3.6 Fly Prevention
Katie Steneroden
- A combination of tools for fly prevention works best.
- Organic sprays are often not very effective and can be expensive.
- Keep facilities clean and dry to reduce fly breeding grounds.
- Physical traps, sticky tape, and fly traps can help.
- Encourage natural predators such as barn swallows and purple martins and consider predatory wasps.
- Compost manure, mortalities, and afterbirths away from the barn area.
- Mimic mother nature’s windy days—flies are not a problem on windy days—by having strong (adequate) ventilation in barns.
- Mobile chicken coops following animal-grazed areas allow chickens to scratch and peck to eat maturing parasite larvae and decompose manure paddies. But wait three days before the placement of chickens so the dung beetles can accomplish their work first.
- More ideas can come from your extension service and the Integrated Pest Management Guide for Organic Dairies 2016 [PDF].
Certified organic producers must always check with their organic certifier before adding new products and include the plan for use in their OSP.
- Are you using organically allowed strategies to control or prevent flies, mosquitoes, and external parasites—examples include pasture rotation, multispecies grazing, dragging pastures to disperse manure piles, manure management, sanitation, ventilation, and moisture control, screening, fly parasites and other beneficial insects, bat conservation, purple martins, and other insectivorous birds, walk-through fly traps, sticky traps, flying insect traps, electric bug zappers, biological pesticides, diatomaceous earthy, botanical pesticides? Do you have any concerns or questions?
- Do you monitor for internal parasites by collecting and analyzing fecal samples regularly? If you do monitoring, how well is it going?
