Practical Approaches for Managing Stock Water

RECORDING COMING SOON!

Even water that looks clean and clear can be poor quality — and insufficient access to good-quality water can reduce beef cattle performance faster and more dramatically than any other nutrient deficiency. This webinar explores the hidden risks of poor-quality water, discusses its implications for herd health and productivity and provides practical tools and strategies to ensure your cattle have clean, safe and adequate water supplies. 

This webinar is available for one continuing education (CE) credit for veterinarians and registered veterinary technologists and technicians across Canada. After watching the entire webinar recording, you may take this quiz and score  >80% to receive a CE credit.

SpeaKers:

• Dr. Cheryl Waldner, Western College of Veterinary Medicine
• Karla Hicks, Bluestone Stock Farms 

key messages:

• Impacts of poor-quality water on cattle health include reduced reproductive efficiency, poor weight gain in calves, increased disease risk and sudden death.
• Laboratory testing is required to determine water quality!
• Common water quality issues to watch for include:
  • Blue-green algae
  • Sulfates
  • Nitrate/nitrite toxicity
  • Total dissolved solids
• When evaluating nitrates, always consider the amount coming from the feed and the water together.
• Sulfate levels, even if low, can reduce dietary copper availability.
• If sulfate levels in water are elevated enough it can result in Polioencephalomalacia (PEM).
• Electrical conductivity meters can be used to estimate total dissolved solid levels in water.  
• Options for micro mineral supplementation include free choice, mixed in a total mixed ration, boluses, oral drench and injectable.
  • The appropriate method of supplementation will vary by operation.
• The trace mineral status of cattle can be evaluated in two main ways: blood or serum samples and liver biopsies.

Learn More:

• Water Management for Beef Cattle (BCRC topic page)
• Tap Into Savings: Comparing Water Systems for Better Beef Herd Performance (BCRC post and podcast episode)
• Optimize Water Quality for Your Beef Cattle (BCRC video)

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Note: This transcript was generated using AI.  It has been reviewed for accuracy, but occasional errors may remain. Please refer to the original webinar recording for the most accurate content. 

Kristin Thompson

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the second of four webinars in the BCRC’s 2026 webinar series. Today, we will be focused on practical approaches for managing stock water. I’m Kristin Thompson, Knowledge Mobilization Specialist with the Beef Cattle Research Council, and I will be your moderator this evening.

We are happy to put these webinars on through the BCRC’s knowledge mobilization work funded by the Canadian Beef Cattle Checkoff and Canada’s Beef Science Cluster.

Before we get started, I’m going to go over a couple of housekeeping rules, so you will be able to see and hear myself, as well as our speakers, but we cannot see or hear you. We ask that if you do have questions, please submit them as they come up through the Q&A tab on the bottom of your screen. We will have a Q&A session at the end of the webinar, where these questions will be answered live.

This webinar is being recorded, and we will be sending out the recording to everyone that registered in about 5-7 business days. You can find recordings of all of our past webinars and other great videos on our website, beefresearch.ca, as well as on our YouTube channel.

This webinar is also available for CE credits for veterinarians and registered veterinary technologists across Canada. If you identified yourself as a vet or RVT when registering for this webinar, you should receive a certificate via email in the next 5 to 7 days. Remember, you do have to stay for the entire webinar to be eligible for the credit. Credits are also available for past webinars, which are listed on our website, and you can obtain the credit by watching the webinar recording and receiving 80% or higher on the associated quiz. For more information on CE credits please visit BeefResearch.ca/ce-credit. This page provides details on how to receive credit for both live and recorded events, and some frequently asked questions.

If you have any further questions or have not received your certificate within a week of the live webinar or completion of the quiz, you can contact Dana Parker, the BCRC’s Veterinary Collaboration Specialist, whose contact information is on the screen.

On our website, beefresearch.ca, we have a number of resources and interactive tools to help make informed decisions regarding water quality and watering systems. These include a dedicated Water Management for Beef Cattle webpage that houses information on all things water. As well as an economics of water systems calculator, this calculator can help you evaluate the initial cost, maintenance costs, potential benefits and payback period of different watering systems. We also have a video titled Optimize Water Quality for Your Beef Cattle, which highlights key considerations when choosing a water system, and how the BCRC calculator can help to inform that decision.

Additional resources include an interpretation of water analysis results guide for beef producers, how to collect water samples, a list of Canadian labs that test water samples, as well as a series of producer case studies highlighting how producers from across Canada have implemented various water systems on their operations.

To remain updated on these, as well as other resources, you can subscribe to our mailing lists, and I will include a link to that in the chat shortly.

Now, without further ado, we have two very exciting speakers for you this evening who are ready to share their thoughts and answer your questions. So, I’m going to introduce our first speaker, Dr. Cheryl Waldner, and invite her to share her screen.

Dr. Waldner is the Beef Cattle Research Council Research Chair at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine. She is actively involved in research examining factors affecting the productivity of cow-calf herds, as the lead investigator for the Canadian Cow-Calf Health and Productivity Enhancement Network.

Her current projects include diagnosis of organisms associated with respiratory disease, as well as antimicrobial use and resistance. Dr. Waldner has examined the effects of nutrition on reproductive performance in cow-calf herds, with a particular focus on copper and selenium deficiency. She has more than 300 research publications, and received the Canadian Beef Industry Award for Outstanding Research and Innovation in 2024. Cheryl and her husband own and operate a commercial cow-calf herd west of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

With that, I will turn it over to you, Cheryl.

Cheryl Waldner

00:06:37

Good evening, everybody I was asked to talk about water and impacts on cattle health tonight. I’m going to start by acknowledging the multiple years of drought that many of us have had to deal with in our operations, and the loss of some of our traditional water sources.

Rather than focusing on water quantity tonight, I’m going to focus more on impacts of poor water quality on herd health. Water quality is important. Poor water quality can lead to reduced number of calves on the ground, reduced weight gains in the calves that we do have and an increased risk of disease. And occasionally, and unfortunately, poor water quality can also result in sudden animal deaths on pasture.

How do we assess water quality? Well, laboratory testing is extremely important. We can’t simply look at a water sample and determine whether or not it’s safe for our animals to drink. When producers were asked in the recent Canadian Cow-Calf Survey how often they tested their water, 38% of producers had tested their water at least once in the last 3 years, while 62% of producers had never tested their water during that period.

For those that had tested at least once, 62% of them had tested in the summer, 21% in the winter, and 17% in both.

Collecting a water sample isn’t complicated, and as Kristin mentioned, there’s very good directions on the BCRC website in terms of how to do that. You can also contact your local lab. You need a clean 1L jug. It’s good to rinse that jug before you use it, and if you are collecting samples for anything more than a routine analysis, for example, looking at specific bacteria or blue-green algae, it is really important then to contact the lab and make sure that you do everything right so that the sample is usable when it reaches the lab.

We have a number of challenges related to water quality. When we’re looking at standing surface water, most recently we’ve been dealing with risk due to repeated cycles of drought and evaporation. We’ve always dealt with risks associated with manure contamination, because cattle might have access to the water, or simply runoff from either manure or fertilizer.

The deep well challenges that we have are related to the fact that many of our deep wells, and certainly in the area where my husband and I farm, are into ancient aquifers that really don’t have a high recharge rate, and they’re very, very high concentrations of salts and minerals in those waters.

I’m going to start by walking through the risks to cattle health that we see with water quality, and I’m going start with the… probably the one that’s the most traumatic.

Blue-green algae toxicity is one that many of us have heard of. What a lot of people don’t realize is that it’s actually a bacteria, cyanobacteria, not an algae. That doesn’t make a lot of practical difference to us as producers. The toxins that this bacteria produces, though, do and can have a very dramatic impact on our animals. They can be hepatotoxic, or impact the liver, or they can impact the nervous system. Typically, what we see in these cases is sudden death losses on pastures. We might just find dead cows.

This lady here, who’s hiding in the bush is an example of a cow that I dealt with, several years ago now who, was basically impacted by the liver-toxic form of blue-green algae or cyanobacteria, and ended up with what’s called photosensitization, or just extreme, damage from sunlight exposure. We did manage to get her adequate shelter, and she did actually go on to recover, but a lot of them don’t.

