If it were red I would guess it to be my daily multi-vitamin tablet.

It's the farm version of "likker"!

I guess every kid who grew up around cattle has either done that or has certainly thought about it....

Those kids will have an immune system more powerful than Superman, because the cows, horses, sheep, and goats all got to that block first!

Looks like a splitting mall, an old washtub
And a little boy wearing his sisters boots licking a salt lick.

I preferred the blue although white or red would do in a pinch.😄

Hmmm. Perhaps that’s why I never catch any of the annual flu bugs that go around. Hope it rings true for the C 19.

An older friend talked a lot of about the "Dirty Thirties" .He said they had livestock salt on the kitchen table, cheaper.
That would have been rock salt.

too funny

The old photo is a bit blurry. That maul makes me wonder if that's a chopping block instead of a washtub. It might have a lip around it, though. I can't tell.

They actually left an unsecured hatchet out?

They actually left an unsecured hatchet out?

I licked a few of those as a kid back in the 1950s.

Llamas will lick holes in them.

Not a hatchet. It's a splitting maul and that tub behind it is what normally the salt or mineral block will sit in. The ones you see today are made from recycled t ires and they are tough as bus station steaks.

We used to knock a chunk off of em. Carry it in our pocket.

Worst I ever did was lick the molasses mill. Only once! 🤣

None...

I screwed with my cousin for a few years. Convinced him they were giant urinal tablets used to train free range cattle to pee in certain spots out on the range. Poor kid amazing he grew up to be so level headed as much as me and my brother f'd with him.

Remember fishing in the creek at the ranch as a boy. We caught a good mess of fish, and fried them up, then realized we had forgot the salt!

Grandad's salt lick was a couple hundred yards away, so I trotted over there and shaved off a handful with my pocket knife.

Problem solved! Sulpher salt, no less.

According to CNN it's an assault hatchet

My wife, raised on a dairy farm in Wi., sure does. I worked on lots of them as a kid..didn`t lick the salt blocks, but sure did get a good line of woodchuck info.Killed them after haying.

I’ve heard of city kids, who after visiting a farm, were appalled that milk came out of a cow and refused to drink milk thereafter.
Good thing they didn’t see where eggs come from.🙄

Yeccchhhh!!!
When I was a kid, we always had salt licks around for the horse and ponies. Never, ever crossed my mind to lick one.

Got de-wormed too.

I remember one year at the fair a company gave out mini-blocks that were about 1" cubes. I thought that they were the neatest thing. I kept mine on the dresser and would give it a lick once in awhile.

City kids don't know what a maul is. I like the assault modifier.

As a kid it was hard to pass a salt block without breaking a chunk of of it for licking later. A lot of kids carried the rabbits salt-sized ones in their pocket

"Brother Dave" Gardner used to have a line on one of his comedy albums about how to tell a city kid from a country kid- - - -"Walk 'em across the cow pasture and look at their shoes when they get to the other side!"

LOL!
Jerry

I will sheepishly admit to spending some time on my knees for a quick lick on occasion. Always looked for what looked to be either not licked or the least licked spot.lol Dad put out the brown mineral blocks in the winter, KayDee was the brand name. They were good also, had some molasses in them. yuuummm He never did buy/put out any of the other colors so don't know what kind of table fare they were. Blue was iodine but not sure on yellow or rust colored.Think there was a magnesium and the yellow may have been sulfur????

Then there was sneaking up and getting your hand under the hen in the nest to catch the nice warm egg that was coming. Shooting nice warm milk fresh from the cow teat into your mouth would probably be considered unhealthy to most by todays standards. Peeing on the electric fence made your balls hurt if they had already dropped down. Many unpleasant 'kid' experiences that made you think things through beforehand which the city kids didn't have or discover.LOL

Was never that poor or ignorant. I once launched 22 LR slug at a block across a drainage, it struck the block near the bottom of one of the licked in depressions, skidded across the bowl, and returned in my direction to strike the bank somewhere over my head. Notice I used the term "once."

A chunk of salt block in one pocket. A handful of horse's oats, with molasses from the barrel, and we were good to go! Roll the oats and molasses, together and you had a sweet treat! Mom would get pissed, if you left the oat ball in your pocket, and it got washed!

