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south east minnesota | First off, do you have one of those black plastic water tanks? Those are known for growing all sorts of strange things. The black color heats the water and anything that falls off the cows mouths will grow. We always had the galvanized tanks so didn't have SUCH a problem, but we still had the gunk growing.
My grampa put about 4 goldfish in the stock tank. No kidding this actually works. Go down to the WalMart and get you some 10 centers and put in the tank. You'll want to kind of acclimate them first, don't just dump them in. Get some water from the tank and put them in there for a couple days. They will eat the algae and that and be able to keep it down. Not completely gone, you still may need to clean the tank, but we only had to do that like once a year. Just dip the fish out. We had several cows and my horse drinking from that stock tank and the fish did a good job of keeping things fairy clean. The only way to keep it any cleaner would be to put a placostamus ( sp? ) in the tank, like you would in an aquarium. The probly with that is, it'd grow so big that it'd freak out the livestock.
I assume you use a stock tank heater, no need to take the fish out, they'll do fine. However, if you have any cats around the place, I'd put a little length of chicken wire into the tank. We had a cat drown trying to fish.
I'd use the fish long before I'd use anything else. It's always worked.
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Moss/scum growing in livestock water tanks
