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Roger Moon, entomologist and friend of The Moos Room joins the OG3 to discuss fly control and to give Dr. Bradley J Heins a hard time. Thanks for listening!
Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.
[music]
Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. OG3 is here, and we have a special guest. We've been waiting to have our guest on today for a while. Brad has said his name a bunch of times in this podcast. Roger Moon is with us today. Roger is an entomologist, used to work for the University of Minnesota, and now is retired but as he said before, we started very active, still doing things like this and helping us out whenever he can. Thanks for being here, Roger.
Roger Moon: No, I'm glad to be invited. Thank you.
Joe: Today, Roger's here because we're talking about bugs, we're talking about flies[crosstalk]--
Emily: Joe-
Joe: Go ahead.
Emily: -may I cut in?
Joe: Oh, yes.
Emily: We have a guest, so-
Joe: That's true.
Emily: -that means we have a couple questions we need to ask before we really dive into things.
Joe: That's true. I'm sorry, I got ahead of myself.
Emily: [laughs]
Joe: Emily, go for it.
Emily: I'm here to keep you honest, Joe.
Joe: I know.
Emily: Roger, we have two super secret questions that we ask every guest. We do keep a running tally of who answers what. Brad and Joe will tell you that there is a right answer to each question, and I'm here to tell you that they're liars.
Roger: [laughs]
Emily: Your first question is, what is your favorite breed of beef cattle?
Roger: Oh, Black Baldies.
Emily: Ooh, okay. Very nice.
Joe: We will accept that answer.
Bradley: Good answer.
Roger: [laughs]
Emily: Black Baldies, they're surging a little bit I think, aren't they?
Joe: They are surging. The totals now are Angus at eight, Hereford's at six, Black Baldies at four, Belted Galloways at two, then we've got Brahman, Stabiliser, Gelbvieh, Scottish Highlander [unintelligible 00:01:49] Charolais, Simmental, [unintelligible 00:01:51], Jersey, and Normandy, all at one.
Roger: [laughs]
Emily: Wow. Yes, Black Baldies are really- they're strongly and third now, I would say. All right. Roger, you can maybe guess what the second question is, and that is, what is your favorite breed of dairy cattle?
Roger: Oh, I can't pass up the soft brown eyes of a Jersey.
Joe: Yes, that is the correct answer.
[laughter]
Bradley: Yes.
Emily: There you go, Roger. There are no wrong answers, but-
Roger: [laughs]
Emily: -you made Joe and Brad very happy.
Roger: From my perspective, they're all about the same untilyou get into the Zebu breeds. From a bug perspective, from a tick perspective, all of the European breeds are about the same, about equally susceptible, irritable. When you get the droopy ears and the [unintelligible 00:02:44] and all that on the Zebus, then you get a little more resistance to things, but up here we don't see too many of them.
Joe: I'm all for a Jersey vote whenever we can get it. We're creeping back up the leaderboard. Holstein's at 11, Jersey's at 9, Brown Swiss at 5, Montb�liarde at 3, Dutch Belted at 2, and Normande at 2.
Roger: I think Brad has been given too many votes on that list.
[laughter]
Joe: It's very possible.
Emily: Yes. There's some collusion going on.
Roger: Yes, probably.
Emily: Yes.
Joe: We pick our guests very selectively to make sure that this total ends up in our favor, but all right, let's get into it. We're talking flies. Fly prevention.
Roger: Having fun.
Joe: Dairy, beef, doesn't matter. We really want to talk about fly prevention because we've discussed this before, but really having someone who knows it inside and out is the way to go on the show. Where we need to start is time to remind everybody of the flies we're concerned about. What are the different flies that we really need to be watching for?
Roger: Oh, I'm sorry. That's a question?
Joe: Yes.
Roger: Okay.
Joe: For you. Walk us through
Roger: It was a perfect cue to my introductory bugs 101 lecture. It depends on where the animals are, not what kind of animals they are, dairy or beef, but how they're housed. The deal is that if cattle are out on pasture grazing, beef or dairy, they're defecating causing cow pats to emerge. The Finish call them sliding mines, with those little isolated droppings and they could be the size of a discus.
