Integrated Pest Management (IPM) of Nuisance Flies on Animal Facilities

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- As livestock, poultry, and equine owners and managers are well aware, flies can present a significant burden to animal and worker well-being, but can be difficult to control with just chemical treatments alone.

Hi, I'm Hannah Tiffin, a member of the veterinary entomology laboratory and vector-borne disease extension team here at Penn State.

You can use integrated pest management, or IPM, to control pests in an effective and environmentally friendly way.

IPM uses a combination of common sense practices to break the life cycle of the pest fly species.

By selecting and using several pest control methods, you can reduce pest numbers to tolerable levels while minimizing risks to the health of people and animals and to the environment.

Let's look at the six steps of IPM.

Steps one and two are related and are probably the most important.

These steps are to identify the pest fly species and to understand the biology of the pest.

There are a few important pest flies found on animal facilities.

Some fly species prefer certain types of animal facilities over others.

The most common are house flies, stable flies, and horn flies.

Each of these flies has a different biology.

Understanding which fly species is a pest in your situation will help you decide on the appropriate monitoring and control techniques.

Step three consists of monitoring to understand the level of pest flies that are currently present within the facility.

Monitoring for pest flies should be conducted with systematic inspections of the facilities.

This may include watching animals at specific times of the day and counting fly avoidance behaviors like biting flanks, stomping, or head nodding, or shaking as seen with this horse.

Or counting adult flies caught in traps like this jug trap.

Step four is setting action thresholds for pest fly levels.

An action threshold is met when the number of flies on a facility requires control measures to be taken to avoid an economic loss.

Economic loss occurs when the pest population reaches the economic injury level.

On this graph of insect numbers versus time, you can see the insect numbers increase until they crossed the action threshold, which is when controls are implemented.

The number of insects then decreases never having reached the economic injury level.

This level of pest control balances the cost of control against potential economic losses.

If control is implemented prior to reaching the economic injury level, often economic losses can be avoided.

However, it is very challenging to determine economic injury levels for most flies.

And on some facilities, like equine facilities or hobby farms, where economics are not as important or for some fly species that don't cause direct damage to animal production, an action threshold may be your personal tolerance of fly numbers and it is at this point that fly control should be implemented.

Step five then is control.

There are four categories of control methods in the IPM pyramid, cultural control and sanitation, mechanical and physical control, biological control, and chemical control.

With an IPM plan, you use several methods of control to reduce pest populations, focus most of your effort on cultural control and sanitation to prevent pest problems and avoid the need for further intervention.

Basically, this is keeping the facility clean and dry.

You can use physical and mechanical control methods to exclude flies from breeding or feeding sites.

For example, covering manure piles or installing screens or using fans to reduce the appeal of these areas.

Another method of IPM is the use of biological controls.

An example of this is the use of parasitoids, like seen here, that lay eggs in developing flies, which kills them so they can't complete their development and emerge as adults.

When chemical applications are necessary, follow the application instructions on the label.

Rotate chemicals with different modes of action to prevent or reduce fly pesticide resistance.

The final step in this process is evaluating the results of the prevention and control efforts to determine the best management for your facility.

To evaluate results, you need to keep consistent and detailed yearly records.

This spot card count is an example.

IPM is a flexible system of fly control that consists of a combination of methods.

Your IPM plan should address the local conditions where the animals are raised and the pest fly species that are present.