Every time the heat gets turned up if it's brutally cold with a wind...flies show up from ? ...I don't know. Both houses have this happen. As for mosquitoes...with all the standing water laying around now...as soon as it warms up in the spring we have monster mosquitoes show up. I always thought they died over winter...but then we've always been dry. First signs of spring and we're getting eaten by mosquitoes. Of course, they lay right away as well...and then clouds of mosquitoes show up. I used to think the wood ticks were bad, but now I have the guineas. It's been a huge learning curve with the wet conditions. We haven't had problems with worms yet in the livestock...but the wet doesn't help.
Microchick, as I'm to understand, ivermectin has the longer killing period (as we all know and love) but the amount of drug only gets so high in the animals system because of how ivermectin works. That leaves some bugs becoming resistant if they are not killed and I guess this is what they're seeing. So out of 100 ivermectin amounts in an animal get to say 79.
Safeguard has not shown any resistance at all because it comes in at a much higher percentage in the animals system and kills all the bugs, but for a very short time period. So it's amounts in the animal maybe get to 98. (I'm using the numbers as an example as I don't have a graph..lol) I thought I better clarify what I said.
They want us to rotate a deworming of safeguard to kill the resistant ivermectin bugs. I have no issue with that and actually pushed for us to do it...so we did it last winter. Our management system also helps because the only thing we bring in is bulls, all replacement stock females are raised by us. Actually that's how it works for all the animals we have. We bring in much less stuff; both bugs and diseases than someone who imports females from different places. We do run the risk of bringing resistance in with our bulls. But the safeguard should catch that. Actually, we should get our butts in gear and deworm the bulls when they come in. The bulls are not my department...but I will get the guys to do that from now on...now that I think of it. I always did it that way with the sheep.
I didn't know about the worms being in the shortest of grass. That's good to know, thank you! We don't rotational graze...our animals are so grossly understocked on pasture that I'm sure people wonder about us...lol. I think we have 6 quarters of pasture for the 70+ cattle we have. (Although 3 are out of commission because the flood took out the fences.) We used to have 140 cattle but pastures were still understocked. Some pastures are native prairie with a creek. Impossible to break up and not worth the hassle.
That's good to know that for the chickens. I do like the lawn to be mowed super short to keep rodents away...I hope that the fact the chickens have lots of room to peruse negates that.
At a sheep seminar I remember learning stocking rates where worms/diseases are like tacks in a room. If one has dropped 10 tacks in a 10x10 room, it's a lot easier to step on a tack than it is than 10 tacks in a 30x30 room. I always thought that was an excellent analogy...lol.