Runoff can increase risk from blue-green algae. Things that we can do to help reduce the chances of getting high levels of nutrients in the water that can promote the bacterial growth are pumping the water to the trough, we can aerate our water, or we could potentially treat the water with copper sulfate. If we do treat the water the dead bacteria release a lot of toxins, so the toxicity of the water can actually go up for a period following treatment.

The next type of toxicity that I want to mention is nitrate and nitrite toxicity.

Ruminants are a particular risk for this because they convert nitrates to nitrites in the rumen. With toxicity, we can see respiratory distress, basically difficulty breathing. We can see sudden death in animals, we can see some abortions. This one isn’t particularly common in Western Canada, but we do see it occasionally, and where we do see it is typically when we get fertilizer runoff, either into surface water or very occasionally into shallow wells. This is certainly a human health concern as well.

Nitrates in water always need to be considered together with the nitrates that we’re seeing in the feed. When you’re thinking about toxicities, it’s the total amount of the toxin that the animal’s taking into its system. And it might be getting some from the water, but it might also be getting some from the feed. And we can see nitrates in nitrate-accumulating plants, like kochia. As an example, or we can see high nitrate levels in feed, and we’re all aware of what happens to feed when we’re harvesting frozen, you know, frosted or frozen feed, or feed that’s been exposed to extreme drought, or sometimes even hail-damaged feed.

The bigger, and I would argue, more common problem has been associated with these repeated cycles of drought and evaporation that have increased the concentration of inorganic salts that we’re seeing in our surface water supplies in recent years. And been a problem in many areas.

It’s measured as in something called total dissolved solids, and total dissolved solids are basically made up of calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, bicarb, and chloride, and probably the most problematic one on that list is sulfates. High TDS all by itself can reduce salt intake and potentially trace mineral intake in our cows, so it by itself can be a problem. But the sulfate is probably the biggest problem.

Just to put some… Emphasis on what happens with evaporation and concentration in these water sources over the summer. The government of Saskatchewan shared this really nice graph with me, and thank you to them for that. What some of these folks have done is they’ve taken repeated samples, samples every week from a couple of dugouts in southern Saskatchewan and submitted those samples to the lab for sulfate concentrations. And if you look at the early part of the growing season, when they start sampling every year, this has been done on a couple of dugouts over repeated numbers of years. We have some sulfate levels that are perfectly okay from the same dugouts. Another year, we have dug out sulfate levels that are high, but potentially not at a panic point yet. But over the course of the summer, we see all of these lines are trending up, and some of them, if you look at this second red dotted line here, into very, very dangerous levels.

So, the take-home message here is, if we were just to have sampled these dugouts at the beginning of the grazing season, we would have potentially been misled into thinking we had perfectly safe water for the entire grazing season, and in these cases, we clearly didn’t.

This was focusing on sulfates. Why are we concerned? Well, some of the sulfate levels in these dugouts were actually high enough to result in a condition known as polio that can kill cattle. It’s a nervous system disease. It results from the conversion of sulfate in the rumen to hydrogen sulfide, which is, in fact, a toxic gas, and then we can end up with polio. This is a really substantial risk in hot weather when we’ve got our mama cows, right? They’re milking. They need to consume a lot of water. The hotter it gets, the more they drink, and the more sulfate they have the potential to take in.

But even lower concentrations of sulfates can tie up copper in these cows. So, it becomes a problem. All right, so you’re probably sitting there going, what is this person saying that we should be taking samples to lab every couple of weeks, or every month through the summer? Of course not. Hopefully we don’t end up in a situation like that.

Again, thanks to some very nice work by the government of Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture folks and others working with them. There are ways to screen your water on-site to see if it’s necessary to take that sample into the lab. And what they’ve suggested using, and what they’ve been using themselves, and they’ve got some nice videos on their site explaining this, is electrical conductivity meters. I’ve bought one from Amazon, and it seems to work just fine.

Basically, the higher the electrical… electrical conductivity is, the higher the TDS is, and EC values above 2000 indicates that it’s probably a good time to send your sample to the lab and find out what’s going on with it. The number that we’re most interested in when we get those results back from the lab is the sulfate levels. And these indicators of how to interpret your sulfate levels have been around for a long time now. They’ve been updated a little bit over time.

Dr. Greg Penner from the College of Agriculture and Bioresources at the University of Saskatchewan has been doing some really neat experimental research, trying to delve into these numbers. And to see whether or not there’s the potential to push them a little bit, because the bottom line is there’s a lot of us that have water with sulfate levels that are in the trouble zone. And getting a better understanding of exactly what this means is important.

What he’s found in the number of experiments that he’s done so far is that high sulfate water in under the experimental conditions that he’s performed his tests hasn’t been associated with dry matter intake, or water intake, or animal growth, but it has consistently led to increased ruminal levels of hydrogen sulfide, which is dangerous to the animal, and reduced copper status. That’s been consistent across whether that copper status was measured using liver biopsies or in a couple of cases with blood serum samples.

Okay, so what’s all this fuss about copper? Copper deficiency is, without question, the most common trace mineral deficiency that we see across Canada, and certainly in Western Canada. We have evidence linking copper deficiency to decreased reproductive performance. There’s a lot in the ledger about impairing the impact of the immune system in these animals, and we’re actually starting a study this fall at the Livestock and Forage Center of Excellence in Saskatoon, looking at how it impacts the immune system of calves coming into the feedlot, and how they respond to vaccines. The traditional way of thinking about copper deficiency has been looking for loss of color or bleaching of hair coat. Here’s a Simmental heifer picture that was taken many years ago now, and when she was deficient, and this is the same heifer, a couple of months after she received supplementation just to show the contrast there.

The reason copper deficiency is such a problem child for all of us is it’s more complicated than just not having enough copper in our forage, in our feed to start with. We do see primary copper deficiency very consistently across good chunks of Canada, and certainly very much so in Western Canada. But what makes this worse is the little copper that is there is often tied up with a secondary form of copper deficiency, where it’s bound by things like molybdenum in the feed, sulfur in the feed, sulfates in the water, or iron. These can act independently, or they can act together to tie up not just the copper that’s originally in the feed, but what we try to supplement these animals with. It can really complicate our attempts at supplementation.

Now, I promised I was going to follow up on this issue of high open rates and association with low serum copper or low copper deficiency in these cows. This data’s a little bit complicated, and has caused some confusion, especially as of late. The bottom line is that we do have strong evidence of an association between low serum copper and high open rates in cows.

On the bottom of this graph, we have serum copper concentrations. How much copper is there that we can see in the blood? Less than 0.4 here. This is our problem point. Right? And what we have on this y-axis over here is we have the open rate. Not the pregnancy rate, the open rate. And you can see that the open rates that we’re seeing in some of these herds and some of these younger animals that are impacted by low serum coppers are just starting to go through the roof. We’re also seeing a pretty significant problem in those 4- to 9-year-old cows that are represented by these squares here.

You’ll notice the 10-14 year old cows that showed up in this study. Well, one, they had slightly higher copper levels than some of the younger cows, which means they just got smart in their old age and figured out where the copper was hiding, and they figured out how to find it. And also the fact that they simply made it to 10 to 14 years of age. That they… maybe genetically, maybe behaviorally, maybe there’s something specific about those animals and their behaviors or their genetics that allowed them to continue to get pregnant and to be productive, even in the face of lower serum coppers.

So, it’s not real straightforward, but there’s definitely a very strong association between low copper and very, very high open rates in some of these younger cows.

Okay, so what do we do about it?

Well, we supplement.

Most producers are supplementing free choice, we’ll get into that in a bit more detail in a minute, or we can add it to our feed.

We can mix it in concentrate and feed as a top dress provided as a total mixed ration.

If we are going to feed it, we have to decide what type of mineral we’re going to provide. Can we get away with inorganic supplementation? Well, if it’s just primary copper deficiency, yes. A lot of people are very successful at providing regular, copper sulfate or whatever to the ration. But if we have problems with molybdenum or sulfate, then chelated or hydroxy minerals become pretty important in terms of trying to get these cows’ copper levels up.

There are also boluses that are available, and more recently, oral drenches and injectables have become available on the market. So, let’s run through these real fast here.

