 I have a partnership on the cattle and I'm the summer grazing manager and so that we kind of divide the labor a little bit that way. And being the summer manager then when we have problems with flies I have to come up with the plan to do something about it. And we just noticed that you need to know, it's hard to know what's going on because you can't go out there at 3.30 one hot afternoon and to say oh there's too many flies, shazam, that's you know because your animals are in trouble basically then you're losing pounds. You're building up a, you're asking for pink eye, you have a lot of economic things coming up behind you like a train when there's flies going on. And so you'd think it'd be easy to just know what's going on with horn flies with pest flies and cattle. It sounds so simple, we all know about the flies. But like okay just read this, this is just the beginning, this isn't the paper, it's just the introduction. It's not easy to go out and quantify and say oh the flies are too bad, oh the flies are okay. So you know how are you, you need to know what your cattle know. They know things are bothering them but they can't tell you what, that Thursday you should do something about it. And so these are our main flies, the stable flies, we don't have that problem in the pasture because that's more of a fly that breeds and filth around buildings or manure piles and out in the pasture in South Dakota. That's not an issue. But the face fly and the horn fly are the main economic pests. And they can cost you easily, they can cost you 40 pounds in weaning weight. That's what my vet told me about, just the face fly if it spreads pink eye. And the horn flies they can steal pounds from you every day because they're working your cattle. Your cattle are going to work to get rid of these flies. Now the horn flies a lot smaller than this and you've all seen them if you have cattle. They're not a native pest but cattle aren't native either. So they got to be with their favorite host. And so we don't have as many natural enemies of them either as you would hope you'd have because they're not native. And they're the little triangular flies that you see on cattle. So a lot of university people over these generations have worked very hard to try and help us figure out when there's too many flies. So we can then make a plan to do something about it. So now this is about, they're talking about 1 to 200 per head as an economic threshold. Well I'll tell you that depends on the price of cattle and the price of your cattle. And so I really don't know if this applies anymore for sure because prices are so much better than they were. So we're not, and I tried to count, I tried to go out and look at the herd and get up and averaged. Is this my average? Is this my average? Is that my average? It's really really really difficult. I don't know how many averages you'd have to take before it was meaningful. You can go out in the herd, one animal will have hardly any flies on it and some other animal will look like that. So do I really care about the average? Maybe I care about that animal. Maybe that's an important animal or maybe that's just too much for my program to have even one like that. It's kind of up to you as an operator. So to get a handle on it, since I saw that just counting wasn't the whole story, I kind of started to look at things this way. I don't know if you can read that back there, but I started to consider the behavior of the cattle because in a way that counts big with us, you know? They should be telling us something. Cattle don't lie. And so if you look up here there's tail swishing, which I felt was like the first sign that you have some flies and then head swinging when the flies are worth they start throwing their heads back and forth. If you have cattle you've all seen that. And then are they stamping? That'll tell you that you might have a stable fly problem because usually the horn flies aren't making them stamp. So you're getting all these messages from the cattle behavior and do they yard up in the corner? Like this is, if you have cattle you know you've seen them do this. They go against the wind and they get in the corner. Are they gaining weight when they're in that corner fighting flies? They're not. They're not utilizing your pasture as well. So maybe that's one of the things that's going to trigger you to take some action or make a new plan if they're yarding. I've got wetlands and mime are wading and swimming across. That sounds just fine but they were wading so much a cow got mired, which cattle can get mired and she injured herself. We got her out but she was injured and she's in my freezer now. And then this just milling, we'll call it fighting flies is sort of like the slang term for it, this milling. Well you know you don't really want to see that either. Got a few runny eyes? You better write down how many have running eyes and maybe even who they are because when you come back in three days you might have twice as many and then you might have twice as many as that. So looking at your cattle, your cattle are kind of giving you clues as to what they're dealing with all day. The runny eyes, you won't even see face flies because they're only on the cattle