I feed the loose TM salt.

That looks like a 3-gallon Fortex pan to me.

Never peed on an electric fence although some of my buddies and I used to grab the wire to see who could hang on the longest. Bloody wonder it never stopped someone’s heart. We all survived.
Warm milk straight from the cow was great on a cold winter morning. We all survived that also.
Kids nowadays have no idea what they’re missing.

Warm milk straight from the cow is a wonderful thing to be missing!

I think when that photo was taken, the word assault wasn't in the dictionary yet.

Make sure that mineral block does not have selenium in it if you are giving it to Llamas.

"The 1-l lama, he's a priest.
The 2-l llama, he's a beast.
But I will bet my silk pajama
There isn't any 2-l lllama."

Thank you, Mr. Nash

Although some fire chief pointed out that he had been to many a 3-l lllama.

When I was little, some of my favorite things were salt licks, dry dog food, and drinking from the horses water tank.


These kids drinking chlorinated water, soy milk, and getting wiped down with disinfectant every second (before corona') have to have a compromised immune system.

Huh? Se is a required nutrient for all animals, including llamas. It's deficient in the soil here so it's needed in a mineral supplement. We have a lot of white muscle problems here in farm animals. While I haven't heard of it in llamas or alpacas yet, they are prone to it. Many breeders use Bo-Se on pregnant females and newborn crias to prevent it.

My friend used to drink from our bird bath.

The mineral block challenge?

He was getting all his vitamins and trace minerals....grin

That is what you put 50 yards from the deer stand.

In Idaho, hunting a salt lick is considered baiting and is illegal.

NOT ME!
Now the 1940s? Yep!

Never licked one but the kids did.

We used the sulfur/salt blocks along with the red mineral block.

I was joking.Not legal here either but you do see them.

Used to knock chips off and carry them with us for a kick on demand.

Put out a block under a big spruce, protected from rain, in one of my hunting areas, for moose some years ago. 4 years later, it was still there. Stupid moose.....

I learned an important lesson in electrical conductivity one day.
Standing there barefoot holding on to an electric fence(weak 12V unit) when a 'friend' poured some water on my foot.
The grounding amplified the jolts to at least 100,000 volts. I'm told that I screamed like a little girl.

I've tasted many a salt block but only tried the molasses bucket once.

city kids would have ground up a chunk and snorted it.

LOL. Our "small prepping type stash" contains a couple of bags of granular stock salt. 5 bucks per 50 pounds... pretty cheap... and it own't kill us and will preserve any meat if we get in a bind.

LOL!

One of my cherished memories is helping milk the Jersey herd at my grandparents place (in New Jersey!) when Uncle Ted showed me milking technique: "Two for the bucket, one for the cat - and one for me." Every day, after they'd hauled the milk to town, there'd be a gallon jug of that day's creamy goodness on the kitchen table.

Salt lick?

When my then 6 y/o son and I were deer hunting in the Rubies we came up onto a small flat on the hillside we were sneaking over, and I heard him laughing. He was standing in a bunch of mostly licked-away salt blocks. I asked what was so funny, and he told me we were in Salt Lick City.

When I was 12 my dad hooked me up w/ a job on a sheep farm Near Swink, Co. I learned early on when you were given a salt block and told to carry it out to the spike in a pen w/ 200 sheep you might get trampled. To this day I enjoy eating lamb. those phuggers nearly trampled me and ate the buttons off my shirt.


mike r

We throw them in the river and catch mullet off of them, bait deer with them and supplement the cows with them. I can't recall licking them but I wouldn't doubt it.

Ha, I’ve been there.

Just because some were born and raised in the big city doesn't necessarily mean that they're imbeciles. Your picture obviously shows a couple of kids who came across a 3 kilo block of blow that broke free from the rest of the load after being dumped from a twin turboprop when the DEA intercepted the plane en route to FL from Medellin back in '86...

Exacty! LOL

but the salt kills off the germs

I assure you that any salt block lying around on the ground where cattle or sheep are found has no shortage of germs.
The block in the photo looks fairly new. Dad might have just put it there.