Free choice supplementation is practical, works good in extensive management situations. The problem is we don’t get a consistent amount of mineral into all of our cows, and it’s hard to estimate how much we are getting in. A lot of people will recommend trying to calculate the average intake across the herd. We’ve got 50 cows out, and we put out, you know, so many bags of minerals, so that means the average cow is eating this much mineral.

There was a study done, published in Alberta over a 6-day period where they followed cows and calves intensively to see exactly how much trace mineral they took in. Only 61% of the cows visited the mineral feeder even once during a 6-day period. Only 22% of the calves, so 39% of the cows never went near the mineral feeder in that 6-day period. So, an average is not going to tell you a lot about what to expect in your cows. So that’s a problem.

Their intake is going to vary depending on how we present the mineral to them, whether it’s block versus loose or lick tanks, whether we’ve got it mixed with salt, whether we’ve added molasses, if we’re limit feeding it with barley or a custom pellet. But if it’s free choice, we’re… we might be able to increase or improve intake, but we’re not going to necessarily be able to get it consistent across the herd, and we’re going to have a lot of cow-to-cow variation in what they’re eating.

So, how do we get around that? Well, if we can put it into the feed, and Dr. Steve Hendrick did a study at WCVM many years ago now where he did put it into the feed, and he compared that to cows on free choice. He did get higher coppers at calving. He did get cows that were fed the mineral coming into heat faster, and being pregnant earlier than the cows that were on free choice. It was also very important in that study that the supplementation was started pre-calving, and that we didn’t try to fix cows post-calving, because that didn’t work as well.

Most people are feeding ad lib or free choice. Some are giving, total mixed ration, 23%. Again, this is the Canadian Cow-Calf Survey data. Some are providing a measured amount. 6%, a few years ago already were using injectables, and less than 1% were using boluses.

We do have some older data that shows that boluses can work in some circumstances to improve copper levels. They’re a bit of a nuisance to give. Some cows are going to spit them back up again. And, whether they’re cost-effective in terms of actually improving reproductive performance is a bit of an unknown.

I’m really looking forward to seeing more data on the oral drenches that are out there, and how long they improve levels, how long those levels actually stay up in the animals is something that I’m looking forward to seeing.

The other product that we have access to now is Multimin. That’s been licensed and is being used by a lot of producers. It would be nice to have a study in herds that are actually copper deficient to see whether it improves reproductive performance, and we are still missing that. It is very important to use this product according to label directions to actually see good benefits.

To assess whether or not what we’ve suggested is working or not, we can look at trace mineral status by looking at the blood or liver. We can also get liver samples from post-mortems and slaughter animals. Serum samples or blood samples get a bit of a bad rap. I’m not sure it’s as justified as perhaps, we hear sometimes. The bottom line is, if we’ve got cows on free choice, if we’ve got a lot of variability in what we’re expecting to see in our cow herd, and we’ve got a lot of groups to look at, we need a lot of samples to make a good decision. If the serum sample is coming back deficient, that cow is deficient, and we’ve had studies where we’ve seen 60% of over a thousand animals being deficient.

So, it definitely can find some deficient animals. I’ve got no doubt that it can pick up a lot of what’s going out there. Maybe not everything, but it can pick up a lot. So, when we want to take a lot of samples, where we need to take a lot of samples, it’s a good thing.

But when we need to fine-tune or optimize copper status, where we’ve already got our cows on a total mixed ration, we’re feeding it very carefully, and we’re pretty sure we’re getting consistent intake, where we’re using injections or boluses, we need liver biopsies to fine-tune what we’re doing in our herds. So, if you’re in a position of fine-tuning what’s going on and not just kind of getting a picture of what’s an initial picture, we need to talk to our veterinarians about liver biopsies.

My last slide is reminding us to think about testing our feed if we want to look at total impacts on animal health. We can’t just look at water in isolation. We’ve got to remember that all of these things act cumulatively, total intake, feed, and water. And while we’re not testing feed, expecting to get any surprises when we’re looking at copper levels, more than 80% of Saskatchewan forages are going to be deficient. We’re not going to learn a lot by doing that.

We might learn something really important about other things that are tying up the copper, and I mentioned zinc here as well, because it kind of comes along for the ride. High molybdenum levels in peat soils, and certainly this is a problem in a lot of areas in Manitoba that I know. Certainly, some other scattered areas in Western Canada. High sulfur levels are a big problem in specific feed types, canola, distillers, byproducts, molasses, soybean meal, and so forth, and certainly in some sulfate-accumulating, plants such as kochia and lamb’s quarter and wild mustard.

So, I’m going to quit here and turn it over to, Kristin and Karla again, and we’ll be happy to answer any questions after we’re done the second part of the presentation. Thank you.

Kristin Thompson

00:30:17

Wonderful, thank you, Cheryl, for your insightful presentation. Just as a quick reminder, if you do have any questions, please pop them into the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen, and we will answer them live at the end of the webinar.

I am now excited to introduce our second speaker, Carla Hicks, and invite her to share her screen while I introduce her.

Karla and her husband Jason ranch in Parkbeg, Saskatchewan. They have a cow-calf backgrounding and grass operation. They also market their own frozen branded beef product called Bluestone Homegrown Angus Beef. Their children and spouses are the fifth generation of Hicks to ranch and work alongside Karla and her husband.

Karla is currently co-chair of the Canadian Cattle Association Foreign Trade Committee, a member of the CCA Environment Committee, Chair of Saskatchewan Verified Beef Production Plus, a member of the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef’s Policy and Framework Committee, and a board member of the Saskatchewan Farmland Security Board.

Karla and her husband received the Saskatchewan Environmental Stewardship Award in 2015.

With that, I will pass it over to you, Karla.

Karla Hicks

00:31:26

Perfect. Okay, well, thanks for having me. I promised myself I wasn’t going to cry tonight, so we’re going to hold with that. Thanks for that really insightful discussion, Dr. Waldner. You nailed pretty much everything we saw at our place, so…

This is us. We’re a family-run operation at Parkbeg and Mortlach, Saskatchewan. Ty, Nicole, that’s my son and daughter-in-law, and then myself and my husband, and then our daughter, Lexi, and her husband, William.

And then there’s the sixth generation to come along. So, we’re pretty proud of the next generation coming along.

Our ranch is basically an 800 pair cow-calf operation. Angus, bred to either Black Angus or Charolais bulls. We run about 800 pairs on around 15,000 acres, and we do that within 3 different plots, I guess. One’s 14 miles south of Mortlach, one’s at Parkbeg, and one is 8 miles north of Parkbeg.

We live within the Palliser Triangle which, is approximately 60 kilometers west of Moose Jaw, or 120 kilometers east of Swift Current. And inside the Palliser Triangle, it’s characterized by low and highly variable precipitation, frequent drought cycles, and high evaporation rates.

So, as you can imagine, for the last few years, it’s been a balmy Mediterranean paradise to live there.

We also are within the Missouri Coteau and that is a region that is formed by glacial activity during the last ice age. It consists of a north-south belt of rolling knobs, kettles, and high slew density. The high slew density is important to remember because, when it’s raining, we have lots of low, wet spots everywhere.

So, where we live, the Missouri Coteau overlaps the Palliser Triangle climate zone, and that landform influences how climate is experienced. And we see that ourselves. Between our three places, we have very different rainfall patterns, very different temperature patterns. Even within 3 miles of our place, we see our neighbors could get 2 inches of rain, and we get 2 tenths of rain, so we see it a lot.

So, John Palliser, when he found the area, he did send a warning that none of us heeded, neither us or our ancestors. He emphasized there’s frequent drought, light soils, extreme climate. Grasslands are better suited to grazing than crops. And there’s many places where we do see that.

So… In 2017, this is kind of what we were used to. And I can start here with saying that Jason’s and my philosophy around water is, if we have lots of snow in the winter, the dugouts will be full of fresh water, and grass will start to come good in the spring. We really need early, early moisture, and we need heavy, heavy snow packs.

The happy sauce, or the perfect recipe, is snow plus rain plus sun. That equals happy, healthy cattle and healthy land.

So, again, until 2018, we were really used to lots of low water holes and belly-high grass. We’re also used to wildlife. Wildlife was everywhere. We have deer, elk, moose, birds, and antelope. Many, many species, species that are difficult to find or becoming scarce. And that’s kind of changed in the last few years as well.

