How a Farmer Won a War Against Flies

i mean look at that i don't know if you guys can hear it but there's a lot of angry flies on this trap so for the past several weeks i have been waging war on my farm waging a war against flies flies that have been harassing my cattle [Music] yeah i would not have expected one of the major problems that my farm would be facing in 2022 to be an outbreak of flies but it has absolutely been the case and when i'm talking about flies it's a variety of different types of fly it's the poop fly it's the horn fly it's all of the flies that are typically associated with large grazing mammals like cattle and horses and in today's video we're going to try to win this war [Music] so here on our farm we have nine head of scottish highland cattle four cows two heifer calves two bull calves and a steer and quite honestly this is my first year of raising cattle and i'm really trying to do my best to use the regenerative agriculture model for raising these cattle that means that my cattle are 100 grass-fed grass finished they're never eating any grains whatsoever it also means that i'm moving my cattle to fresh pasture every single day and some days i'm moving them two or three times per day so that they're always on fresh pasture they're always eating as much grass as possible and they're staying out of their own poop and manure to avoid parasites and other problems and it means that when it comes to medical treatment i'm doing my absolute darndest to avoid things like pests parasites and other health issues and i got to be quite honest this has not been easy you know for example we had an outbreak of winter lice towards the end of the winter and i relied on some natural remedies to address it but it probably would have been so much easier if i just poured on some ivermectin or something but the reason i'm so strongly opposed to substances like ivermectin or permethrin is because of what we're trying to do here on our farm as well as what i think it takes to braise good food you know number one as a person who's going to be consuming some of the beef that comes from our farm i'd like to avoid those things if i can i don't think that they're the boogeyman but i also don't think that they're necessarily great things to consume and so avoiding them whenever possible makes sense from a food consumption perspective but then second what i'm trying to do with my farm it makes a huge difference when i think about chemicals like ivermectin you know i really am trying to regenerate the pastures here by doing this rotational grazing where you have heavy heavy grazing for a day and then good rest for about 60 days what that lets you do is it make sure as much as possible of your grass matter gets consumed down your cows are gonna leave nice big poops those poops are gonna fertilize the soil by feeding all sorts of insects and nematodes and other types of micro soil life and when you use a substance like ivermectin you're killing the micro life that's on your animals but then that is also going through their pee and poop that's going into your soil and it's killing some of the microbiology in your soil itself and so it just strikes me that that's the type of thing i should avoid doing and when i think back to when i was an office worker dreaming of one day having a farm it was one of those things that i very much said to myself oh i will never ever use chemicals or never ever use all sorts of weird treatments that big agriculture uses my animals are going to be all natural but what you often find is when the rubber meets the road and you go from being somebody who's working in theory versus somebody who's working in actual practice that becomes much easier said than done which gets me to the great fly war of 2022. you see for the last several weeks my cattle have been absolutely infested in flies and i know for my animals it's causing a great deal of stress as well as some health risks you know number one much like people cattle don't like to have a whole bunch of flies on top of them number two they actually burn more calories when they're having to deal with flies because they're constantly moving and twitching and trying to shake the flies off of them that means that they burn more calories and so that means that you have skinnier cows who are in less good condition and health problems like fly strike or pink eye are possible now luckily our breed of cattle the scottish highland is very thick skinned it has the big eyelashes and that helps protect them a lot from flies but they are by no means impervious now most farms when they're dealing with flies they're going to use things like ear tags or they're going to spray with things like permethrin but i've been desperately trying to avoid doing things like that because of all the reasons i just explained and admittedly at first the problem wasn't too bad you know i'm naturally trying to do some things that mitigate my fly problems you know number one by constantly moving my cattle to fresh pasture they're going to be avoiding a certain level of that fly pressure because they're going to be further away from their poop which is going to be the hatching ground for a lot of those flies and then number two i have these chickens and these chickens play an important part in my fly mitigation strategy you see they live in this mobile chicken coop and i move them every couple of days and usually they're about two to four days behind the cattle and so when they're behind the cattle what you're gonna find that they do is they peck and scratch and break up the cow pies and so then they're consuming a lot of those baby flies which does a fair amount to reduce the fly pressure and when i was reading up on things like regenerative agriculture and planning out my farm and raising cattle having a strategy with chickens to follow around your cattle is something that somebody like joel salatin's always preaching but in my personal experience it's always been okay maybe i don't have enough chickens maybe i'm not moving them fast enough maybe i don't have enough netting and they're not covering a big enough area but the challenge of scaling up like that is i just don't have a market for that many chicken eggs and so it almost becomes wasteful to have