Like every other horse owner, one of the most unpleasant tasks was dumping and scrubbing my stock tanks every week, especially during the warm weather months. They were always dirty and I always managed to get soaking wet when bailing the tanks out, bucket by bucket and ending up with lots of it in my boots. If I was fortunate enough to have a tank that had a drain plug, it made a muddy mess right where the horses stood. Then, I had to scrub the sides of the tank, which was generally messy and time-consuming. It was a lose-lose situation. My husband came across a study in England where they were treating ponds, streams and rivers with barley straw. After conducting Internet research and applying what I learned from working in the water treatment industry, we set our sites on finding out how we could make this same technology work in stock tanks. After an intensive search, we finally tracked down the raw materials from an organic farmer here in Nebraska. Then, it took time and trials to determine just the right amount and packaging appropriate for use in stock tanks. Testing on our farm was an interesting ordeal. We set up test tanks all over our property. Every day, we would run around with a little notebook writing down the performance of each test tank. We also used what would become Stock Tank Secret in the tanks my horses were drinking from. I wanted to be sure that our horses would still drink from the tanks and that there were no other effects from its use. After three seasons of testing, we were sure that Stock Tank Secret worked. We then began testing Stock Tank Secret with friends and family who also had livestock. Several of our friends own large farms where there are more than 50 horses and found it worked in large automatic waterers as well. We even had two friends test it in their ornamental fishponds and come back for more – and have given up using chemical treatments altogether I haven’t scrubbed my stock tanks in over four years. Whenever I notice them getting green or about every other month, I toss in a new bag. We thought other horse and livestock owners would like Stock Tank Secret, too.