11.3 — Livestock drinking water: how much, how salty, and what poisons it
DWT — Water Treatment, ExplainedShow Notes
A dairy cow in milk drinks five litres for every litre of milk she gives, and tolerates only a third of the salt a dry ewe shrugs off. The official South African numbers per species (how much water, how much salt, and the handful of real poisons) plus the trough habits that protect the herd.
More from DWT — Water Treatment, Explained
The agencies have already published the warning for 2026-27: a strong El Niño and rising odds of a dry summer. How many days of water the farm should hold, what an open dam loses to the sky, what a shed roof can harvest, and the registrations that keep it all legal.
Export fruit is washed, cooled and moved in water, and the audit schemes treat every litre of it as food contact. What GLOBALG.A.P. and South African law require, how a recirculating dump tank is kept safe with chlorine and pH control, and why Listeria changed the rules for hydrocoolers.
A broiler drinks nearly twice what it eats, through kilometres of warm plastic pipe where biofilm grows readily. The water-quality numbers for birds and pigs, the chlorine-and-pH discipline at the far nipple, and the between-flock line clean that decides the next cycle's performance.
The law treats a milking shed as food premises, and the water that touches milk equipment must meet the drinking-water standard's microbiology. What the regulations require, why hard water grows milkstone, how iron eats your sanitiser, and the plate-cooler water worth catching.
Injecting fertiliser through the irrigation system saves labour and puts nutrition exactly where the roots are, until calcium meets sulphate in a stock tank or fertiliser syphons back into the borehole. Injection equipment compared, the mixing rules, and the backflow protection the law expects.