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Writer's pictureJ. A. Thomas

Water Quality: Gold Fish vs Copper

Water quality is a factor to healthy animals of any kind and cattle are no exception. They need good quality water to drink. Right now there is quite the rage to use copper in water troughs to mitigate the algae growth in them. We are conducting a test to see whether it does better than our gold fish or not.

Gold fish are an old time anomaly on some farms and they tell of fish that are old in terms of decades in their troughs. Well we decided to experiment in our troughs with gold fish a year or so ago and cleaned out our troughs and put them in. To date I can't see any improvement regarding the algae aspect in those troughs, I have noticed a complete removal of any insect life in the trough where the goldfish are. Before we had mosquito larvae as well as both small and LARGE water bugs. Large as in the size of quarters. They were quite impressive and I don't recall seeing them as a kid around here either. Given that our detest for mosquitos is so large I would consider the goldfish a success.


Now we are trying the copper in some troughs and will update as it progresses. We sourced old wire pieces from a construction site for free. The theory as it goes is that copper somehow has anti algae aspects to it. We put a decent amount in but the trough continually getting new water does make me wonder how it will work out. Look back here to see any updates we do.


Although the water quality on neither is pristine there are benefits from both. The water clarity with copper you can see al the way through to the bottom but it also clearly shows the algae growing on the sides and bottom of the trough. The top picture you can see the top has lots of growth of algae but the win is not bugs (mosquitos) hatching from it.

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