This map is of July 31st, 2017, and if you can see down, like, kind of Regina and west of Regina, where the dark orange is – that’s where we are, and it was already pretty dry then.

January 2018, We had no snow. And that was kind of where we started to feel things were getting dry, and nobody was really talking about it. And when you went west of us, like, you’d go 20 miles west of us, they were drier than us, and we had, like, we have so many friends that 20 miles, 60 miles, 100 miles west, were living in drought years before we were.

Here we are in 2018, and this picture is important to remember, because we’re calving in stockpiled grass, and the crocuses are kind of buried. That was kind of the last time we seen any of that.

2018, our soil moisture started to go backwards on us a little bit, and I have to thank Sask Crop Insurance for helping with these graphs.

Fast forward to March and April of 2019. It’s very dry. We don’t have a bunch of stockpiled grass to calve on. We’re not calving on any snow. We’re still calving end of March and April, and that changes later on for us, where we push it back to April and May, but things are starting to look a little bit bleak, and we could feel in 2019, things were getting very different.

March 2020, more of the same. Still no snowpack. And again, snowpack is what fills up our dugouts. So, in 2020, when we started to go out in the spring, first of all, the grass never started. We joked that we turn cattle out on to dewclaw high grass. The dugouts were maybe partially full. We were a little bit concerned how the summer was going to go, and again, nobody was really talking about a drought.

This was our snowstorm on April Fool’s Day. It was cold, and we did get a little bit more snow than this picture shows, but that was as good as it got. By the end of May, these pictures are taken in May, and if you can see the cow on the left-hand side, if you look far back into the Cooley, there’s 35 deer in there, and you can’t really see all of them because of how the picture cut off.

Still really used to wildlife, but in this pasture, there’s a free-running spring in there, so it’s not unusual for us to see large groups of deer. The last few years, a large group of deer there, though, is 5 or 7, not 35. And then the middle picture, there’s not a lot of trash on the ground anymore. Things are really drying up.

And August 2020.

Which, I hesitated to post this picture, because the top one is our yearlings, and wow, do they look light. And not very good. But water was an issue in that field.

This was the first year we really noticed a change in our weaning weights on our calves. We probably went backwards 50 pounds on our weaning weights in 2020.

This was when we were really starting to see some things in the health of our cattle, in their growth and thriftiness.

August 2020 was not much different from May, which was really unfortunate. We were pretty proud of trying to be least cost producers. We try to only feed our cow herd for about 100 days, and depending on the winter. If it’s a bad winter, obviously not. We have to start feeding as soon as the snow falls, but,

And in 2020, we weren’t getting 15 to 20 days out of like, 180 cows on 160 acres. And we were already moving them.

So, in 2020, I showed you our yearlings, that’s our yearling picture on the left, and water was a big problem, so we fired up our very first solar system, which was an older system we had bought years prior to that. And it took us a few days to get the kinks worked out of it, but we finally got it filled June 13th.

And within 7 days, you could see a difference within those yearlings. Now, we’re not testing water yet in 2020, we’re watching water, but we’re not really testing very much water yet.

And then we got our very first rain of the year on June 14th, I believe that was. And we felt a little bit like, well, maybe things are going to be okay. It wasn’t going to be okay, but…

We got through that, the calves came in 50 pounds lighter and we sold our yearlings early.

We skipped through to 2021, and it’s the year of the official drought.

And so that picture just highlights everything that we had no idea what we were doing day by day at this point.

March 2021, there is no snow. There is no snow at all. That heifer calved she was not really deficient in anything, and back to Dr. Waldner’s comment about feeding mineral, we were feeding 100% chelated mineral in a TMRR ration to our cow herds.

At our place, our first calf heifers and purebred calves and the feedlot calves. We knew things weren’t right. They weren’t thrifty, the calves were getting up, but they weren’t thrifty and lively like they had been, and so we were feeling like something was just a bit off.

So, when we acknowledged that the weather forecast was probably right, because they had forecast a 100-year drought, and the current state that we were in, we went shopping at Ritchie Brothers, and the first thing we bought was this excavator.

And the second thing we bought was this little beauty, this 1980 Western Star water truck. And let me tell you, we wore the rubber off the tires, watering cows all summer long with that thing.

We brought them home April 24th, and on April 25th, we went digging.

And just for context, when we started in 2020, we had 10 dugouts and 2 free-flowing, spring-fed water spots. That’s all that we had and that’s all that we needed. Everything was utilized well, and those water spots were working for the cattle footprint we had.

So, while we were learning how to run the excavator and trying to dig holes, we were also building solar water systems from scratch. And everything about all of this was complete trial and error. The month of July felt like the longest three years of our lives. Every day felt like we were in a furnace. Every day was hot. Water was drying up.

We had the wildest symptoms in almost every herd of cattle that we had. And then we started to test water, and that’s when our real hell began.

When I talk about symptoms, it was everything Dr. Waldner alluded to in her slides. We had diarrhea, flickering eyes, neurological symptoms, and pneumonia symptoms without pneumonia. We had some cattle walking in circles. Almost every cowherd was really unsettled.

There was a little bit of copper pulling, but this is a really good picture of our black cows. They weren’t slicking off as they were supposed to be. And the calves, that’s where we’ve seen it the most. The calves were not thrifty. They were lively enough, but they just weren’t thrifty.

Here is just a sample of one of the water samples we did. And at this point, I don’t have a tester. This water sample happened to test in the high 19,000s. And we believe at this point that most of our water was already pretty high for TDS and had some sulfate content in it. Especially our dugouts that were ground-fed, because of the mineral content coming out of the ground.

A lot of our cattle were already sort of accustomed to a higher level of bad water. We had also bought a herd of cows in 2021 that weren’t accustomed, and those were the ones that we’ve seen it the most in.

When you see a water test like this, it doesn’t really warm your heart all that much. And the key to all of this, we learned, not just following our gut with how our cows are feeling, but taking a look and assessing the water, like, around the water. Are we seeing wildlife tracks? Are we seeing any wildlife at all? Because wildlife is way smarter than our cows are, and wildlife won’t drink out of bad water. If you’re not seeing rabbit tracks, even, deer or anything, that water is bad before you’ve even tested it.

So, this became my life, and I’ve since upgraded my water sampling tool to a hockey stick with a big water jug tied to the end of it, or taped to it, and so I can get a long ways out into the water and get a good sample without worrying about falling in.

And in this slide in particular, I’ve got to give a huge thanks to the Ministry of Ag Staff in Moose Jaw, and especially Catherine Siedle. She delivered more bad news to me. Like, she probably doesn’t even realize how I was when I would get into the truck and try and drive home after getting another bad water test, especially when we were getting them from, like, 7,500 to 15 thousands, and you just drive home wondering what next? Like, what do we do now? Is there another plan? So anyways it was quite an experience. As much bad news as she delivered me, she also helped me problem-solve through a lot of the things, so I have to thank them for that.

So now we have a water tester, and we got it a little bit after that, and I did buy… this is very similar to the one I have, and I did buy it on Amazon. They’re like $35. And this year, I took mine in to the Ag Knowledge Center in Moose Jaw, and the Ministry of Agriculture calibrated it for me, and then I have solutions at home, so I just keep it calibrated. This is essential.

Now, we take salt out, we take mineral out, and we test the water. That’s just what we do all the time.

This is south of our yard, and this is the pasture that had the bad 19,000 test. And we had extreme panic with this group. And I remember the day that I checked these cows vividly, I was driving down the road, dusty as hell, wind blowing, and there was diarrhea everywhere. And I was like why would the cows be this loose? Because the grass is dry, there’s nothing in it, there’s no explanation for the cows to be this loose.

And it was the water. We had to get fresh water into them fast. It was 30 degrees. It was a furnace. Their closest water was poison. Their best water was a 2-mile walk into our yard to water bowls. And it was hot and stressful.

We got the excavator in, and we started digging out where an old Pioneer Homestead pump was attached, and Jason had always known that there was water there. There’s always a pool of water there.

We dug out the side of the hill until the water was flowing, and then we couldn’t keep the hill back, like, there was so much water coming in that the hill kept slopping in. We dug it out 3 times. It took over 150 man-hours to try and get this set up. We went through 3-foot valves buried in the water, attached to the hose, because every time that it collapsed, it

buried everything in water. Finally, we spent 2 or 3 days, and we just dug it straight out, and our biggest worry was losing the clean water that we had, because the cows were trying to drink or slurp out of it.