for a short time during the day and then they're off the cattle so you're not going to be able to count them. So maybe we have to kind of ask our cattle what's going on I guess. And so then I started thinking well what really makes me happy when I go out there. So if they're not fighting they should be doing these things. They should be eating nicely during the day, having a good time eating. Cavs should be sleeping. They should be split out in their little babysitting groups like they are on the best days. And they should be laying down and they should be chewing their cudges doing what they're supposed to do. And you can get a clue like when the calves aren't sleeping and they're following mom around to get the benefit of her tail, that's a clue that maybe you're losing some pounds on those calves because they're too busy, they're working too hard just to lay out there in the pasture. And so I made myself this form that is going to be about my cattle, my operation and my tolerance for flies. So this horn fly that's the large economic pest. It has this life cycle. It winters in the ground in South Dakota. Then it hatches, goes right to the cattle, drives them crazy. And when the cow lays a fresh defecates and the fresh pat hits the ground, that female horn fly, zooms out, lays eggs on that fresh pat. Well then the larvae see they have a couple of days and then they grow, then they'll be coming out in about a week. And if you're watching your cattle you'll see that. There's just a few flies and then in a week oh man where they all come from hatching. So then see this here is what we did in the past and we put something in the mineral that they ate every day and you know it worked for a couple of years. But just look at this life cycle. What if this doesn't stop them here? Then nothing stops them. Now back at the feedlot we're trying to decide how do we know if the flies are bad at the feedlot because there's very few flies at our feedlot. The manure management is good, you move them. Remember that eight day cycle for horn flies? Well we never have horn flies at the feedlot because the manure doesn't sit long enough, gets hauled away. And then there's a slat building over the pit. Well the fly pressure there is very very low. So I asked Mark, well let's give me some good records on between the dry bed buildings where we do have a few flies just because it's kind of a normal environment there and the building up atop. Well you know here's two very very similar groups of cattle and it's very easy to differ by that much in a super controlled situation. So there again you don't see those pounds disappearing. You don't know what happened to them. So the idea of the economic threshold being a trigger meaning like oh they're below the economic threshold, I'm okay. Maybe not now, maybe not with today's prices, maybe not for your animals you know. We have to kind of each operation has to decide. So this is where, this is about 330 acres where I spend most of my summer. And these little lines here are our grazing system. And I think that's a great help to us because the cattle do get moved. So when they get moved from here, say all the way here that's half a mile, at least they're that much distance from the manure. And so we're helping break up that life cycle again. When they come out of the manure they have a long way to go to find a cow. But see this? Okay, I have to remember that what I do or my average on my animals is very much influenced by my neighbors. These are all different cattle herds here, all around me. So I'm not an island, I'm not going to be able to just solve my own problems all by myself because I'm still going to have flies. When the wind blows this way, I'll have flies from here, here, here, whichever way the wind blows. And I think that's pretty typical. I mean that's pretty common for my area. And so I'm not going to take credit for like thinking ahead of this problem. I'm going to admit that this problem came up and knocked me off the railroad tracks because this is what happened first. We were doing what responsible people do and we were feeding us fly control and that failed. And then that same year, so we had the vet come out, treat this pink eye problem and pour them. Okay, we're going to solve it. No, didn't solve it. What solved it was the summer, the weather in South Dakota froze out some flies. And that will deceive a person very easily that the weather might have killed off the flies or the natural environment somehow has killed the flies. And you might think it's what you did, but you can't always be sure that what you did actually got rid of those flies for you. So then the next year is like no more feed through. I realized that was a big mistake. We'll not do that. And I put just a few ear tags on the mineral barrel that we feed out of the holder instead of putting them in every cow in every calf. Because that's an ordeal in itself actually and I have news from lots of people that those don't work that great either. And then we did have one time during that summer where or then we sprayed them and we knew we couldn't use permethrin, that it already failed. So we did what's recommended and we switched to phosmit which is organophosphate you