Those things are where horn flies develop. They are the economically problematic species for grazing cattle. These horn flies, they don't live on the horns. They live on the bodies. They suck blood, but you can trace them back to a metal muffin somewhere. If you're grazing, you're going to have horn flies most likely.
On the other hand, if you've got confined animals, it could be replacement calves in a dairy operation, it could be a replacement heifers pinned, and certainly, where beef cattle are confined, you're going to accumulate feed and manure and urine, and if the rainfall is right you're likely to have stable flies. That's the other bloodsucker out there. That's the one that causes the cows to stop. It'll cause them to bunch together, beef or dairy.
The flies don't care about what the product is coming from the cattle. All they want is the blood. Cattle managers should be thinking about which are the two habitats do I have around, and usually they have both.
If you're talking prevention for horn flies, there isn't much you can do out on the pasture and the range. For the confined animals or feed debris left over during winter or from winter, if that material can be disposed of quick, it'll knock the knees out from underneath the stable flies and you'll keep the cattle more comfortable and more profitable during the summer.
Joe: That's the thing that I always think about, especially with stable flies is that we're just trying to keep them from building momentum. Because if you can really knock it down right away, you're way ahead of the game when it comes to stable flies. Now, Roger, my big question when we're talking producers is, can you rely on cattle behavior to really tell you what fly you're dealing with and is the biggest problem?
Roger: I think so. For a long time, Jack Campbell, my predecessor in Nebraska, and others have talked about economic thresholds and counting critical numbers and somehow doing something when the numbers exceed thresholds. I argue life is much easier if you just watch your animals. They will show you behaviors, bunching mainly, fly aversion behaviors. They're telling you that they're bothered. At that point, you know you have a problem.
Whether you can intervene or do something quick or should have thought things through a month earlier is another issue. If you realize that the cattle are bunching because they're being attacked mainly by flies, stable flies will occur out on pastures, horn flies will cause bunching too.
Generally, if you see them lifting their legs and stomping, switching their tails, twitching their flanks, milling around in groups, fighting for the center, because that's where the fewest flies are, if bunching is happening, that's telling you you're probably being bothered by stable flies. That's not perfect but you can do that from a truck and probably be right 9 out of 10 times.
Joe: Perfect. That's one thing that I think it's nice to hear something so practical.
Roger: [laughs]
Joe: You don't need to bring everybody in and count flies and discover economic threshold or not, which is important for research and we need to know that, but on a day-to-day, a producer doesn't have time to do that. Being able to rely on cattle behaviors, that's huge. I love that. We can do that.
Bradley: Or you can hire my interns. They're out in the pasture right now counting flies.
Roger: [laughs]
Bradley: Roger, we are still counting flies here.
Roger: No kidding. [crosstalk]
Bradley: We are, yes.
Joe: There's been some heavy influence on Morris from Roger. There's still a cow back sitting there too.
Roger: No.
Joe: The next question for me is one that I get. When we talk about flies a lot with producers, producers are asking me, "Okay, how far do these flies travel? If it's really far, how concerned do I have to be that I get on the same page with my neighbors and they're treating flies as well so that I don't have a problem?"
Roger: Let's go back to stable flies. I and some people in Nebraska did a study where they had hay rings, debris rings left over. We had another study in mind and it crapped out totally. What we ended up doing was dusting the debris around the hay rings, and then we set up traps and looked for bright glowing flies, picked up the dust that we left on the piles. We found them out to five miles. We got probably 75% within one mile.
There's always a few notoriously just-gone flying insects in any population. If you're going to talk to your neighbors, I would say over the fence is close enough. If your neighbor is producing flies, you're going to see them on your cattle and vice versa. You could treat your cattle with some sort of a topical insecticide that will kill the adult flies, they're coming back over the fence, meaning you're not sending them away, but they're coming, replenishing what you killed with what you put on the cattle.
