hayguy said:
Faster horses said:
Good shots, all of 'em.Thanks for sharing. Been missing your pictures.
What do you do for fly control? You have lots of flies, looks like.
nice pic's RA it's good to see the green grass again, coming soon here too.
FH what can or would you do for fly control?
There are many things you can do, depending on your situation. If you have
a place to run your cows/calves through, a product called Cylence works
really well and it is relatively inexpensive. The gun (applicator works good too.)
If you don't have many cows, you can just put them in a corral and have
them go around you and use the gun that way. It shoots a stream out
quite a ways. We really like that product and the applicator.
IGR (fly control) in your mineral works really well too. In ours, the cattle
need only eat 2 oz of mineral for the fly control to work. How IGR works
is that it interrupts the life cycle of the fly, they hatch early and can't fly
so they die. In R A's situation, the flies are already ahead of him so he
would do best by using cylence and then putting out the IGR. It will take
a couple of weeks to start killing the flies. If you put it out early, like when
you have 65 degrees three days in a row, then you can get the first hatch.
And then leave it out til the first frost and the flies won't over winter in
the manure. The way you can tell if the IGR is working, is that your cattle
don't bunch up, but stay out grazing. You might see some flies on them
still, but not enough to cause them to bunch up. When they are bunced,
they aren't grazing and when they aren't grazing, they aren't gaining.
There are fly tags (which we have never used) but they need put in later,
the way I understand it. Putting them in at branding time is too early and
then when the flies really come the tags have lost effectiveness. And from
what I am told, you need to put some in the cow and some in the calf.
If you don't do it correctly, the cattle become immune to the insecticide
in the tag and you must change brands often. Like I said, we've never
used them. With the Cylence, after a few years you need to change to
something else as they will build an immunity to that as well. Not so with
IGR, there has never been any immunity found with it.
Flies cost the producer a tremendous amount.There has been a lot
of research done and they do cost the producer a lot of money.
Sometimes when flies are really bad, you have to do a couple of things
to keep them under control. We have run the numbers on yearlings,
fly tags vs. IGR, and the IGR in the mineral is cheaper per head than fly tags
and it lasts longer too.
There are dust bags aswell. We tried them as some cows really use them--
you can tell as their faces, backs are white with powder. Our cows weren't
impressed and wouldn't use them. It's a great idea and we tried it several
times, and then gave up on them. Our cows didn't have trees either so we
thought surely they would use them. Wrong. But I know some cows
will use them.
Oh and we have a Lewis cattle oiler as well. That's a pretty good deal,
but spendy to buy and hard to move unless you get the frame on wheels
too.
Hope this helps. I just hate to see cows bunched up, fighting flies.
Costs you $$$.