Why Your Fly Control Isn't Working - With Jessica Starcevich

Flies are one of the biggest battles livestock owners face every summer - and most of us are fighting them wrong. This week Lori sits down with Jessica Starcevich, entomologist and fly control expert at Spalding Labs, to break down what's actually living on your animals, why your fly bags might be making things worse, and how to build a smarter, more natural approach to fly control.

From horn flies and face flies to house flies and biting stable flies - they're not all the same, they don't all breed in the same place, and they don't all respond to the same treatment. If you've been spraying permethrin all summer and still losing the battle, this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways

Not all flies are the same species - identifying where they are on the animal tells you everything. 

Fly bags placed near barns can actually attract more flies than they catch. 

Rotating your spray active ingredients reduces resistance. 

Dung beetles are your best free tool - don't kill them with the wrong wormer. 

Fly Predators target house and stable flies in confined areas and can achieve up to 75–90% control.

Episode Highlights

Jessica explains the four main fly species affecting pastured cattle and how to tell them apart. 

Lori gets the wake-up call about her fly bags and how she was using them wrong. 

The conversation covers IPM — integrated pest management — and how to build a whole-farm fly program without spending more than you need to. 

Plus: what fly predators actually are, how they work, and why you should call Spalding Labs before ordering if you have over 50 animals or multiple species.

Timestamps

00:01 — Welcome & intro to fly control 

01:35 — Jessica's background & Spalding Labs' 50 years in business 

02:39 — What fly predators are and how they work 

04:11 — The four fly species affecting cattle & how to identify them 

07:28 — IPM: integrated pest management explained 

09:18 — Fly control for manure piles and large pastures 

16:04 — Why fly bags can backfire 

20:22 — How to know what flies you actually have 

23:35 — Resistance to sprays and rotating active ingredients 

28:22 — How fly predators reproduce and what results to expect 

31:09 — When to call Spalding Labs instead of ordering online

Learn more and get a custom fly program at www.spalding-labs.com

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Website: hornsnhoovesauction.com

Production Credit: Edited and produced by @the32collective_ / https://www.the32collective.co/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Hey everybody, welcome back to Horns and Hooves. We have today Jessica with Spaulding Labs. I know many of you guys have started looking into fly control. In this industry, everybody's always fighting with flies. A lot of us have not just cattle, we have horses and mini donkeys. And I even have a mini pig that's supposed to be mini, but he's 450-pound coonie. So I know a lot of us have been at our wits end trying to figure out what is the best thing we can do to keep the flies down. So I have invited Jessica on to talk with us a little bit about what their fly control. And I have seen in some of the groups that some of you guys are trying it out. And I think that's awesome. Jessica, so like for me, I feel like I'm constantly spraying permethrin on my cattle. And I know that can't be great for them, but they're covered in flies, and it's the only thing that I have found to get that, to get the flies down. So tell us a little bit about when did Spaulding Labs come about?

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Spaulding Labs has actually been around. This will be our 50th year in business this year. Wow. Yeah. So we have been around for a while. I've been with the company for 15 years. I did my graduate work in a dairy effort facility looking at how these parasitoids work with like different bedding choices. And then they kind of helped me through grad school. And then I went ahead and took a job with the company afterwards. So I've been the entomologist for 15 years now.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Oh, that's so exciting. At least you're helping people. You're helping people try to get these the fly population down. Like for us, I swear that flies they might look dead, but they come back alive. I swear. I'll see them in the window seal and think I got them cleared out, and all of a sudden something's alive again. So can you tell us a little bit about what you guys, how your system works?