We lost a set of panels in there because we were trying to tie a football to panels. We set an old steel bin in there, a 1300 bushel bin. The hill sloughed in, collapsed the bin. Finally, we dug it all straight out. And waited for 3 days, it filled, and the water was good.

But the price tag on that, I mean, nothing died from that, but, it was pretty crazy. So that wind generator is a 600-watt, turbine wind generator. Our solar panels are 400-watt solar panels. And then we have between 4 and 6 or 8 batteries at each location. But the key thing you’ll see in all of my photos of our water setups is the gas generators.

The thing that we learned right away, especially on this set of cows, was some cows just have a taste for bad water. They’re stupid, and you can’t help them sometimes. This particular cow, calved by a poisonous… that poisonous slough, her condition deteriorated every single day, her calf went backwards, and eventually died. We pushed her to good water, we called the calf to good water, and she kept going back, day after day after day. And some people watching this will be like, well, why didn’t you fence it out? Well, this particular slough was, 45 acres, I think. And so, it’s not very easy to go and fence that out, especially when you have so many other catastrophes happening at the same time. And we have to remember, through all these years of drought, it’s easy right now because the price of cattle is high. But cattle weren’t worth very much then.

And so, resources were fragile, to say the least. So, to hire someone and just say, go fence over there, that wasn’t very realistic for us, especially since we were… we had been written off and had to buy feed.

So, it’s not an easy task to just start going and fencing out some of these water bodies. The best case scenario actually came in 2022, when that was dry. And if they would have all dried up, we wouldn’t have had hardly any problems, to be honest.

Our water systems of 2021, this is how we spent most of our days. We were thinking about better ways to build them, and how to pump further when we had elevation involved. How to maintain power, how to mitigate power failures, and then the water failure. Running around and purchasing the supplies to build more systems, monitor and manage systems that are already running, monitor grass availability versus good water, and determine how far we can possibly pump water

For the good grass, because inevitably, you run out of grass where your water is, and it seemed like the two were never together. And then hauling water where the systems failed or the systems were being developed, and could we even get water hauled in? You saw our water truck.

Some of these places literally are the back 40, so it’s not very easy to get water hauled into there, and we were hauling, in 2021, every day, we were hauling to at least 3 sets of cows.

And then, most importantly, keeping the gas generators full of gas, as they wrote a critical backup. And two spots. We were, like, going out at midnight and making sure that the gas generators were full, just so that we could have enough charge into the battery systems. And then we would repeat everything the next day. Plus, check all the cows, take more mineral out, and basically rocking in the fetal position for a lot of it.

Our biggest enemy from 2021 for managing the solar systems with the heavy smoke from the forest fires. And it felt like we were in a furnace, and the wind was blowing.

But the low spots we were trying to get the water out of didn’t allow for great wind generation all of the time, and sometimes none of the time at all. Gas-powered generators were critical. We also know that the heavy smoke was probably shielding us from the sun. There were lots of days we wondered how hot could it have actually been without that forest fire smoke in there. But it really was the number one hindrance to our solar power.

Again, 2021, here is what our soil moisture looked like. And here is a drought map. And then we flip to 2022, and we are living in more of the same. It just didn’t want to let up.

In 2022, these two pictures were both taken at our Parkbeg place.

And, by July 31st, the slough in the first picture was bone dry.

So, 2023. I think most of us remember that winter. I have PTSD from that winter. And we have snow. And I have to say, like, these calves… this is a picture of calves on feed.

I skipped through it pretty quick, but our weaning weights, 2021, we lost another 100 pounds off of our weaning weights. And then in 2022, we lost another 45 or 50 pounds. So that’s… when you’re weaning 550 or 600 pound May born calves, and then you start to lose 150, 200 pounds, that hurts your bottom line a lot.

So 2023, we have record snow. We go into the spring and we are calving on snow, which is fine, and then we get nailed by a snowstorm, and that wasn’t a lot of fun. But it was moisture. And all of our dugouts filled.

Some way past capacity, so now we have to figure out how to contain that extra water, because now we’ve become water misers, and we don’t want to see any water run away that we can capture and use for good. Especially when it’s filled like this, because we know it’s fresh.

So, in 2023, we’re making big plans, because we’ve had all the snow, everything has started good, the dugouts are full. And we’re pretty excited that things are going to be awesome.

And then the grasshopper apocalypse of 2023 comes. And we can’t win for losing. All the tame grass was gone, side hills are bare, tops of hills are bare, we had water.

In all of our dugouts, and it was fresh, like I said, and there was grass in the coolies, we figured out that if there was heavy grass, like in a coolie, or a heavy, heavy hay stand, the grasshoppers didn’t like that, and they wouldn’t move into that. But everywhere else was gone. Native grass, tops of hills, bare. Roads looked like they were moving when… especially when guys would be spraying, and it would push grasshoppers off, the road would just come alive. It was absolutely the most ridiculous thing we have ever seen.

And this was my saying that I was really trying to live by, but at this point, every decision you made today was wrong tomorrow, and so I was trying really hard to stay chipper, but some accuse me at our house of not being very chipper.

We did have good water samples, like I said. All of the dugouts filled fresh.

But… The cows still did not look awesome. And… we knew… Something was off in them. They slicked off, not bad. But the grasshopper’s taking off the grass, like Dr. Waldner said, everything goes together, the feed goes with the water, it is all puzzle pieces that have to fit together. And in the end of August 2023, Dr. Penner brought his beef sciences class out for a Southern Saskatchewan tour. He asked if he could come see us, and we’d been talking about the sulfate water problems that we were having, so I took him out to see some 3-year-olds that had calved, and we were pretty proud… we were happy with how they looked, and I think we had only had, like… well, when I say only, we were only about 10 or 15% open on them, which, considering what they had gone through.

We were pretty happy with, because we had been hearing horror stories of worse. And so we’re staying on top of a hill, and there’s cows laying everywhere, and there’s bulls laying, and it was hot, and I said, if you look out here, like, all these cows are content, the water is good, there’s mineral, there’s salt, they’re not really going through a bunch of it, and we’re not seeing a lot of activity, so we’re pretty convinced that the bulls had covered everything off, and one thing that Jason’s really proud of is, like, the bull power. We’re proud of the bulls we put out, and the way that we get our cows covered, and we probably have more bulls than we need to, but it’s just the added insurance that we like to have.

And Dr. Penner says, I’ll never forget him saying this. I don’t want to burst your balloon, but do you think you’re not seeing any bulls breeding cows out here because the cows just aren’t cycling.

I was speechless and flabbergasted. Where would that even come from?

Why would you even say that? And I… it kind of took me aback, and then all of a sudden, a bull… I could see in the distance, a bull covered a cow, and I was like, well, no, because look, see? Over there? Oh, yeah, yeah.

And then we kind of left it alone, and that night, I didn’t sleep very well at all. The next day, I went out and I checked cows, and I saw a bull covering a cow, so I was like, no, it… it’s fine. Everything’s fine.

Well, everything was not fine. We preg checked a small group of 100 cows that fall and our open rate, I won’t say, but it was high. Higher than we had ever seen.

And it turned out that what Dr. Penner had said was absolutely true. We had realized, even in 2022, we had 6-year-old home-raised cows that had never calved on green grass, and that’s… our philosophy is kind of to run with Mother Nature. Happy grass, happy cows. We calve on green grass. We hadn’t had green grass since 2017, to have on.

And so, when we preg checked that group of cows and that open rate was that high, we were like, okay.

We’ve got 250 days to think about this till calving starts. We kind of know what we’re in for. And it turned out we had quite a high open rate across the board.

From high sulfate water. From nothing in the grass. From 7 years of drought conditions, from all of the stress, from cows going into survival mode and looking after themselves first. And the worst of that situation was vets didn’t know what to tell us. We had asked 3 or 4 different vets what we should be doing.

And the general consensus was, well, they’re open, sell them. And we sold a small group of them, but the rest of them we kept.

And, happy to say last year’s calving was off the charts phenomenal. Probably one of the best we’ve had historically. We did take a big risk. We bet the ranch on keeping those cows. And it paid off this year, thank goodness.

