Fly season has begun. They are always a challenge when you have livestock. Fortunately our animals don’t spend much time in the barn when it’s warm and the chickens do a pretty good job cleaning up the pasture and eliminating the flies. They still make me a bit paranoid. Growing up we were obsessed with eliminating flies because they caused so much disease and distress which resulted in lower productivity. This fear is pretty prevalentin the cattle industry. All sorts of chemical concoctions have been invented with lots of creative ways of applying them. Sprays, powders, rubs, automated misters, fly traps, scratching posts that administer the chemicals while the cow rubs against it, etc. I’ve even seen a pasture vacuum to suck up all the manure and any bugs that it may harbor. For us, beyond the chickens and careful attention to manure management, we don’t do much in the way of fly control. When I tell farmers around here what we do for flies, the first response I get is “that wouldn’t work for us.” The second thing (sometimes the first thing) that is said is “you must have a lot of problems with pinkeye.) For a lot of people that seems to be a real problem. I remember using all kinds of shots, sometimes right into the eye, powders, and glue on patches to try to treat pinkeye and keep it from spreading in a herd. I know natural beef producers who have 10 – 15% of their calves dropped from the program because of pinkeye and the treatment options they use. I’ve seen animals blinded, eyes exploded and then removed, and pinkeye that has turned into an abscess and killed the animal. It can be a huge problem, and flies are a vector for spreading it. A few years ago I managed a herd of dairy goats. We had a good, natural, fly control program similar to the one I currently use. We hadn’t had a case of pinkeye in years. One summer we planted a new field with sorghum/Sudan grass to increase our hot season forage. With in three days of turning the goats into the new pasture we had our first case of pinkeye. Several more showed up the next day. This was a problem. We were milking these goats in a Grade A Organic Raw Milk dairy. Most of the treatment options the vet recommended would make the milk unusable and the goat no longer Organically certified. Not a good option. After some more research into alternatives, we hit on cod liver oil. Two ml squirted into the eye and 10 ml given orally. We treated the goats with pinkeye and then the whole herd with oral cod liver oil. As fast as the problem appeared it disappeared. It turns out that pinkeye is an indicator of vitamin A deficiency. Most of our pastures were minerally well balanced and had a diverse mix of grass, forbs, and legumes. The new pasture hadn’t had enough work done to balance the soil, and was planted in a single crop. (I suspect the sorghum/Sudan grass isn’t as well balanced even in good soil. I’ve seen lots of problems associated with it.) Once we identified the deficiency we were able to meet the need with a suplement. The only other time I had a pinkeye problem was when I was feeding hay purchased from an “organic” farm that was not minerally ballances. Attending to the quality of the soil and the feed produced on that soil will get you much better results than waging war with the flies.
I think there are lessons to be learned here as far as human health is concerned. Food grown in soil that is properly ballanced promotes health. Food that is deficient in something, because it was grown in soil that was deficient promotes disease.
So true, good minerals make so much difference. All our neighbors are plagued with pinkeye. The more they do as far as treatment goes, the worse it gets. Now they are scared their cattle will catch it from our cattle since we aren’t vaccinating. Even when we try to explain the mineralization aspect, they still suspect our cattle our carriers, even though they show no signs of pinkeye. Sigh, more of that controversial “organic” stuff I guess… . Last time I checked their wasn’t a real vaccine for mineral deficiencies.
I’ve seen the same thing with Mexican bean beetles. Beans grown in minerally balanced soil had very few beetles while the same beans grown in the next bed where the soil was not balanced where compleatly devistated by them. Same is true for many other pests.
Oh, that’s very interesting. I know practically nothing about farm animal health and such. I really wish it wasn’t so easy to just turn to the almighty chemical bath when there is a problem.
great article, thank you
we had a yearling mini-oberhasli doe with pinkeye last year – our goat mentor recommended treating it with port wine, and we just happened to have an almost-empty bottle that had been sitting around for a awhile
treated her by pouring some on a washcloth, and then squeezing it gently above her eye, so that only a few drops went in
did it a couple of times a day for only a couple of days and it was GONE
never spread to our other 2 goats
(and the doe quite enjoyed licking up the bits that ran down her face…)
the vitamin a deficiency aspect would never have occurred to me – though i think in general most illnesses only take root in systems (bodies) that are weakened through nutritional deficiency…
Very interesting post. Wish we had known about this some years ago. My daughter had a small dairy goat herd that contracted pink eye after she loaned some kids to a petting zoo affair. We did the vet and medicine route that cost a mint and wasn’t working. They just kept passing it around. But we couldn’t get rid of it. The vet said this particular pink eye bacteria didn’t have a cell wall and could grow wherever it could find something it could use as a cell wall. So, it was everywhere and we were sterilizing everything we could.
It just happened that the Dairy Goat Journal came out with an article on how to cure pink eye without vet bills. So, my daughter tried out the remedy. It worked! Turns out it has to be burgundy wine from California. It has some kind of fungus or something that grows on the grape that is in the wine. She used a spray bottle full of the wine and squirted it in the goats eyes 3 times a day for 2 weeks or until the pink eye was gone.
Wish we had known about the vitamin A deficiency. We could have given them supplements.
I like your human health lesson. I know I feel better when I eat the eggs from our chickens who get to wander over our 3 acres. We probably don’t get enough nutrition from our food supply.
I enjoy reading your blog. Great post!
I have a black & tan coonhound. Coonhounds have droopy eyes and she is prone to pink eye. I’ll will give this a try.
Huge success using cod liver oil with pinkeye! SO thankful I found this advice!