can buy in the hardware store. Great, worked. Then you see what happened in 2014. We got in a bind and we were going to use that phosmit again and it was just the most spectacular failure that you could ever see. But you had to be paying attention before and after to see that it didn't do any good. And so we sprayed them this first time in 2014 and I texted Mark and the grant had just started then and so Mark and I were kind of getting on the same page and I texted Mark and said, phosmit failed at the pasture. He texted me back. It failed at the feedlot too. Just a big flat zero. So then this other chemical here, this isn't the chemical, this is the active ingredient and Lily makes it now and I had read about this chemical a couple of years before that it was not as toxic to the non-target insect species and so I found some of it. But it already wasn't being manufactured anymore so I found some of the warehouse. It was perfectly legal to use but there isn't anymore. And that did work and we worked in the feedlot and at the pasture just 98% control we went out and instead of hundreds of flies we had two, one per animal. So I mean we still had to use pesticides. We don't really wake up in the morning wishing that we could go to the pesticide store but we didn't want to kill cattle. I mean there's a choice there. So you can see by what that cost us, these failures. So we all know that there is such a thing as pesticide resistance and it's well documented that happens with cattle at pasture and pesticides are cheap when they work, terribly expensive when they fail and that was kind of the saddest part that we used the chemical and then it failed and then you just really feel like you've just got to fix this somehow and another chemical is going to have the same troubles. So help wanted. It's like, oh what are we going to do? The chemical store is closed. What are we going to do? And we'd read about dung beetles and I just wasn't smart enough to catch on earlier. So I started to look for them. Did find some in 2014. You know after the spraying and everything. Actually fall of 2013 I found some. And it was actually pretty exciting. You just don't expect to turn over some manure and find happy insects in there. But there's a lot of things in manure. Miner's alive. And so we thought well maybe more of those insects is one of the things we could do for ourselves. We could not feed because when we fed I'm a little ahead of myself there. So when we fed the fly control in the mineral and you remember the slide, it breaks up the life cycle of the fly until you get resistant flies and it doesn't. Well in the meantime it also is unhealthy for the larva of these good insects that are living in the manure. When this life cycle and of this good insect encounters the chemical in the feed through fly control then this good insects life cycle is broken. And there isn't a lot of research. It doesn't, you can't easily say oh it killed 30% or it killed 20% or it killed 90%. You have no idea. I'm pretty safe to say nobody has any idea if it happens in your pasture. So this was one of the things we decided that we should keep those and get rid of the things that fail us. So then I went on the net looking for things and I came across some plans for a contraption and my unhappy dog is modeling here. He's like this isn't right so maybe do this. But so pesticides can fail because the such a thing is resistance. Dung beetles are great but you can't just like go to the store and buy them either and say oh now I'll get to work. Like it'd be great if you could get a five gallon pail and say fix this. So you can't buy anything. But to keep this train from coming up behind us and hating us again, found this contraption and invented it in I think the 1930s and it's called a Bruce box or a walk through horn fly trap. And you can see here University of Missouri they built one and they tested it and it worked. 50% control in Missouri. Lots of fly pressure in Missouri and that 50% was enough that they didn't have to treat the cow with anything else for flies. Oh now we're talking because there you could see that you're not going to easily develop resistance to this and at least it's something else. Another arrow in your quiver to keep this fly, to keep the flies running you over in that train again. Now this one was really expensive because it's the first one that's been built in South Dakota or I don't know it could be the first one built in decades but I can't find anyone else who has one. You can buy a $5,000 one with electricity and a vacuum cleaner for your dairy. Those are actually commercially available. They walk in and the vacuum cleaner sucks the flies off but this should work for horn flies. It's a cattle walk in right where my dog is. It'll have a roof and it'll have some canvases hanging right here. So that as the cattle walk in and the canvases brush the cattle the flies are trapped in here. This is screen on screen so they think they're flying out towards the light and instead of getting out there's little slits in the screen they're supposed to and they did in Missouri crawl into the slits to get to the light end up trapped between the outer screen and the screen right here. I would have just