#fly predators

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.

The image of the docile cow getting covered in flies while she chews the grass or the cud very slowly and calmly is one that most people have of the cow.

However, the reality can be a lot different and researchers at Florida State University have been finding that the aggressive streak in cows is more and more common. Why that should be is another matter entirely and one which these researchers aren’t too interested in answering just yet.

“We conducted studies on herds of dairy cows on 50 ranches across Florida over a ten-year period,” says Sismic Culluck of the bovine division of the Animal Behavioral Studies Department at the Tampa college. “It was a very comprehensive and lengthy study and we were quite surprised at the results.”

Taking samples of what he terms “anger hormones” in the cows, Culluck and his team found that during the ten-year period covered, cows of all ages experienced a 38% rise in the prevalence of this aggressive strain in their blood.

One of the more interesting corollaries from this test showed that they were having less medical complications from flies at the same time.

The researchers insist that they cannot be certain that the two sets of findings are even related. The presence of the hormone could be, they say, attributed to a change in feeding patterns or in the ingredients of formula feed. It does correspond with a period during which farmers had become more and more dependent on formulated feed for their animals rather than using more natural foods.

Or it could be that the formula feed has something in it that acts as a fly repellent through the skin and that that is causing the reduction in fly problems for the increasingly cranky animals.

What many farmers believe, however, is that more and more cows are simply evolving with the increase in flies around the farms and are fighting back.

“It’s certainly both an interesting and a plausible theory,” says Dr. Culluck. “Nature has a way of fighting back in a whole host of domains and manners that really leave you wondering if we aren’t all just puppets whose strings are being controlled by something else.”

One of the biggest and most constant challenges for anyone with a goat herd is the whole issue of fly control.

For the production of milk and the general well-being of the goats, the number of nature of flies around the place can have a very profound effect on what will happen next.

The first thing you have to do is to learn all about your enemy. You need to examine just what is eating your goats, quite literally. For any herd of animals, there are a few main suspects involved: These are usually the stable fly (or the biting stable fly, if you like) and the housefly.

The flies move fast in terms of reproduction during the warmer days. In as few as 10 days, the complete life-cycle of a fly goes around, with new adults emerging, each of them laying about 200 eggs and infesting your goat manure with up to 1,500 maggots per pound.

Breaking the life-cycle of the fly, therefore, is the primary aim for any good fly control program.  Essentially, the housefly and the biting stable fly look pretty much the same and they have the same characteristics with the important distinction (as your goat would tell you if he could talk) that the biting stable fly bites and the housefly doesn’t.

The biting will not only have an annoying effect on your goat, but it also means that it carries very strong risks of infection. This, in turn, will have an effect on the milk production of your goat and also on its longevity. Depending on whether or not your goats are a commercial interest, this can translate into a lot of dollars and cents in your pocket.

As a famous Roman general once said, if you fail to prepare, then you’d better prepare to fail. The plan to combat these flies on behalf of your goats is all important.