Maybe a quarter of a mile to half a mile I think is reasonable. If you're sitting down at the coffee shop talking with somebody else who's feeding cattle over the winter, say, "Hey, I'm going to do something to get rid of my hay pile the spring. Why don't you join me and see if together we can reduce the misery of herds collectively?"
Joe: Yes, that sounds perfect because I think that's the question that I haven't been able to answer in the past is, well, how far out do you have to consider neighbors when you're talking about flies? I think that is perfectly reasonable to go a quarter to a half mile and, like you said, just find those people at the coffee shop and ask them if they're willing to jump on board with you.
Roger: Oh, one complimentary idea if I can inject. Taking it out of the barn or taking it out of the dry lot and parking it a short distance away- I'm talking about the debris now- that stuff is going to continue to produce flies, and they're going to be coming back to where the cattle are.
These flies come out and they go, "Where am I?" They go in all directions and they settle down where cattle are. Just moving it out of the barn or out at the dry lot and letting it sit somewhere else, dude, spread it, incorporate it to the extent that you can to try to reduce the water content and in turn, make it unsuitable for the maggots, which are actually developing in that debris. That's where the adult flies come from. It's little maggots like you'd see in your garbage can, although they're different anyway.
If you're going to do sanitation, you need to really dispose of the material thoroughly and not just move it and transport it to your neighbor's place. [chuckles]
Bradley: Those herds that are out wintering their cows or heifers and they just leave it there, post it up to compost like we have done here, Roger, that is my breeding heaven.
Roger: I know. I've chewed you out a couple of times for that.
[laughter]
Bradley: Exactly.
Roger: If you're trying to compost, you really want hot compost. Get your temperature probe and you want to see the core, a foot under the surface to be about 140 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter. We have shown with poultry manure and the compliment, we have seen that non-composting straw piles and morass composting matter. If you get it churned, aerated, and the moisture content right, you can render it unproductive of flies within four weeks, a month.
On the other hand, if you let it sit there, they'll keep producing that pile. Even if there's no cattle around, the organic matter in there will stills nurture maggots, the adult flies will find that pile and lay their eggs in it, and they'll continue to produce for two to three more months.
Joe: I think that we're talking a lot about prevention, and this adds into what we always talk about on the show, which is management strategies and being clean, providing you all sorts of preventative benefits for your cows. That's a huge point. I don't know why I haven't thought about it that they just can't just move it just a little bit and expect it to do something, especially when you say that these flies can fly up to five miles away. I don't know why I've never thought of that before. [chuckles]
Roger: I think I and my colleagues over the last 10 or 20 years have started to really appreciate what debris management is about and recognize that simply piling it up and letting it stack isn't sufficient. You've really got to spread it. Here's the conflict. In spring, I think many in your audience are busy getting seed in the ground. That's the primary chore. Once things are planted, then secondary chores can come in. Manure disposal is always going to be secondary. That crop's got to be in the ground.
The conflict is that you need a place to spread it if you're going to spread it. If you just planted your available ground with seeds, you got no place to go with that with your spreader. That's a fundamental conflict. I think for operations that are motivated, they can work a composting system into their routine to buy them some time so that debris material is not producing flies at the onset of the season and carrying off into August.
Then you've prevented fly breeding in the stacked manure, and in turn, you've got some time at the end of the growing season to dispose of it by spreading it. That's the strategy that I'm going into. I'd be interested in hearing if any of your producers think that might work or are doing it already. There's lots that are way ahead of me.
Joe: There are some people that do that. They're very active in composting and being ahead of the game there. There's also plenty of people that are itchy in the spring to do something and they know they can't get in the field yet. I think it's not a hard push to get someone to do it, I don't think. Brad, what do you guys do with your organic material and all your bedded packs that have been there all winter?
Bradley: Not the right thing.
Roger: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Brad, you've got a bed and compost pack barn.
Bradley: Yes, that's right.
Roger: That is a sweet solution. We actually looked at flies in your bed and compost barns, and we couldn't find nearly any. It's like composting renders it useless for the flies, and that's a good thing.