So, 2025, we slept all winter believing that we would have no water worries due to all of the snowpack again, and we were fooled by a slow snow… a slow melt and no frost in the ground, so we had, like, snow bank over snow bank, 5 feet of snow in some places were blown up.

And when it melted, it just went straight into the ground. None of our dugouts filled and we were right back to water worries,

I just put this slide up here to kind of show, like I said earlier, we take salt out, we take minerals out, chelated minerals. And we test the water, and it’s such a routine that when we get to a dugout, before we’ll come over a hill and we’ll see the dugout banks, and often we have our 3-year-old grandson with us, he’s reaching into the glove box for the water tester, because he knows that’s just what we do.

I always measure the water, or do a test on the water when we move cows into a field. And then every, like, every time I go back, I test the water, but I don’t record it. Anyways, the one I wanted to show you was over to the bottom, says Wildlife New Dugout at 13,075.

And what’s interesting about that is, obviously, it tested off of my tester, and I had to take it in to get the official test. But we tested 4 that day. One within a quarter mile to the west of that dugout tested off of my monitor. We didn’t pull a water sample, but it wouldn’t show up on my water tester.

We moved a herd of cows. We were supposed to move cows onto that, but obviously we couldn’t because that was the only water source there, so we chose the field beside them and screwed up our grazing footprint.

We were walking them past. A dugout that was two-thirds full that we were really hoping was going to be good. And the first 45 cows looked at it and kept walking. It was the most bizarre thing.

Then 3 stopped and jumped back out. There was another dugout two hills away, I don’t know how far away it was, and it was only a third full, and we were like, oh, we sure hope that one that’s got lots of water in it is good. It was not. It tested at 8,700 that day.

Those cows just knew, like I said, they were stupid, and some have a taste for bad water, but most of them just knew to walk by it. And again, no wildlife tracks at that bad dugout. So, again, this is all summer long. I keep this. This is only just a small snapshot of all of our dugouts.

I said we started with 10. We’re at 32 dugouts now. Through all the years since 2021, we’ve kept digging dugouts. Our grazing plan is built around water first. We’ve intentionally developed dugouts in every corner of our grazing system so cattle are never far from clean, reliable water.

We’re up to 32 now, and the success in them filling, both from runoff and underground filling, comes from… comes down to my husband’s ability to read and judge the natural runoff. And his uncanny witching ability, which is crazy. This is the beginning of a dugout build in a calving field, May 3rd of 2025. And this is the same dugout, and it’s still filling from groundwater.

And these pictures are from May 17th on the left, and then May 25th on the right, and it was testing about 2,700, and we find anything that’s filling with groundwater tests a little bit, like, in those mid-2000s to almost 3000s because of the mineral content from the groundwater source.

And then this is the same dugout on February 6th, and it is full.

This is another dugout that was done in the fall of 2024 on a quarter of native grass, and it was one of those ones with, like, little shallow wet spots that, in a regular year, you’d be able to use. We dug this in 2024. It did not fill.

And so we couldn’t use it last year, that’s why there’s so much grass in it. Typically, before the dugout, we were hauling water, and, like, even this quarter will hold 15 pairs comfortably, but watering cows is not fun. I don’t care who you are. If you have to do this, and it’s just a part of your life, I’m sorry for you. It’s not fun, and it’s not something that we choose to do, so that’s why we chose not to use this this year.

The other day, February 15th, this dugout was full. From just the melt and the runoff already from this winter.

And here is another one, and it is full. So, all… most of our dugouts look like this already, the ones that we can get to. Our concern now is when the frost goes out of the ground, what are they going to look like in a few months?

But even if they settle, like, even to half full, we know they’re all good water, they’re all fresh, so we’re starting on better footing than we were last year.

So, and just for fun, I saw this the other day from Just Bins, they’re… they’re kind of a fun thing that we watch. But the Pallister Triangle of Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan has zero snow in the middle of February.

I’m in a blizzard right now in Regina, Saskatchewan, so it is kind of funny right now, because we did get a little bit of snow, but this is concerning, that this is what the Pallister Triangle looks like right now.

So here’s my last slide. At our place, this is everybody’s favorite spot to go to. There’s a spring that runs out of the side of the coolie, you can’t see it, it’s up a hill. In the wintertime, it’s a glacier ice field because it never stops running.

But in 2021, it looked like this. And it’s inside a half section of theme, a native grass attached to another half section of native grass, which was just in despair, but this little spot was paradise. And we would go here, and we would think about things. We always put our mineral and salt out here for these cows.

But at least there was a little piece of paradise for us, and it’s really what we hope. When it starts raining again, things will look like.

Kristin Thompson

01:08:38

Thank you, Karla, for that presentation.

We are going move into the Q&A session. We’ve got a few minutes that we can answer some questions. So, Karla and, Cheryl, if you’re able to turn your audio and video on, we’ll start answering some of these questions.

The first one that we’ve got is, has any research been done on the best way to clean water troughs for cattle? For example, using bleach, apple cider vinegar, snails, fish, any thoughts on the best way to clean water troughs?

Cheryl Waldner

01:09:18

I’m not aware of any specific research, just personal experience with a scrub brush. Folks that I’ve talked to over the years just try to get as much of the debris out as possible, and then bleach pretty much always works. It’s a nuisance to work with, but it pretty much always works. But there’s certainly… I certainly have seen producers talk about using apple cider vinegar. I haven’t seen anything on snails, although it seems feasible that it has worked, and crazily enough, I did actually see someone talking about goldfish from the States. Now, I don’t know how well they do in Canada, or how effective they actually are, but

But yeah, getting the worst of the debris off, and then the appropriate concentrations of bleach, which, of course, I cannot remember off the top of my head. And then letting it dry as best you can, and sunshine, before refilling it, seems to work the best, and then trying just not to let it get too bad in the first place. Once it’s bad, it’s a lot harder to… to get clean.

Karla Hicks

01:10:54

So we use goldfish. But when you have a power failure, and then a water failure, and your trough goes dry, it’s kind of a sad day for the goldfish, but when the troughs are full, goldfish work really, really well.

Kristin Thompson

01:11:14

Interesting.

We’ve got another question here concerning mineral deficiencies and toxicities, and that they were always concerned with, copper deficiency as well as sulfates when grazing crops such as canola. But then they ended up having a iodine deficiency, which caused issues with their cattle and some deaths. So, Cheryl, you hadn’t touched on iodine deficiency, but I’m wondering if you had any comments that you could add.

Cheryl Waldner

01:11:50

Thank you for bringing the issue of iodine deficiency up. It is a very important one. It hasn’t so much been linked to issues in water, but the one comment that I did see that Kristin didn’t mention in question was the reference to feeding canola. And there are a number of feeds that we have that have fairly substantial amounts of glucosinolates in them. Basically, they’re chemicals that tie up the iodine in terms of the ability of the thyroid gland to absorb it and just make things a little bit more difficult for the cattle, and as such, they require maybe a little bit more iodine than they might otherwise.

This is not an area where I have a lot of expertise, so I would be reluctant to make specific recommendations, but the idea of other trace minerals being tied up by things in feed, or even potentially in water, beyond what we’ve talked about tonight is very real. And, yes, thank you for bringing that one up.

Kristin Thompson

01:13:06

Thanks for that answer, Cheryl. The next one is, are there financial or consulting resources available for ranchers who may need to invest in more infrastructure, such as pumps and watering systems? I might ask you, Carla, to answer that one first.

Karla Hicks

01:13:23

I had that in my notes, and I forgot to bring it up. In Saskatchewan, the Farm and Ranch Water Infrastructure Program has been key and I can’t say that loud enough, key in our ability to dig all these dugouts and build all the solar systems, or if you’re purchasing solar systems, there’s a wide range of programs, a vast range of programs. They’re available, at a 50% cost share.

So, Saskatchewan’s really lucky with that. I’m not sure about other jurisdictions, but, if you talk to your extension people, they can let you know.

Kristin Thompson

01:14:01

Thank you.

Our next question is on blue-green algae, and I’m just wondering if you could just touch a bit more on that, Cheryl, and kind of what to watch for, and potential treatments and how to deal with a dugout that you are treating, given that you can have a higher, level of toxins after treatment.

