Waging War on Parasites from Another Front

Despite using rotational grazing to move our cows and goats to a new paddock in the pasture before they eat the grass down to the ground, our animals have suffered from time to time with parasites.  This is often caused by animals grazing too close to the ground.  If your pastures are overgrazed, the animals will pick up parasites.

Rather than automatically giving de-wormer, we've opted to take stool samples from our cows and goats to our veterinarian.  He runs the test, identifies if parasites are present and in which animal(s) and we treat.  We've seen success with this, but the parasites continue to return.  Tricia stopped by a Shaklee dealer that lives down the road and brought home a gallon of Basic H.  We had read in Joel Salatin's book Salad Bar Beef that he uses Basic H as a cattle de-wormer.

Basic H is not labeled as a de-wormer.  The ingredients are proprietary, so we really don't know what's in it.  Stranger still, here are some of its uses: a rust inhibitor, a heavy duty soap/cleaner, mosquito/flea repellent, removes fish or skunk scent, fertilizer for garden, toothpaste, etc.  At $49.99 per gallon, it is pricey stuff, but we figured we'd try it as a de-wormer.  Hopefully, we won't have to try it to remove skunk scent!

The rate for de-worming is said to be 1 cup to 100 gallons and 1/2 cup to 50 gallons of water.  It just so happens we have a 100 gallon trough in the pasture where the cows and goats are and a 50 gallon trough in the pasture where the two bulls are.  Tricia put a cup in the big trough and a half a cup of Basic-H in the smaller one and turned off the water valves.  This allows them to drink the water/Basic H without the valve opening and diluting the Basic-H.  Here is the big trough after the animals drank for two days:

100 Gallon trough

And her is the smaller trough after the bulls drank on it for a day:

50 gallon trough

We also put some in the chicken water trough.  Notice how it made suds.

Turning off the valves and allowing the animals to drink the water level down showed me just how dirty the troughs were.  I used this as an opportunity to scrub down the sides and completely clean the troughs out.  Then we turned the valves back on.

According to Joel Salatin, you can't overdose your animals on Basic-H.  Tricia and I have discussed treating either once a month or every other month.  We'll give it a try and report our results.  We aren't afraid of trying new techniques on our little homestead farm.  Hopefully it will work to "clean the parasites" out of the animals.  I'm already seeing a positive effect - it cleaned up the water troughs!