Iron water

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33065, 4 November 1972, Page 14

Iron water

Sir,—lt was illogical and misleading of your contributor to state, in an otherwise excellent context (October 20), that “stock do not like drinking iron water and this will certainly depress production if,” etc. Iron water is not poisonous, stock get used to it, and their production is not affected. In the Auckland province, from 1946 to 1965. I had several times to assess that very contention among groups of farms seeking a rural water supply subsidy, but in no case was a group’s production below normal. What finally clinched it was one group in the Bay of Plenty whose neighbours inside a” borough boundary (Katikati) had good piped mountain water but revealed no advantage in butterfat over the petitioners outside. However, Ruakura, in a spray irrigation trial from a peat bore, found that dairy cows would not eat the resultant dusty, rusted pasture, i.e., their production was actually depressed by irrigation, but this may be the origin of the present myth.—Yours, etc., JAKE MILLER. Maitai Valley (Nelson), October 26, 1972.

[Mr M. Eden, dairy advisory officer of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, replies: “I would like to thank your correspondent for his interest and his information that I did not possess. If iron is present in drinking water

stored in large open-surfaced troughs much of the iron will settle out as rust, so that iron levels would not be excessive. The comments made about production appear quite reasonable. The information that I used as the basis of the article was indeed from Ruakura, where it was found that water containing greater than 10 ppm iron was unpalatable to stock. Excessive iron intake caused scouring, loss of weight and loss of production. However, this information came from the irrigation trial, as mentioned by your correspondent.”]