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Sure. So there's a couple things. I know when I was talking to you guys through email, like hornflies and face flies tend to be a pretty big problem for cattle, especially pastured cattle, which a lot of these kinds of cattle are. And we mainly carry the fly predators, which is a type of tiny, tiny parasitic wasp. It doesn't bite or sting. And it works really well more on like houseflies and biting stable flies, and a little bit less, it doesn't really work on the face flies very well. And it works okay on hornflies. You have to get it spread really thoroughly through your pastures to get there, just because they only travel about 150 feet in their lifetime. So if you're covering a whole pasture, you're trying to do kind of a grid pattern across the pasture. So really, when it comes to pasture cattle or kind of mixed environments or mixed animals, we really encourage kind of an IPM program, integrated pest management. That way you're getting all the different flies, and not all of it is something that you'd buy from us by any means. But if you've got problems with flies on the legs, some of the ones on the faces, those are your house flies and your biting stable flies, works great on those. And then there's other things you can do in your pastures to kind of help manage hornflies and face flies as they're developing.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

So I feel like I don't know what kind of flies we have. They look the same. Ones outside look the same as the ones inside, but maybe they are different, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

It's one thing, it's a really common misconception. It's something we ask customers a lot about. We ask a lot of questions about the flies that customers have when they do call us to set up a program because we want to make sure that we're really setting you up for success. We want to see you succeed. So any given time on your farm, there's probably about a hundred species or so of flies. Only a few of those are pests. Some of them are just really good pollinators. Some of them are actually really helpful because they're predatory on other insects. So there's some good flies out there. The main ones that any kind of livestock or cattle owners or horse owners, anything like that, that they're going to experience. In if we're talking about areas where like you're adding supplemental feed around watering areas, any place where manure is going to accumulate, that's going to be a lot more of houseflies, which will feed kind of on the face and all over the body. That's what you'll see come inside. And then biting stable flies will breed in that same stuff. And then also any kind of decaying vegetation, where my personal problem area is we feed round bales in the winter. Then it starts raining. I'm in Illinois, so it starts raining come April. By the time we can actually get any of that old winter feed cleaned up, it's June. So and I'm Nebraska, so I get it. It's a common thing. And that ends up being where a lot of our early biting stable flies come from. That kind of decaying winter feed. Silage is another area where you can get silage biting and stable flies or hailage, anything that's kind of decaying organic matter. And then out in the pasture, you'll get those horn flies, which are going to cluster on their backs and their bellies, and then the face flies, which are going to be really aggressive on the face, more so than houseflies. Those will only breed in undisturbed cowpats in the pasture. They won't breed in anything else. So any given time, most cattle owners, if they're grazing, doing any grazing at all, are dealing with four different species of flies.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Is the big thing. The hornflies and the face flies, the hard thing about them, they don't go to any traps. There are no traps that you can buy that are going to catch face flies. And for hornflies, there is a trap called walkthrough trap that you can build that if they're going to go through it at least once a day, every day, and every cow on your property will, it can significantly reduce hornflies. But a lot of times, especially with the Highlanders, any horned cattle, the walkthrough trap isn't usually quite as good because horns are going to tear that up quite a bit. Yeah. Then you're kind of left with a few different strategies as far as IPM. The core concepts of IPM, that integrated pest management, is cultural control through essentially making an environment unfriendly for flies and their development. So for any place you've got that confined manure, the more you can do to clean it up and remove it at least once a week. That way you're breaking that life cycle. And out in the field, if you're doing like chain drags or harrow drags to break up cow patties or mob grazing so that they're breaking them up, or just encouraging a lot of dung beetles and things like that. Dung beetles actually do a really good job of reducing those populations. So protecting those kind of native beneficial insects is really helpful. And then something like what we offer, which is the fly predators, works really good up in those confinement areas. So for places you can't clean, I know that we personally go through and we scrape, but do we get around every post and every gate? No. There's so much time in a day and so much that you can clean up. So those areas, especially around like the edges of silage, if it's bagged silage, isn't usually as bad. But if you've got like the concrete with the covers and you get that molasses creep around the edge, fly predators are great to get rid of the houseflies breeding there or around any waters or feeding areas, they're great for that.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

So what about like for us? You were talking about manure piles. So we can clean it out, but we have to wait and we have to hire people to come in and get that those manure piles out and spread it for us. So we have the manure piles and piles out like in the back back here. That do these help anything at all if you release them.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

The fly predators are great for manure piles.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