thought it was kind of a crazy idea but they tested it in Missouri and it worked and they didn't really have any bias they probably didn't even expect it to work but they reported that it was successful. So we built this, this is ours this belongs to the grant and it's ready to go now and the spring just needs that roof but if I put the roof and the canvases on you couldn't see how it was made and it was so exciting for the welder who built the frame I had to have a welder build a frame and then a carpenter build the boxes and it was sitting out by the welding shop and he told me I had to come and get it take it home because too many cattlemen were stopping by asking questions and he couldn't get any work done. So that was interesting to people I mean regular commercial cattlemen so I think they're having the same problems that I'm having that they want to control flies but you can't just go to the store and buy something to fix it Oh there's screen on both sides so after they get in those little slits they just can't find their way back out so it'd be like if your window paint had two screens and there's a hole on the house side and the flies got in there it's very hard for them to find their way back out the hole that's why it had this see how it's like an accordion so the accordion folds totally confuse them so on the way out they're crawling into the fold and there's a slit there they get inside well on the way if they're trying to get back the way they came well now they end up in the apex of the fold again rather than crawling out the tip and getting through hopefully over time they don't get so clever that they figure it out but I kind of don't think they will I think I have time yeah it's supposed to work there's little clean out doors here for for dumping out the dead flies yes okay because you get a hundred cattle that thing's gonna fill up with flies it's gonna be gross it's gonna make great pictures yeah this is the other trap we built and this is an interesting one it was first developed for tetsy flies in Africa and I'm thinking that sounds good you know flies in Africa I want to get my flies they can't be tougher than that and it's been tried it's um right now this is the only website up today but before that at nzflightnztraps.com there's been quite a few papers done on it particularly this paper was interesting because it was trying these traps in Canada where you get a lot of species of flies very similar to what we have here and they did great trials on it it catches a lot of different species so my horn flies like maybe I can cover them with that mechanical walkthrough trap and then my other species of which there's really quite a few that can be a problem some of them at least might be attracted to this and I'll tell you just while we were setting it up there is something special about the blue color as reported in the paper a very particular shade of blue they tell you which Benjamin Moore paint to buy actually that I mean they just they landed they flew to this thing and they covered this and before the frost that came around probably around 11 o'clock at night or whatever we caught several hundred flies it was only up for a few hours and those were the stable flies at my neighbor's sheep lot and so that was the first thing he and I had come across that would help him with his same insecticide resistant problem there he's one of those neighbors in that picture where I said cattle cattle cattle well he has cattle and sheep and he's adjacent to my pasture so we're gonna cooperate so I'll attach links for the plans and links to the papers onto my SARS grant report because I've been told that's the easiest way for anyone to find them so Mike's concern is that the cattle might not care to walk through this and I'm not worried about it for my herd because I already have they're quite used to me and moving for me in the grazing system and I can move them into the corral for other treatments we have done so I've already I know this can happen because I've already put them through the corral many times and I can do it myself in 20 minutes with that dog right there and they're just they're they'll walk through that easier than into a shoot I'm sure so Mike said how often will I have to be out there to run these cattle through in Missouri they set it up they got the cattle to go through once and they had it set up between the water and the grazing the cattle voluntarily went through it and they even noted that the cattle seemed to understand what it was for like it felt good and they would walk through it voluntarily not for water just to walk through it so that's a pretty exciting if that happens I'll have a video for you because that would be very very exciting to have a zero labor way to help cattle with their flies that is a great question I'm so glad you asked it just that we just they just got finished in September and so we just did a quick trial of it in September where the fly season was about done oh it's no problem filling this whole sock up with with flies we didn't get to count and you know see if it was significant for the but it does it does attract them and catch them and there's no bait in there just the blue color yeah I'm surprised too