OK, I’ll admit it, I’m pretty cheap sometimes.
It comes in handy when you’ve chosen an extremely lucrative profession like farming.
But sometimes frugality leads me astray. The first iterations of our chicken waterers were built with some very nice poultry nipple waterers from QC Supply. They’re fantastic and they’re $1.95 each. When it came time to buy more I fell prey to the smoking deal on Amazon/Ebay/wherever for the type of nipple pictured above. They’re quite a deal at $0.05 each. Or are they? I thought they’d be a step-up because they can be disassembled for cleaning.
Little did I know that they’d require dissasembly and cleaning at least four times per season. So take that five cents and tack on the cost of slowed poultry growth when the nipples clog, a ruined pocketknife from prying out the little plungers and several hours of labor per year.
Those QC supply nipples are looking better all the time. They’ve never once clogged or given me any trouble in the 2.5 years I’ve been using them.
Frugality is good. Cheapness gets you in trouble.