You don't need quite as much as one kind of common mistake people make is they'll want to put all of their fly predators there. But anytime that you've got your pile big enough that it generates heat and it's actively composting, you're gonna cook actually most flies that are developing there. You'll only need fly breeding on kind of the bottom outer six inches or so. Everything in the middle will be too hot and it'll get too dry on the top. I think my favorite analogy that my graduate advisor used was if you can pick it up and it crumbles through your fingers, it's too dry for flies. If you can make a nice ball with it, it's just right for fly breeding. And if it runs past your elbow, it's too wet. Definitely use fly predators, any of those areas. Any place where you've got manure stored, places that you can't get cleaned up, anything that's gonna breed those house and stable flies, it's excellent for those areas.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

So out in the pastures, because here, well, hopefully here in about a month, I'll be moving mine to our pastures. So let's just say I've got 200 acres here and 300 and some in another place, 80 some. What do you do? That's a lot of acres. So 150 feet that they can roam. What is your best suggestion to help with that?

SPEAKER_00 9:02

So I typically don't recommend fly predators for large pasture areas unless you're doing small rotational areas where it's easy to cover each time that you're rotating. For pastures, you can go a couple different ways. If you're wanting to go entirely organic, non-chemical, then your best bet is preserving any of those naturally occurring beneficials. So to protect dung beetles and really encourage dung beetle populations. Don't ever want to use if you're worming any of the wormers that end in OLE are generally not harmful to dung beetles. So those are the best thing to use in the spring. If it ends in ectin, then that's something you want to use in the fall because those tend to be very toxic to dung beetles. I need to get my notebook out. What worm are to use when? Some folks that will use the IGRs, so like the mineral blocks that have fly additives in it. There's a couple main kinds of active ingredients. Diflubenzeron is one that's in a lot of them. It tends to be more harmful to dung beetles, whereas methoprene is less toxic to them. Neither are great for them, but if you have face flies and hornflies are causing a lot of issues, they cause mastitis, they cause pain guy. If you're going to use one of the insect growth regulators, it's better to go with something like the methoprene as the active ingredient. And there's a lot of different brands out there that use those. But just being mindful of the types of products that you're using that could be detrimental to anything that's already doing good for you out there, and then adjusting so that you're really encouraging those and helping protect those. The other thing, as I said, you can do drags. Again, once you get to 150, 200 acres, that's a lot of acreage to try and drag every 10 days, because about 10 to 14 days is about how long it'll take them to go from egg to adult. So a lot of times I really just encourage protecting any of those natives that you have if you're gonna use anything.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

What about even by your tank? And we put our salt and mineral out, you know, where our tanks are. What about that area?

SPEAKER_00 11:03

So those kinds of areas, loafing areas. So if they've got a favorite tree or a favorite place in the pasture that they're gonna go lay in the afternoon, watering areas, feeding areas. The fly predators work really well around that because that's when you're gonna get more houseflies and stable flies that breed in that.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

What about a couple ponds in different pastures? Is that like around those, maybe?

SPEAKER_00 11:24

It depends on your pond. Okay. My pond grows duckweed like crazy and it recedes a lot in July and August. So we get a really muddy, mucky edge that has a lot of decaying plant material around it. That becomes a big breed, like stable fly breeding area for us in midsummer. So I will treat around the edges of my pond with fly predators from about July to September, where I'm at. But if you don't have a lot of plant material around your pond, or if it's a spring-fed pond, so the level's staying pretty consistent, then it's not something that you really need to worry about. These types of flies. That is where you will breed your big horse flies and deer flies. Those all breed in the edges of ponds, lakes, and streams. So you could be breeding those kinds of flies.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

So the one has a dam, but it's they are one of them's just been naturally made over the past few years. It's crazy. It just decided to form itself. Oh nice.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

So you can always just kind of go by what's it looking like? What's the edge look like? Is it real muddy? Is there a lot of plant material around it? If so, you can throw some fly predators there.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

I know. This is just one of the big things I see every year. Well, all summer long, is what are you guys doing for flies? And you know what? I have tried to hang the bags. Do you guys have those too?

