Fly Control For The Hobby Farmer With Cows
When you have animals of any sort, then fly control becomes a huge issue. One should think of them as perennials, in fact. Rather like perennial plants, flies will reoccur every year in hardy fashion. Like unwanted weeds, they will multiply if not kept under control.
For people who become hobby farmers, the decision is, in almost all cases, a lifestyle-based one. In other words, hobby farmers don’t tend to come from farming backgrounds and are therefore the most in need of learning a few of the things that they wouldn’t have learned from their forefathers.
For the most part, the main enemies that you need to keep in your sights are the house fly and the stable fly. The housefly is a common fly that will not normally bite but which will spread disease of many different types. The stable fly, on the other hand, is a biting bloodsucker. These will torment your cows and spread disease too. This will result in poorer health and very often the harassment factor alone is enough to cause a decrease in milk production.
Cleanliness is lesson number one. This means to control the manure piles as best as you can. Cows won’t be toilet trained, in case you didn’t know, but you should clear all areas of manure as thoroughly as you can in the feeding and eating areas. Damp hay is another potentially major breeding zone for flies so clear it out and don’t let it fester. The ideal solution is to spread it on your pasture, where it will help it to grow. You should have a system of making a manure/damp hay pile and then clearing that pile regularly.
The second part of the strategy is to use the various attack products to eliminate flies. There are basically two categories of flies you need to attack with equal measure: those flies that are buzzing around in the air and those flies that are still developing into adult flies.
Too often, people think in terms of getting rid of flies as to only get rid of flies that they see buzzing around. But the fact is that there are even more of them developing and eating their way towards winged pests that you don’t even see. The cleanliness aspect is the one that will minimize the numbers of unseen flies. In order to really go to town on them, however, you need to institute organic fly control methods. This would involve fly predators in the first instance. These are insects that will seek out and eat the larvae of flies. The adult female goes and collects the baby flies and feeds them to her young. This will work for our aforementioned flies above, as well as many other species of flies, including green flies.