too many chickens i think and i know that's probably a debatable one but that's what i've been experiencing so far abby what are you doing get your head out of that fence goofball and at the same time though it's not just chickens that i have i mean we've got a massive population of geese we've got a pretty healthy population of ducks here so there's a lot of poultry going through this pasture working it over speaking of poultry working the pasture over i see jemima puddle duck and she looks like she's sitting on some eggs how's it going jemima all right you keep doing your thing girl so despite my best efforts of using chickens and rotational grazing practices we've still just had a massive outbreak of flies on the farm and because i've been so reluctant to use man-made chemical treatments my only other solution to try to help the problem has been trapping and to be quite honest trapping has been the magical thing that has helped me win my war on flies and now before i break down exactly how that happened and what traps work best i did want to do a quick commercial for my t-shirt here it's a pretty cool toby dog t-shirt toby dog of goldshaw farm it's got toby dog hanging out and watching over some goslings i absolutely love this illustration and as we continue to work on packaging up the toby dog book i think it's going to play a pretty big role in things these shirts are on sale now and all you have to do is click on the link down below to access them but know that it's a very limited time offer and once we're done offering the shirt we're going to go to print and ship them out to everybody and you won't be able to get them after that so act quickly and you can take advantage of these awesome toby dog shirts and quite honestly i'll use the money to help pay myself back for all the fly traps i've recently bought because i've tested out a number of fly traps i mean would you look at that that's kind of disgusting in there huh and while i tested a whole bunch of different brands and models when it comes to natural non-chemical based fly trapping there's really just two different options you have your sticky traps and you have your bucket traps and when i say bucket traps too that can mean like a plastic cup or a pan it can mean like a plastic bag or it could even mean like these modified five gallon plastic bucket traps quite honestly at this point i have tested them all and i will tell you what worked and if you're wondering if they actually worked i mean look at my cattle right now there's like no flies here on kurt cobain audrey one who was probably the most fly riddle cow i have and i think that's because she's a black cow she's got nothing there's some like gnats that are floating around in the air that you might see around here and there that's not a big deal actually as i look at ariel the little mermaid you can see a fly right on her nose that is the only fly on my cows right now and while that one lone fly might still seem bad to some folks if you're used to being around cattle and horses that's like nothing and so i feel like at this point i have solved my fly problem but it's gonna take a little bit of work now let me just tell you right now when it comes to the different bucket traps some of them have been pretty good some of them have been abject failures you know for example that fly bag that you see up there that actually has worked pretty well it does a good job of catching flies and collecting them it smells pretty awful which is the downside it's relatively inexpensive and so it's a decent solution for trapping flies but not the best then we have these five gallon traps i had really high hopes for when i set the trap up because honestly it could be the easiest way to trap them and if i use homemade bait it also becomes the cheapest way to trap them but unfortunately with my testing so far it hasn't been all that effective i've caught in a few but not much and so i only give it two out of five dead flies i also tried these fly buster traps the way they work is they have this like little pop top on them and there's a bait that goes in here it attracts the flies the flies go all in here and then boom i'm in business with a whole bunch of flies that i caught they worked pretty good but they were kind of expensive and so i didn't love them and they also smell absolutely horrible too probably my favorite model of the bucket trap variety are these pop traps it takes a couple of days for the bait to activate but it is pretty effective in catching flies i mean there's a ton of them in here and if we open up this one which is going maybe a couple days longer let's see what it looks like inside okay poots this stuff stinks oh wow yeah this one was going a little bit longer but you can see inside of it it's even got maggots that formed inside oh that's disgusting oh that is grosser than gross oh and it smells so bad but i would definitely rate it as an effective trap so if you want bucket traps it's been my experience that those pop traps are probably the most effective ones i'll give them four out of five dead flies but far and away the most effective way for controlling flies no doubt about it is by using fly paper now fly paper is exactly what it sounds like it's just sticky paper that when the fly lands on it the fly sticks to it and then the fly eventually dies now for all the fly rights folks that are out there yes it does harm the fly yes the fly does probably suffer a little bit but in the name of protecting my animals i will trade off a little bit of that fly suffering i guess that's just the way it goes now in terms of the best type of fly paper though and the best way to trap with fly paper i actually found some other things that were pretty interesting you know i actually started my experiments with the fly paper by sticking it to the happy cowmobile and it did pretty well you know the upside to doing that is it kept it very close to my cattle and so that meant it trapped a lot of flies the downside is up here it was just always subjected to wind and so it was constantly getting torn and knocked down and if it rained it would get knocked down and so i was looking at a bunch of other options and i actually found on a online cattle forum somebody suggesting that you take