SPEAKER_00 12:43

We do carry some bags. Now, the big thing with any of those bags, one, they're definitely not catching face flies or horn flies at all, or stable flies. Really, they're only going to catch houseflies. And they are an attractant. So you want to make sure that they are at least 150 feet away from barns, buildings, and places that you don't want flies.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

You can definitely make your fly problem worse.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

That is interesting.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

The other thing with those to watch is making sure that you don't put out too many, really, like one for two or three acres is plenty. If you're getting more than that, you're probably attracting in not only houseflies, but you'll end up bringing in flesh flies and blowflies. So flies that wouldn't even be there will end up coming in for that. And if you forget about them and they dry out, you can actually become a fly breeding factory in that bag. There's not enough water to drown any like eggs that are laid in there. The maggots can actually crawl up out of those baffles, which the adults can't. So bags are useful for certain situations, but a lot of people overuse them and especially tend to put them within their buildings. Which granted, I was guilty of the same thing. We used to have like three bags hanging in our barn until I went and got a degree in entomology. Now you have one. So that's when I was like, oh my gosh, what were we doing this whole time? Any sticky traps.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

So it wouldn't be bad to put one bag in each barn.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Not in the barn, 150 feet away from the barn. Not in the barn. Away from the barn. Okay. Yep. Anything closer than 150 feet could actually be bringing more flies into your space.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Oh my gosh. That's a big thing. We won't talk about what how many I had out and what I was trying to do. I'm like, ooh, there's a bunch in here, but I didn't feel like we were gaining any.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

And most likely, if you look at those bags when you're catching a lot of them, if the flies look kind of a metallic color, green or copper, that's blowflies. They're just attracted by the odor and they're never bothering you or your animals really at all, unless you have enough bags out that you have a large population of blowflies. Sticky traps inside always go with the sticky traps. Anything sticky means it's a close-range attractant. They have to already be close to be attracted to want to sit on whether it's the string tapes or the yellow tapes or anything like that. Those are fine to use indoors.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

I feel like I need strips like this. I can't even do it on here, you know, wide and this all the way. It's pretty bad. I literally have to hang them. We have a fairly new house that was just built like 10 years ago. And one of those that I have got a sticky trap hanging in my kitchen in the summertime, especially towards the end of summer.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Oh, yeah, we do too, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

It is what it is. It's way better than flies having their feces everywhere. And vomit. Yeah, and vomit. Oh wow, that is so interesting. Is there anything else like that you can think off the top of your head that would be really useful information for our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 15:46

I think the biggest thing is just being really conscious of what you're using and making sure that you know what flies you're really going after. What fly is a problem, what species of flies are a problem. And that is one thing that we are always here to help. We really do push education. So I all the time we have customers, if they're having a fly problem, they're not sure what it is. And if we can't figure out just based on where on the animal it is and kind of their behavior, we'll have people send pictures.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

That's what I was wondering. If it's easier to just send pictures of what you're dealing with, so then you have an idea.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

It's amazing because one thing that's really kind of unique about a lot of these species of flies is you can even tell just from where on the animal they are. Biting stable flies from the knee or the hawks down, pretty much, and sometimes in the flanks, you won't see them on the rest of the body. And houseflies you might see all over, but those horn flies are going to be just down the backbone and on the ventral line of the belly, and face flies you're only ever going to find on the face. So there's a lot that we can tell species-wise, just by a description of the behavior and where they are on the animals.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

One of my donkeys, man, his legs in the summertime get soyed up, but I started instead of keeping them in a smaller pasture, I started them run in the bigger pastures. And he did they don't have near the problems that we had before.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Yeah. And poor donkeys, they are known. Biting stable flies will beat on them over almost any other animal you have in your pasture. Really? Yes. They tend to not be as they don't stomp as much and kind of actively try to get rid of flies as much as horses and cats.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

That's true. They don't.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

So the flies are like, well, easy meal. Everybody congregates with them.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Yeah, that's how I feel about poor lucky.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

When we had our mammoth Jack, he could be out there with 20 other horses. Nobody had flies on their legs, and he'd have 30 per leg.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

That makes so much sense. So what do you think gets on my cooney cooney?