Bradley: Yes. When we're using sawdust in what Roger was talking about, there are no flies in that at all when you're using it as a compost barn. That's number one. Our out-wintering lots, that's a different story. We're here in June and we have some cows in our out-wintering lot still on that pack. It's going to be generating stable flies like crazy.
Roger: Well, think about this one, Brad. I don't know, am I supposed to be helping Brad here on the show?
Bradley: You can help me. Yes.
[laughter]
Roger: Okay. Seriously, put those cows on a new bedding pack. Free up the old bedding pack, and deal with that debris, which has a lot of organic matter and moisture in it leftover from the winter. Put those cows on new bedding and catch up with them a month later.
Bradley: Yes, we could certainly do that.
Roger: If you've got the ground. There's a limit. Everybody's got a shortage of space.
Bradley: Just [crosstalk]--
Joe: My question moving on, Roger, is, if you do a good enough job cleaning and getting all that organic material taken care of in the right way, do you think you can do a good enough job on a standard operation that you don't have to treat and you don't have to do some of our other go-tos when it comes to fly control?
Roger: How good is good? [laughs] I can tell you, I'm strongly certain that if the practical debris management can be carried out, there will be far fewer stable flies than there would otherwise be. Whether there are few enough to have the cattle sitting out idyllically on the ground for the summer rather than bunched up and bothered, I don't know. I can tell you, I do believe that if you practice source reduction to the extent- and that's what we're talking about right now- to the extent that's practical, you'll be better off.
If you have to treat the cattle with some insecticide or the premise with some residual insecticide, it will delay the time that you have to start treating, and it will shorten the time in the year that you have to keep treating. I've spent too many years counting flies on cows, and I have a sense of the numbers through the season. Usually around here, July 1st, things start getting miserable. July and August, but when you get a little bit of cooler weather in September, the numbers drop off.
Actually the same for horn flies, the numbers are bothersome for two months. If cattle managers are thinking about getting through the misery, think July and the months of August. Anticipate and keep your eyes on the animals, and then winter will save you.
Joe: Way to think of it. That's how I've always thought about it. If you can operate clean enough and take care of that organic material, you can delay how long it is until you have to start treating. You're saving money because you may only have to do it once or twice rather than three or four times.
I'll ask you the same question that I asked one of your colleagues, Dave Boxler, when I had a chance to talk to him. If you have your cows, let's just say you have cows, what's your ideal treatment schedule and product to use? You don't have to get into specifics, but if we talk about pour-ons, ear tags, feed through, what's your ideal way to handle everything?
Roger: Okay, this comes back to which kind of fly you're trying to control. If horn flies are your target, the only way you know what's coming is what came last year, right? Keep your eyes this year to the people that are managing right now. Think ahead. If horn flies are a problem, if it's practical, I think you could get through a season with one or maybe two pour-ons. Trouble is, you got to run them up, run through the shoot.
The active ingredient of interest to me is permethrin. That's the AI that seems to persist long enough. It's a synthetic pyrethroid, P-E-R-M-E-T-H-R-I-N, permethrin. Producers, I think would be best off to pick an application method that's convenient for their operation, but pay attention to what the active ingredient is. Ear tags, slap them in, and turn them out. A range of producers to do that. It's easy. You get a whole season until resistance gets in your way.
I really think if horn flies are your target, you're talking grazing cattle now, and you have to watch for a restriction for some materials on dairy cattle. Lactating cows, not everything is registered for them. I think that would probably be the simplest. If you can pour on, the second choice would be an ear tag. My first choice would be would pour-on, because it's not going to last as long, but long enough to get you through that two-month window. Up here, we're lucky. The range of Texas or New Mexico or where the seasons are all year, really, that's a different story. Up here, we can get away with a short time.
What we're getting by treating with it temporary product like a pour-on is we're not selecting for resistance so long. We're increasing the chance that we're going to be able to use that permethrin again next year. Once the flies have evolved resistance to an insecticide, it's really slow to go away and we don't have a whole lot of other stuff in the pipeline.
I urge that we'd be conservative. Keep those things when the cattle are really miserable, so we have something in our back pocket we can use, and do it prudently so we can continue to have it in the following years.