Cheryl Waldner

01:14:27

One of the specific comments in that question that I think was key was the fact that the primary water source had temporarily become unavailable. And the cows had found an alternative water source. And on some of the pastures that we use, I know it’s very hard to almost impossible to monitor all of the water, or to manage all of the water sources all of the time, because there can be a lot of little potholes that they’re getting into and drinking out of. And just being aware that some of these little potholes or, you know culverts or other places where water can accumulate, that we can end up with blue-green algae, not just in our primary water sources, but in a lot of these little side sources as well, and that that can become a problem for a specific group of animals.

The most effective tool in terms of dealing with blue-green algae in the short term is if there’s some way you can keep the cattle out of there. Is there some way to… to put up some temporary fencing? Is there some way to move them to a different pasture, while you look at ways to treat and manage the problem?

It’s not necessarily going to be an ongoing problem, but trying to find ways to keep the cattle out of the problem source once you identify it to prevent further deaths is… is… and… and provide an alternate source of water is key.

This was a really good point to bring forward, because we sometimes get surprised because it’s not the main water source that’s the problem, it’s the one that we’re not thinking of, or one that’s hiding that we’re maybe not quite as aware of, that they insist on drinking out of, and getting into trouble.

Kristin Thompson

01:16:21

Thank you for that answer.

To combat, or to help combat copper deficiency, has there been any research done on increasing the copper content in annual forages by using a foliar copper product?

Cheryl Waldner

01:16:40

Karla, have you seen anything on that at all? I’m not aware of any research in and around our area. I’m not saying that I haven’t missed some, but I’m not aware of any, but I have seen some extension materials, particularly from the U.S, that suggests that it can work. What the cost effectiveness of it is relative to just supplementing the cows directly, that would be the question that I would have. It might be a little bit easier to manage just trying to get it into the cows directly, but I do not know the answer to that.

Kristin Thompson

01:17:20

Thank you for that.

On a dry year, how often would you recommend sampling surface water sources, and should groundwater or well sources be sampled on the same schedule? I’ll maybe turn that one over to you, Karla.

Karla Hicks

01:17:38

So, we now sample every time we’re in the posture. It’s just a part of the routine. I don’t write it down unless there’s been a huge change in the water, but it takes 30 seconds to dip the hockey stick in the water, pull the water. It takes another 30 seconds to read the tester. You have to watch your cattle, you have to follow your gut.

For me, I never want to feel like we’re out of control, and testing the water is one of the small… the fewest things that I can control out there.

Kristin Thompson

01:18:42

Another question for you, Karla. So, what is your long-term plan to make your drought, or your ranch drought-proof, to further enhance what you’ve already done on your operation?

Karla Hicks

01:18:54

So, we’re still digging dugouts. We’ve got 7 or 8 more dugouts planned.

Unfortunately, this is in the one part of where most of our pastures are, underground water is not a thing. They’re, like, it’s just known for not many wells or anything like that. So, the next thing is really improving on our water systems after that to get the cattle moved out of the dugouts, and really be able to utilize our footprints better that way.

Fencing out riparian areas and stuff is fine, but we’re in rolling hills. We could never fence… when it starts raining, we could never fence all that out.

If I go back to 2021, the best case scenario for us would have been waking up one day in June and everything was dry.

We wouldn’t have had as big of a wreck that way, because in 2022, it kind of leveled off when the water was gone.

Kristin Thompson

01:19:57

I think that provided some good insights there.

Question for you, Cheryl. If you needle cows at branding with multi-min, do you know how long it will raise copper levels in deficient cows?

Cheryl Waldner

01:20:11

I’m not sure we have really good data on that for our area. What the company talks about is the injection starting to improve levels within, sort of, 8 to 10 hours that you can start to see some measurable improvement, and that they expect it to last in terms of enhancing liver storage levels for 2 to 3 months. But I suspect that that would be impacted depending on what sort of sulfates the cows are ingesting, what sort of molybdenum the cows are ingesting, and what other sources of copper that they’re ingesting. But that’s the numbers that come back from the company is 2 to 3 months, but whether that was in copper-deficient specific animals or not, and what else they were faced with.

Kristin Thompson

01:21:07

Thank you.

Karla, do you use mineral blocks or loose mineral in tubs on pasture? And if you could comment on the brand that you use?

Karla Hicks

01:21:18

So, we have been using, loose mineral from Master feeds, trying to think of the breeder’s choice. And that has been really, really good.

Also, we were using Sweet Pro blocks with our yearlings. That are a chelated mineral, and that was working really well. And then, like, at the start, at the onset of 2021, when we were, like, we spent thousands on mineral. And we were scared that the cows were not eating it like they should, and actually, in the beginning, it was such a panicky situation in two groups of cows that I would go around and I’d dump mineral in tubs.

And then mix some loose salt in, because we just wanted them consuming it. After that, we were able to kind of settle it back to putting it out on a Monday with this group, you go back the following Monday. That was after a few months.

But I’m not going to lie, when you’re in the middle of a firestorm. If they were out of mineral, we were refilling mineral. They didn’t go without. So, Master Feeds Breeder’s Choice, it was 100% chelated mineral. And then, for a while, everybody was onto the chelated mineral thing, and it was hard to find, and I was running between Moose Jaw and Swift Current, just trying to find mineral. Which added to the complexity of it.

Kristin Thompson

01:22:51

Thank you.

A question on, are there any practical treatments for lowering total dissolved solids or sulfates in a water source, or would hauling in be the best option for those sources?

If either one of you wants to answer that one…

Karla Hicks

01:23:10

From our experience we did have the option, like, when we were testing into the 6 and 7000s, we could have probably poured fresh water in and diluted it a little bit, especially if we had a water tank and had things set up with our water system. You could mix it out a little bit that way. But, your best bet is probably to haul water.

Getting the cows out of the water, though, is really key.

Cheryl Waldner

01:23:45

Yeah, I would agree with Karla on that. I would just add that there is a bunch of research going on at the University of Saskatchewan looking at practical methods to actually try to treat dugouts, rather than just replacing the… replacing the water source, actually looking at how to treat dugouts for high sulfates. So hopefully there’ll be some answers coming within a couple of years. I don’t know that for a fact, but I know that people are taking this seriously and looking at, you know, how can… how can we actually do this in field situations? So there are folks that are from engineering and chemistry and so forth, that are actually, actually looking at this because of the prevalence of the problem, just how widespread this is.

Karla Hicks

01:24:32

I will mention, too, it was brought to my attention that we could have done a reverse osmosis treatment on some water, but, we just… we didn’t even know where to pick, where to start, but that is an option as well, and there’s funding available for that.

Cheryl Waldner

01:24:49

Yeah. Trying to do that at scale and power it’s just hard. It’s possible, but it gets tough trying to do that at scale for that many…

Kristin Thompson

01:25:03

Are there recommendations, or would you recommend a prophylactic treatment for cattle using any of the drench or injectable forms of copper?

Cheryl Waldner

01:25:21

I’m not quite sure what the prophylactic treatment would be, or what the concern is there, and I apologize, I’m probably missing something really obvious. I don’t have a lot of experience with the drench. We have done a study looking at the injectable. Unfortunately, it was in cows that weren’t as deficient as they kind of could be.

To have a really good chance to look at the injectable and see how well it works, but we didn’t have any problems. Like, there was no issues or side effects or unexpected reactions in those cows where we were using the injectable. The only concern that I’ve ever heard with any of these treatments is very occasionally in some areas, like, for example, in Saskatchewan, we have moderate to higher levels of selenium, and the injection includes not just copper, but it also includes selenium and zinc and manganese. And, in cows that are… or cattle, or younger cattle especially, that are higher in selenium, but very low in copper.

The multi-pronged injection might be something that you want to discuss seriously with your veterinarian before you use it to make sure that you don’t get into a situation of selenium toxicity. So, in terms of areas for concern with these, that would, you know, just thinking about these, these multi-package, therapies, do the cows actually need all parts of the package? And we don’t want to ever put our cattle into the position of risking toxicity with some of these.

So, I’m pretty sure I did not answer the question, and I apologize if the person wants to type in or clarify what they were looking for a little bit. I can certainly try again offline.

Kristin Thompson

01:27:29

Thank you for that, Cheryl.

Next question is, when feeding free choice mineral on pasture, does mixing salt in and not providing any other salt source help with consistent intake, or is there something else that helps to get cows to consume the mineral?