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Please be about it. Depends on where are they.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

Mostly down his spine.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

Down his spine, most likely horn flies.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

So my cooney cooney is fairly popular on Facebook because Arnold is always getting into trouble. So he is uh very mischievous. He's always into anything, any food, any beverage that you leave in your garage, he's going to eat or drink or whatever. So he's got it figured out. So he's naughty. But I do I end up hitting him with a permethrin too, because he carries them on his back.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

And one thing with that, a good thing to do is rotating periodically what the active ingredient is in what you're spraying. Because if you're using any one thing too much, either through ear tags or through sprays, flies develop resistance faster than almost anything. I mean, just with a couple generations, they can build resistance to a lot of those. And something that might have killed them before may only knock them down now. And sometimes they get to the point where you could spray them and it doesn't even affect them. So it's always good. They won't tend to build and hold resistance to multiple actives at the same time. So if you're doing a good rotation and rotating your active ingredients, it'll help you reduce any kind of resistance from developing as well.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

So we have sprayer that goes on the back of our side-by-side. He uses that fogger. Only goes so far, really. Only goes so far. He puts a different one in that, and I cannot think of the name of it. A lot of people don't use it. It's more used at dairies. I want to say it starts with a V, but I can't remember now.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

And it's amazing. We're to the point now on our farm. We've still got 26 horses. There's six cows. We just keep steer so constantly rotating. Other than when we trail ride, we don't really use chemicals at all anymore. Just pasture management. We've gotten our dung beetle population really built back up, which is great. And we just haven't really had to use much. And we do if we're gonna go somewhere, we're traveling. Or when the horse flies and deer flies are really, really bad, we might pull them pull something out. But other than that, we hardly have to spray it all anymore or do anything.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

And also when it comes to that, like you said, using that can kill your beetle population too, correct?

SPEAKER_00 19:55

Yeah. Not only the dung beetles, but you can harm a lot of the just the beneficial insects that are out there. Like I said, there's true dung flies. Sometimes people see like the big golden fuzzy flies on MM and things like that. Those are actually predatory on a lot of other fly species and their larvae are too. So you're getting kind of a double hit. And there's predatory beetles and predatory mites. So overspraying or fogging can kind of lead to a reduction in those, which then, especially if you start to get resistance to that chemical, then you get kind of a twofold problem because now the flies are resistant and all the natural predators are gone.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

So you want to stick to it if you're gonna do it. You want to stick to the one method if you can.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Yeah. And a lot of times, too, is only spraying when you hit a certain threshold. If flies generically, the number is something like 200 flies per animal is when you're gonna start seeing like an economic or a physical loss in the animals. So trying to hold off and using chemicals only for a short period and only when they've kind of hit that I can't take this anymore kind of stage. Because there's a lot of things that can be done up until then to really hold off ever getting that massive fly population that a lot of us do.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

So how long is their lifespan? I was reading about it. It's not very long, is it?

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Almost all of the flies between 20 and 30 days as far as their adult lifespan. And then their development time from egg to adult really varies for houseflies. It can be seven to ten days, stable flies closer to 10 days, and then for hornflies and face flies, about 14 days to 21 days, all depending on temperature.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

And they can multiply that fast.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Oh, I was just gonna say, houseflies can lay a thousand eggs in their lifetime and egg to adult in seven days. So you can get houseflies in particular can explode very, very quickly.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

A thousand and seven days or whatever. Oh my gosh, that's insane. So, what about your predators? How long is their lifespan?

SPEAKER_00 21:58

About the same three to four weeks. kind of depending on temperature and humidity. With a program like ours, it's considered augmentative biocontrol where you're doing regular releases throughout your fly season. How often and how many kind of depends on your setup and how many animals you've got, but they're all native species. So you're not introducing anything new to the environment or anything like that. And they can't survive without flies. So they just die off when flies die off. That's something that it, like I said, does really good on those couple species of flies and something most people are putting them about every three weeks or so and out of shipment.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

And do they reproduce?