Emily: I have a question, Roger. Joe, you can cut this out if I'm going way off track here. This is going to go off into the weeds, and I'll bring it back. This year, we've been hearing a lot about cicadas, and I was learning about how they're on these 13 and 17-year cycles where they're just really heavy every 17 years.
I'm just curious if any of these major insects and pests that we're talking about, do they have any cycles like that? I know weather impacts and season of the year, but is there any phenomenon-type situations that we need to be aware of with any of these like that?
Roger: No. Think of it this way, what's the generation time for a cow? A couple of years, right?
Emily: Yes.
Roger: These flies can do their business in two weeks. What we're seeing in the field is turnover all season long, which is why, as Joe is mentioning, stable flies will build up and build up and build up. That's because you're getting overlapping generations and they continue to reproduce. No, the reason we have cicadas is that it takes them 13 or 17 years, depending on their population, to actually go from egg to adult and come back out and play in the woods. These flies are out in two weeks, three weeks.
What we do see is-- In fact, I remember one time, Brad, I was out at Morris, and the director of the experiment station was out there for some event, and he was complaining that, "Where are all these flies coming from, Roger?" [laughter] He was noticing that there was an outbreak of them. From year to year, depending on the weather, we can see numbers build up to, "Mosquitos aren't too bad this week," that sort of reaction. Or, "Jeez, where did all these flies come from?" If it's short-term things like the weather patterns rather than longer-term things like generation, generally.
Joe: We've mentioned resistance a couple of times now, and I'm getting the impression that there's not a whole lot of hope when it comes to resistance and developing resistance in our fly populations. On the internal parasite side, we've been talking about a concept of refugia where we purposely do not treat certain cows to lessen the pressure on developing resistance and then providing a population that can also compete with potentially resistant populations. Is there anything like that going on on the fly side?
Roger: We talk about it, but I don't know that anybody's done research to answer the question. The equivalent is, I think many of your producers are growing corn. They're using Bt corn. EPA requires that they have a refuge. It could be a refuge in a bag or a refuge in space but anyway, it's the same idea. You leave something out there for the susceptibles to breed in. Then when they emerge, they go out and they mate with the resistant ones. This may be getting too technical, but the heterozygotes are susceptible. You can drive resistance genes down by the refuge idea.
I don't know that anybody has really demonstrated that with cattle, but it makes a lot of sense to me. If you're a dairy operator, maybe skip treatments on your replacement heifers. Think of them as a refuge. Let them breed some horn flies. They'll recover. What you really want to do is protect the cows and the growing calves. If you have a refuge for horn flies now with the grazing replacements, that concept might work.
I don't know about a cow-calf operation. How do you decide who gets treated and who doesn't? They all bunch together. Any topical thing that you put on those cattle is going to spread from one animal to the other. Unless you've got them penned separately, I'm not sure that concept would apply, but it's a really interesting idea, Joe. Really interesting idea.
Joe: I'm just trying to think out of the box as we move here because like you said, I think we develop resistance so quickly and it takes so long to go away. We're running out of products to go on. Dave Boxler and I talked him and he was talking about, we need to really rotate modes of action on our ear tags. That seems like probably the most clear thing that needs to be done. Is there anything like that when we're not talking about ear tags, when we're talking about pour-ons, is there a way to rotate?
Roger: In concept, yes. The idea is going from brand X to brand Y of the same active ingredient is not rotating. You need to be rotating, as you said, Joe, between groups of active ingredients. What active ingredients are there for application on dairy cows? I think you've got pyrethroids and they are all more or less the same in terms of a resistant potential. Brad, are there any OPS, organophosphates that are registered for lactating cows?
Bradley: Not that I know of.
Roger: Or maybe premise sprays?
Bradley: Yes.
Roger: You maybe don't have to rotate actives in the same formulation, but you could pour on cattle, and then next time when you need it, go to a premise spray, something like that. Out on the range or in pasture situations, I think there's an organophosphate. What is it? I'm having a mind block right now. [unintelligible 00:26:10], Rabon and diazinon, those are two compounds that are listed.
