Hoskins Automatic Waterers and Parts

Hoskins Mfg has been building automatic livestock waterers in Hoskins, Nebraska since 1966. Sixty years, one good idea, and remarkably little about it has needed changing: a stainless steel tank, a 16 gauge galvanized frame insulated around it, and the heating element mounted in the frame rather than against the tank, so warmth reaches the water through the air instead of from one hot patch on the steel.

That last detail is the one owners bring up first. It is also why these tanks stay open in weather that leaves a drop-in heater losing ground to the ice.

The rest is plain good sense. Stainless does not rust out, and a rounded tank brushes clean in a minute. The service doors are big enough to actually work through, and the valve sits in an insulated compartment of its own behind a lift-off cover, so a January repair means lifting a lid rather than draining the unit. Cattle, sheep, horses and hogs, the same honest build in nearly forty sizes, from a 17 in. stall tank up to a ten-foot trough rated for 500 head.

Hoskins says it more plainly than we could: water is your cheapest feed. A waterer that simply keeps running, winter after winter, is the least expensive thing on the place.