SPEAKER_00 22:33

To some degree. They won't reproduce like they won't maintain a high level on their own. In nature, they kill about five percent of flies just because they need flies to survive. So as they are encountering fewer flies, they'll actually lay fewer eggs, ensuring that their offspring have food. So that's kind of why ours is is more of an augmentative because we're forcing that natural population to stay so high that you get closer to like 70, 75% control. Some people can see 80 to 90% control. I would say with my regular like how I maintain my farm, I can get about 75% control. I'm sure know a lot more than what we know about keep them down. That's a do as I say, not as I do. Right. I know what I could do to have just absolutely amazing control, but it's just me and my dad and my husband and uh there's only 24 hours in a day.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

So that makes sense. I get it. We have we're blessed with some hired men which like I told you earlier we are we set up and with horns with piling crosses and the horns it takes forever to set up for AI and for embryos for us. And today we're doing feet so or hooves. They're getting their paddy cures. So I'm thankful for extra help because we all know how that goes and then we run out of time. So that's why I was thinking oh man it would be nice if I could just put some of these out especially in the smaller areas that we have.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Oh yeah. Especially any of those areas where you're bringing them up to do any handling or vaccinating any of those areas where it's going to be more confined. And really houseflies and stable flies are the only ones that are also going to bother you guys. Storm flies and face flies don't bother people. So if you're getting flies in kind of those areas then something like fly predators works amazingly well for kind of those confinement areas. And that's where we really encourage people, especially if you've got a real mix like you do of a lot of animals on pasture maybe not as many, but you've got some of those areas that are breeding flies. We really recommend that you call and kind of talk over your program with us because if you just go online and put in 200 cows, you're gonna get way more than what you need for kind of your situation. So anybody that's got a mix.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Actually your website stops you and says it's a call. So anything over I tried that already anything over 50 we recommend calling and multiple species I think it's an automatic call. Yeah. Which is good from what I'm hearing.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Yeah we definitely we don't want you to be getting like spending a ridiculous amount of money that you don't need to spend I love that kind of just helping you because especially if you talk to us then we can say okay you've got these kind of flies here we're going to recommend fly predators for that here's a variety of things you can do in your pasture depending on what kind of equipment and management time that you have available these are some things that could help there. So that way we can really tailor kind of a whole IPM program to your particular farm.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

I love that that's great. So like if you're using Vitaferm, the heat, does that affect the fly predators? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Not really at all. The only thing that would affect them is if you were doing if you were spraying heavily in the area that you release them in the first two or three days. Most fermethrins and things break down in sunlight within about 48 hours or so and fly predators are terrible flyers. They're made to burrow. So by the time they're under that kind of surface material, even if you're gonna spray say four or five days after you've released fly predators, it's usually not going to harm them. And anything on animal isn't harmful. Any of the feed throughs are there's not much other than directly dousing them in themselves an insecticide that's gonna harm them.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

Awesome. That's good too. Well I appreciate because I'm gonna tell you what made me reach out is every time I'm scrolling through Facebook, your ad pops up. I need to check into this yes I need to check in I need to get take a deeper dive in every cattle group I'm in I don't care if it's the Angus group or if it's my Highland group if it's whatever the biggest questions out there are fly control, fly control, fly control.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Absolutely and flies are so hard and especially because to most people all those flies look the same. So that's the big thing because they all breed in different places how their handle works differently. So really getting a handle on what you've got and how to handle each one and really putting together a full like integrated program is definitely the best way to really get those fly numbers down.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

You guys can help with that. Absolutely awesome. I love that well if you don't have anything more we can wrap it up. I was trying to think of now you know what's gonna happen I'm gonna have questions when I get off of here off this podcast. So we will put the link on the podcast of how you get a hold of Spaulding labs and they can help you with your questions if you guys have questions after listening to this.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

Any questions calling us you hit one number to get to a person there's like about 15 of us on staff.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

My next question is do they speak good English?

SPEAKER_00 27:34

We are all US based we are here coast to coast the company originally started in California so we still have some people there and we have people all over like my husband and I are in Illinois we've got people in Arkansas and Florida and New Hampshire and all over the country but all US based.

SPEAKER_01 27:51

And do you guys service all 50 states?

SPEAKER_00 27:53

All except Hawaii. We do not ship the fly predators to Hawaii that's the one I thought about I'm like I wonder if they do Hawaii. They're the species we use are not considered endemic to Hawaii like they are the continental U.S. So we do ship to like Alaska but we do not ship to Hawaii.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

That's good information to know. All right well we appreciate you hopping on with us this has been great this has been so educational and I hope that somebody gets something out of this and I'm sure they will you've just been awesome I appreciate it. I appreciate it love spreading the knowledge hey guys thanks for tuning in and we will see you next week on Horns and Hooves