The Way I see It

by Dustin Webber

The first and last words on controlling flies, you will ever need to read!!

We have 36 horses on our farm and nary a fly. How? We implement a few quite simple strategies to trap and kill them. The first thing you need to understand is that flies on your farm are attracted by either smell or sight. So, you need to decide on types of traps. The stinky fly trap bags that you simply add water to and the visually attractive sticky surface fly traps that incorporate a multi-colored pattern. The stinky traps catch the face flies, house flies, barn flies and others. The visual traps catch the biting flies that makes your horse stomp its feet 500 times a day.

Beginning in March before the flies really get started, place the stinky fly trap bags around the perimeter of your pastures and around, but away from, your barn. Initially hang them directly on the outside of the fence posts every 150 feet or so. Most of these flies do not originate on your property and you want to lure the flies away from your fields and barn anyway. Check the traps after a week and then relocate those traps seeing minor activity to where the traps are catching a lot of flies. This is usually along tree lines, ditches, swampy areas and similar places where there is rot and moisture for the flies to breed. Once the stinky bag trap is getting full, don’t remove it. Hang another one right with it. The more stink the better. Remember to re-charge the fly trap bags with water every two weeks or so.

For the visual traps that catch the biting or “stomping flies” as we call them, place the trap on a stake in the ground outside the pasture or paddock where your horses congregate for feed, water, and the gate. The top of the sticky visual trap should be about 18 inches off the ground. With this placement, you will be amazed how many of these biting flies jump off your horse and onto the visual sticky trap. Replace the trap when full.

For the barn, use an automatic fly spray system that sprays a pyrethrin compound. Pyrethrin, is a derivative of the flower Chrysanthemum and has been used as an effective and safe insecticide for hundreds of years. It breaks down in sunlight and oxygen, causes no build-up, is safe to use when mixed appropriately with water and dispersed in accordance with the manufacturer’s directions. Set the fly spray system to run once a day, at night, for 20-30 seconds when the winds are typically calm in your area. Currently, the flies are all “down” and not moving around and there is little wind moving air through the barn, so the spray application is highly effective. It kills all the insects (tics, fleas, flies, mosquitos, ants, spiders, etc.) in the barn. You can always add another spray sequence, but experience has shown once at night does the job quite well. Do not bother using a fly spray system during the day when the fans are running or when there is a breeze flowing through the building. Spraying at these times is ineffective at killing anything and is a waste. If expecting a deep freeze, flush the nozzles by running isopropyl alcohol through the system at the end of each season so the nozzles do not freeze and rupture.

In conclusion, trapping and killing the flies instead of trying to just repel them with fly sprays is highly effective. Use stinky water-filled traps for the flies attracted by smell and visual traps for those nasty biting or “stomping” flies on your horse’s legs. Move the traps around to where they are being most effective. A fly spray system using pyrethrin in your barn and sprayed at night is extremely effective in ridding your barn of all insects.