Oh, as an aside, Joe, I don't know if you post readable things on this podcast, but there is a National Veterinary Entomology website that people can go to. The reason I'm bringing this up now is from state to state, things that are registered differ. To comply with EPA laws or rules, producers need to use what's registered in their respective state.
You can go to that website and say, "Oh, I live in South Dakota." That subsets everything that's registered in South Dakota. In turn, you can shop for the kinds of active ingredients and then do what you're talking about, Joe, say, "Okay, I used a pyrethroid last time, maybe last month or last year. I'm going to rotate."
We don't think that mixtures make sense. It doesn't make a lot of sense to have a mixture of an organophosphate and a pyrethroid, and maybe some of the ectons in the same tank mix. The crop growers have tried to do that. You're better off to rotate and have a mosaic on the landscape of different materials used in different places. That seems to be slowing resistance down faster than ganging up on them.
I don't know how you can get that URL out for that website, but I would urge producers to look for Veterinary Entomology and I think Google will hit you there. I should do that so that I know what I'm talking about better.
Joe: Oh, yes, I'll get it in the show notes. I think that's a great website that I've been to a couple of times.
Roger: Oh, have you? Cool.
Joe: Yes. It's super helpful. I had to learn a lot of this on my own and after school. I was searching for anything that I could find, and that was a very helpful website.
As we talk about this, resistance is an issue. There are products available, rotate if you can. There's pretty clear product recommendations, and I think there's not a whole lot of debate on that. What I hear debate on a lot is whether or not our parasitic wasps work and do any good for us. Do you have a feeling on that, Roger?
Roger: Yes, I do. Truth be known, one of my past graduate students works for one of the parasitic wasp vendors, and we've had long discussions about this. My view is that for the pasture, this comes back to which fly you're fighting. If you're paying attention to horn flies and face flies, which are the other species that come out of meadow muffins in the pasture, dung pats, there's parasitic wasps. You can't release enough of them. Because the pats are being produced serially, the wasps that you release won't keep up with those flies.
The parasitic wasps are really rare naturally, and it's very difficult to operationally raise the numbers and get benefits of fly control out in the pastures. In the feedlots, though, dry lots, calf pens, and places where animals are confined, my answer is it depends on how good your sanitation is.
If you've got knee-deep fly breeding material anywhere on your farm, you don't know how many flies are there, but I'm sure you can't afford enough to release the parasites to kill them. Honestly, I've come around to think that these parasitic wasps are most useful around horse premises where the sanitation is naturally really good.
There have been studies in dairies in New York, for example, and elsewhere that show modest reductions in the numbers of flies on farms where they were releasing the parasites. Student of mine, forgive me, but I just can't sign on to a blanket purchase of a box of parasites every week and hope that it's going to do any good.
Joe: I like a clear answer.
Roger: [chuckles] Was I clear enough? [laughs]
Joe: Yes, I like it. I like it a lot. All right, before we get out of here, there's a couple of things that we need to talk about. First, is a story that I've heard repeatedly about Roger, and I honestly can't remember who told me the first time.
Roger: That's comfortable. [laughs]
Joe: I know. I need to make sure it's true and we got the source right here. The story goes that you walked into either a classroom or a meeting and you had a cup on your arm, kind of suction cup to your arm, and you were feeding bedbugs for a study. Is this a true story?
Roger: It could have been.
Joe: Allowing bedbugs to feed on you for a study?
Roger: Yes. They tickle a little bit. They're not bad. The trick is to make sure you don't take them home and get the missus pissed of at you.
[laughter]
Joe: I was going to say you've got to be real careful. You don't want to transport any.
Roger: Interesting. I wonder who told you that story.
Joe: I honestly couldn't tell you, but I think I've heard it two or three times now and it's a good one. I like that.
The other one, and we can cut this if we need to. Dave Boxler outed you and said that I need to ask you about a story from a west central Nebraska feedlot in your early days of extension. That's all the information I have. He said it would come to your mind immediately because it was such a good story. If not, maybe we'll have to call Dave.
