallon buckets.  Free is good!  Besides, you can use that money you saved to buy more goats!