the largest possible fly paper that you can find available at your agriculture store and wrap it around a trash barrel that's what i've been doing lately and now you might be looking at these results and saying it looks okay but this was just set up 24 hours ago and the truth of the matter is if i go back a couple of days ago even if you looked at what i would catch in 24 hours it was way way more dramatic seeing how successful and absolutely disgusting yesterday's attempt at trapping flies was figured it was time to give it another go pretty much two minutes later it was already starting to attract and catch flies and then this is what things looked like at around noon and then this was the second trap that i set up i think this one was catching even more flies than the first one even toby dog was kind of impressed the cattle definitely had fewer flies around them not perfect but way better than it's been the past few days and then by eight o'clock at night i think i had caught a couple thousand flies with these silly little glue traps it's pretty incredible just how effective they are for capturing flies you know the thing about the trapping like that though is i started about two weeks ago and i've been doing that every single day all in all it's about a three minute operation to set up the fly station every day so it doesn't feel too bad in terms of sustainability at least effort wise i would say that the downside is it does produce a lot of garbage and that garbage eventually has to get thrown away i've been putting traps right here by their waterers and i've been constantly moving them with the cattle and constantly making sure that there's fresh paper you know admittedly i also have other traps that are around in the area as well to help keep the fly pressure down and at first i got to admit i was feeling kind of disappointed because it seemed like it wasn't making a dent my cattle still seem to have a lot of flies on them but really in the last two days and i say this two days 48 hours it has been an absolutely insane drop in the number of flies where now there's only a handful floating around versus before when there was a crazy amount it wasn't like it was getting less and less and less and then slowly dwindled down i mean it was like pretty heavy pretty heavy maybe slightly less heavy and then nothing and so my theory is that the aggressive trapping over these last two weeks coupled with my efforts with pasture movements and my efforts with chickens and my efforts with all these other traps all of these things working together over the span of about two weeks is what completely eliminated my fly problem my hope is now that the fly problem is not that bad i'm gonna continue to use traps like this i might even continue to see if i can experiment with the bucket trap and find a better form of bait coca-cola ain't cutting it guys and so what i'm gonna do is just keep that pressure on them and if that's the case i think we might have solved our fly problem of course i probably jinxed myself by the way i actually also tested out one of these wand sticks it's kind of like fly paper but it's on a wand you know it's actually about as expensive as one roll of the fly paper one 40 foot roll of that fly paper gave me two trash barrels for two days and around here they were selling for about eight bucks here you could buy one of these sticks for nine bucks and it's not nearly as effective and the other thing i found is with the fly paper i was not trapping any beneficial insects whatsoever like i would look very carefully for honeybees and that sort of thing these sticks have actually captured a couple of honeybees that i've seen before and so in my opinion do not go with those they are a rating of a one out of five if you get the thick rolls of fly paper they are a five out of five their only real drawback is that they can be a little expensive if you're using them every day you know again i was probably spending about four bucks a day on fly paper over this past two weeks and from a labor perspective you know it takes me about three minutes each day to change the trap i don't even think i'm gonna change these traps today because there's so few flies on them i can easily go to next day so i'm hoping i'll have to do it like once or twice a week going forward and speaking of going forward i gotta move my cattle forward so let's go so i just got the new paddock set up here we'll have this space for the rest of today and then they'll start moving down the road that way i'm going to take a moment and grass geek out on you guys for a second this has been about 60 days since they were last year actually to be exact it was may 18th that they were grazing this spot right here so it's been actually 66 days since they had a chance to graze this area right here you know one farming tip people always tell you is you should keep meticulous notes i don't keep like a written journal but because i take so many photos and videos of the farm that i end up posting on social media all i have to do is go back and look at either my social media accounts or my photos and videos and i essentially have a log and you know just as i was setting up this paddock i decided to take a look at my phone to see the last time i was here and yeah it was 66 days ago you can tell that the cattle want to move hey hey guys come on kels hey kiosk come on gals let's get ready to go come on all right who's ready for some fresh grass huh oh yeah you guys can keep moving up you got plenty of space here no we need to crowd the entrance you're gonna have to move your water tub up and i'm gonna have to move your happy cow mobile up in a moment and i'm also gonna have to move their fly traps up too right because now that things are in a good place i don't want it to get worse again [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: Gold Shaw Farm

Views: 7,215,658

Keywords: gold shaw farm, duck farm, goose farm, vermont farm, fly traps, fly problem, how to catch flies, fly bait, best fly trap, the ranch fly traps, diy, homestead, homesteading, homestead problems, farm animals, garden, fly, fly sticky trap, build, catch, farm vlog, fighting flies, cattle flies

Id: pFHJJOdOzK8

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2022