Fly Control Experiment

Every time it warms up flies become a problem around Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  In the past, we've set out some fly traps that you break a smelly fly attractant into a bag and add water and hang it.  The flies are sort of like the Eagles song, Hotel California, "You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.  The bag fills, in no time, with dead flies.  Thousands of them.  The bag becomes a stinky mess.  If you don't do anything about it, flies get in the house.  Is there a greater nuisance than a fly flying around the kitchen when you are trying to eat?  You can't even enjoy your meal.

Flies are a big nuisance to the cows, too.  They land on their backs and bite them.  The poor cows swat with their tails, their heads, rub against trees, and lay in the dust.  Largely all that is ineffective as the flies simply move to a different spot.  We could buy some chemicals to kill them, but we really don't want to do that.

I found an alternative - Texas Cedar Oil.  Cedar oil is oil that has been steamed out of dead cedar trees.  I wish that you could twist the top off of the bottle below and sniff.  Talk about smell good!   Now this stuff has many uses, but one of them is natural pest control.  It can be sprayed on your cows and keeps flies away.

Texas Cedar Oil

So Tricia ordered a bottle and we're going to give it a try.  For a 16 oz. bottle it was $26.50 plus shipping and handling.  The recipe is:

20 oz. warm water
1/2 oz. of liquid ivory soap
4 oz. 100% Texas Cedar Oil

Tricia learned from a talk given at a SSAWG convention that if you substitute 48 oz of vegetable oil for water in the recipe, and use 2 -3 oz of cedar oil, while leaving out the soap, it will adhere better and give 5 days of fly control.  So I mixed up a batch.


Canola oil is the medium to mix the cedar oil in

We emptied the fly repellent concoction into a little garden sprayer and walked out to the barn when it was milking time yesterday afternoon. 

Pouring the concoction in the sprayer.

Sure enough, Poor Daisy was full of flies and they were annoying her to no end.  She was madder than a mosquito in a mannequin factory.    

Flyswatter?  Anyone?

So I pumped up the Cedar Oil concoction and began to spray the offending areas.  Flies like to light (and bite) right on Daisy's shoulder area where her tail won't reach.
 

Can you scratch my back right there?  A little up, to the right.  Yeah.  That's it.

I sprayed a good dose on her.  You could actually see where the deer flies were biting Daisy and drawing blood.  I had donated blood earlier in the day (that's why I have the blue bandage), but I volunteered to give blood.  Daisy and Rosie are unwilling donors!  We'll try to help the girls out. Hopefully this stuff works.


Spraying Daisy down

Finally, I added an extra dose to Daisy's shoulder area.  You can see her tail in action as I'm spraying.  

Natural Pest Control

Prior to posting this I called Tricia to see how the experiment was panning out.  Here's the preliminary report.  Several dead flies on Daisy's back and not many flies at all on her.  It looks like it is a successful experiment.  We'll see how if we get 5 days of coverage.  At the very least the barn will smell like a cedar closet.

As I walked out of the barn, Russ and Benjamin were standing around with the chickens.  Or is that our turkeys?  I'm forever getting them confused with these guys.


Our Turkeys