Karla Hicks

01:27:53

The salt does draw them in, and it makes them consume more. The problem when they’re on high sulfate water is they’re thirsty, and everything goes straight through them. Our experience was you had to get them consuming it. And you had to get them on good water to get it leveled off.

We also are using chelated mineral and we’re pushing the boundaries between good and bad water.

Although I saw Dr. Penner’s presentation at the Saskatchewan Beef Industry Conference saying chelated mineral did not have any effect on catalysts in high sulfate water. But we’re hoping that it’s offsetting it to some degree, especially when you start talking about the copper tie-ups. We also put a trace mineral salt block out. The dark brown ones. And it actually is higher in selenium as well. So, we’re kind of watching that a little bit, but we have salt blocks out, and our loose mineral.

One thing I’ll say, we have some water this year that tested between 240 and 380. And, we had 180 cows on it, and in 15 days, they went through 12 blocks of salt, because that water was so pure and there was nothing in it. And so, like, again, through now 8 or 9 years of this craziness, the things we’re seeing and learning, we don’t know anything. We don’t know what we thought we knew.

Back to the original question, we do add a little bit of salt, but once we get them leveled off, we take the salt out, and the cows seem to still consume the mineral.

Cheryl Waldner

01:29:44

The one thing I would add is, I know there’s a couple of places in Saskatchewan, and maybe it’s just differences in the composition of the water, where cows have backed white off of salty mineral because of the salt in the water. And it might just be the specifics of what’s in there.

So, in some areas, what they’ve had to do is go to, hand-mixing molasses in to get the cows to eat it in the face of high salt water.

In terms of not being cautious about not having different types of salt out, going back to the thyroid question and reference to, you know, potential goiter problems earlier. We always want to make sure that the cows have access to blue iodized salt, that they’ve got the cobalt iodized salt, that there’s… it’s mixed in something, or it’s there by itself.

That we don’t accidentally end up with inadequate thyroid… inadequate iodine going into our cows and end up with… with goiter or iodine deficiency. So, just a little caution there. Most commercial salt products are going to have it in it. It’s not going to be a big problem, but I certainly have seen people that somehow… that it’s fallen through the cracks, and then they’ve ended up with calves with goiter, even when they don’t have those goitrogens that and glucosinolates that I was talking about in the feed.

Karla Hicks

01:31:27

Can I put a quick question in, then? Dr. Waldner, do you recommend, then, like, we have trace mineral salt blocks out? Should we also have blue salt blocks out?

Cheryl Waldner

01:31:38

Most of the trace mineral salt blocks, Karla, do have, if you read the label, they do have… that’s what we use, and most of them do have very adequate levels of iodine.

Karla Hicks

01:31:48

You scared me. I think most of this is trial by error, right? Like, and what works at my house might not work somewhere else. Probably won’t work somewhere else. Everybody has to just follow their gut.

Kristin Thompson

01:32:01

A question for you, Karla. Was drilling a well versus digging dugouts a consideration?

Karla Hicks

01:32:09

Yes. But we have some areas in our pastures where there is no ground water. We had some neighbors that were trying to drill wells, and they couldn’t find any underground water. And my husband can witch.

For some reason, we’re just known to not have very much underground water there. And those dugouts that we dug in those locations are only snow-fed. They’re only runoff-fed.

At our place, our well is 380 feet in the ground, so that’s simple. We know there’s lots of water there, we can dig a well there, and our further north place, we know that there’s groundwater there, so we could dig there, but just at our south place, where most of our cows are grazed, it’s not an option there.

Kristin Thompson

01:32:59

Great, thank you.

Is there any concern about depleting your groundwater sources in your area, Karla?

Karla Hicks

01:33:09

Our water table dropped in the last few years. Especially at our North Place, we watch that. But… I don’t think that’s a concern right now.

Kristin Thompson

01:33:25

Question for you, Cheryl. I’m just wondering if you can explain what a chelated mineral is.

I think Cheryl is having technology difficulties. So, maybe you could comment on that, Karla, on a chelated trace mineral.

Karla Hicks

01:33:56

Well, I probably should know this off the top of my head. The chelated trace mineral is the organic mineral in its whole form. I believe, not processed. There’s Dr. Waldner.

Cheryl Waldner

01:34:17

My apologies, my computer’s had a bit of a mind of its own here last week, and apparently it decided to become demon-possessed.

I don’t have the proper definition in front of me because I was fighting with my computer instead of checking things out. But the bottom line is what we’re looking at is attaching something to the mineral, an amino acid or a protein to the mineral that protects the mineral from being bound in the rumen and allows it to be absorbed more effectively and efficiently.

And there’s different complexities, and I do have a really good answer to this on a slide that I can’t get to right now, because I don’t deal with this every day. But the bottom line is we’re paying for a more complex product that is protected against binding from sulfates, binding from molybdenum, and hopefully will get us to a point where it can be more effectively absorbed.

Now, again, as Karla mentioned, there’s some conflicting evidence on how well that works. There certainly is evidence in the literature that chelated minerals do help when we’re dealing with high levels of molybdenum, and I would say there’s conflicting evidence on the subject of sulfates. I can’t say for sure that they’re going to fix the sulfate problem or not fix the sulfate problem, because depending on which paper you look at, I’ve seen both.

It does seem to be, at least supportive, more of when we’re dealing with molybdenum challenges. And if we’re just dealing with primary copper deficiency. Where we’re just short on copper, and we’re not trying to fight absorption problems, then, just regular inorganic copper or copper sulfate should work just fine. But, keeping in mind that we’re still battling inconsistent intakes if we’re feeding it free choice, and if we can find some way to work it into the ration, we should, we should be able to get those, those levels up just without paying the extra.

Kristin Thompson

01:37:03

So we’re getting short on time here, but I’d like to ask just a couple more questions,

So, in your presentation, Cheryl, you had talked about nitrates, sulfates, in the concern with… in water sources in Western Canada. I’m wondering if you would be able to comment on whether these are a concern facing producers in eastern Canada as well.

Cheryl Waldner

01:37:30

I don’t think the situation with nitrates is going to be a whole lot different. It’s the same risk factors, and anytime you’re dealing with the potential for runoff, you’ve got the potential for nitrate problems.

I suspect, based on some of the work I’ve done with some producers, at least in Ontario, I’m less familiar with Quebec and the Maritimes, although we’ve got some data now that I’ve got to analyze again. That it’s probably less of a problem, and the reason I say that is because the copper levels that we see in the cows there tend to be better than they are in Western Canada.

So, I don’t know for sure that it’s less of a problem, but it’s not something, when I have done presentations specifically for producer groups in Ontario, that has the same level of concern from either the Extension folks or the producers that I’ve talked to.

Kristin Thompson

01:38:37

Thank you.

And one final question for you, Karla. You talked about, when you’re talking about your watering systems, you had mentioned, working with elevation and using that as a tool when setting up your systems. And I’m wondering if you could just provide a bit of an explanation on how you can use elevation when you are setting up a system.

Karla Hicks

01:38:59

So, we’re in rolling hills, so if we can use the elevation to help push it further. That has been helpful in a couple instances. Probably more challenging for us, though, is often we have to push out of a low spot, and so some of my pictures, I have those great big 700 gallon pressure tanks, or 1,000 gallon pressure tanks, and there’s big pumps on them, a couple of gas generators. And so, once you get the push out of the low spot, often the hill goes down on the other side, and we can use the elevation that way, and get the water siphoning through.

It’s been a double-edged sword, having elevation. Work for you and work against you.

Kristin Thompson

01:39:50

No, that’s great, thank you for that.

We’re going to close out the Q&A session now. If your questions weren’t answered, I would encourage you to reach out to your veterinarian, nutritionist, local extension agent, provincial producer organization, or reach out to us on social media.

Thank you again to our incredible speakers, and thank you all for spending your evening with us. We hope that you were able to gain some valuable information that you can bring back to your own operation.

This was the second webinar of our 2026 series. Our next one will be taking place in March, or we will have two in March, on the 18th and the 25th.

There will be a post-webinar survey link once this webinar is over, and we do appreciate any and all feedback on the webinar, as well as for potential future topics as we plan for the next webinar series in 2027.

Again, thank you, everyone, and have a good rest of your evening.