Roger: I'm not making this up. I honestly, Joe, I don't remember. This isn't prompting anything. I mentioned that fellow, Jack Campbell. He hired me as a postdoc to work out of Lincoln, Nebraska. We were working on feedlots in the northeastern- actually mid-Nebraska. I don't recall ever getting out in western Nebraska, but even in east-central Nebraska, I don't recall any embarrassing events.
[laughter]
Joe: All right. We'll have to get the story from Dave and then re-check in with you.
Roger: Okay.
[laughter]
Joe: That's why he came to mind right away and I said, "You got any dirt on Roger?" and he said, "Yep. Ask him about this time in Nebraska feedlot early extension days."
Roger: I do remember when I got there, Nebraska's press were all over what the ARS lab is doing out of Lincoln. I may actually have a copy of the magazine but it was a beef magazine, equivalent to it, and there was a picture of me up to my knees in manure in a feedlot, digging for insects. I'm sure the rest of the world thought, "This guy is a nut."
[laughter]
Joe: That's one of the things that I've never thought to do in practice, was actually go look for the breeding grounds. How much value does that have? For me as a veterinarian, the value I immediately think of, this is a way to convince someone that it is a problem.
Roger: Same utility for fecals. You pop a fecal sample and see what the EPGs are. I was going to say earlier, if anybody is treating for flies, come back the next week and see if it did any good. Be a critic about your program and say, "Is this working or not?" and document that.
I've been preaching about, I call it scouting or troweling for maggots. The problem is, no two places are the same. They have different kinds of debris and all kinds of variations on the theme. In half an hour, I can walk a place with a simple little garden trowel, scout around and figure out where the active breeding sites are and start to talk with the producer about how to minimize its suitability for the flies.
Scouting is very useful. Although just a reminder, you can't find maggots from the seat of your truck. You've got to get out and look around. It's not that hard. The trick is to see what they look like, know where the kinds of places they're located and after a couple of passes to your premise you'll find where they are. They wiggle. You can see them. They're not impossible once you know how big they are and the kinds of places you can find them in.
Then you can focus management, water management or debris management, however you can practice it to get that stuff very wet. Maggots are not aquatic so if you get the debris under the water, you kill them all. Similarly, if you can spread them out, they're dehydrated, they're dying. Once you know where they are, then you can think about what's practical. This is something I wish more producers could do and more extension agents would teach them to do.
Joe: We'll get on it. We'll get on it. I'm interested in learning a lot more about it. I have a trial set aside to do it already because we're going to go-- As Brad admitted, there might be some breeding grounds up in his place. I think it's probably time to go up there and dig around and see what we can find.
Roger: Joe and Brad, I'm only about three hours away.
Joe: There you go. There you go.
Roger: I'd be happy to come out and see the old digs.
Joe: Absolutely.
Bradley: Exactly. Roger will show us all kinds of stuff and where we can find flies and maggots and--
Joe: I'm in. I'm in.
Bradley: Yes, it's a good old time.
Joe: Emily might even drive from Rochester.
Roger: I like that.
Emily: I would be willing to do that.
Roger: Well, great. Come to St. Paul. I can find stuff here too you know.
Joe: All right, we can do it. Moos Room field trip is underway. All right, well thank you for being here today, Roger. We really appreciate your time.
Roger: I appreciate your interest. I had a good time. Thank you, Joe.
Joe: If you have comments, questions, scathing rebuttals for us, you can send them to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: Check us out on Twitter @umnmoosroom and @umnfarmsafety. I will put the entomology website in the show notes, so look for that. Thank you, everybody, for your listening. and we will catch you guys next week.
Emily: Bye.
Joe: Bye.
[music]
Roger: I can't pass up the soft brown eyes of a Jersey.
Bradley: Yes. That is the correct answer.
[laughter]
Joe: Yes.
Emily: There you go, Roger. There are no wrong answers, but you made Joe and Brad very happy.
[00:36:30] [END OF AUDIO]
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