Thanks to Chris Hollen and Loran Shallenberger for this fly trap. Note how it’s placed near the water. When a cow goes to drink, face flies typically leave to avoid getting wet. Then they fly over to the barrel and get stuck on the giant fly paper.
Here’s Loran Shallenberger’s version of the Chris Hollen model fly trap.
What you’re looking at is a barrel wrapped in fly paper. Here’s what it looked like 24 hours later:
Here are sources I found when I did a Google search for “Catchmaster Giant Fly Trap Roll.”
Kevin Swalley did this last year and provides these instructions for setting up your barrels: “It’s only sticky on one side. Just make a wrap around the barrel and overlap the ends a little to stick the paper back to itself. I just started wrapping over the old paper with the new. A sharp knife will cut through it to throw it away.”
Kevin says he caught face flies, horse flies and deer flies. The chickens would eat every fly they could reach on the paper. He also found that “there were more flies toward the top of the barrel every time. So I just started flipping the barrel upside down. It seemed to do the best at waist-level to chest-high on me.”
Kevin says that most folks kept the barrels outside the fence so that cows wouldn’t get stuck to it. He started moving it with the cows and didn’t have any trouble with cows touching it. He even wrapped some trees and fence posts with the fly paper.
Here’s Another Option
Michael Kinsey shared this video from Kevin Jahnke has a seasonal dairy farm in Lancaster, Wisconsin. He builds these blue barrels that use a smelly attractant to draw the flies into the barrel. He cuts a hole in the top of the barrel and covers it with clear plastic making a window of light that the flies go towards so that they don’t find their way back out. He empties the barrels from time to time. The last time he did it he filled a 5-gallon bucket and estimates he got about a million flies.
This may sound antiquated, but if we’re moving to more holistic farming methods, what about having chickens in with the cattle or following the cattle?
I know it’s easier said than done, but definitely something to contemplate for animal and soil health.
Chickens only do so much, and that’s only for certain species of fly (those that lay in the manure). There’s still the issues of (a) first flies in the season, (b) all the ones that will fly in from neighboring lands, and (c) those that chickens aren’t really going to be able to intercept as various life stages.
And mechanical traps and sticky paper are surely more holistic than insecticides on the animals and environment.