At River Taw we believe that farming is more than just a business – it is a way of life; a connection to the land and animals that embodies respect for the complexity of life and love for the simplicity of nature. Part of our way of farming is our organic approach to pest control. We’ve briefly described our two main methods below. Click on the links to the left to find out more.
Because we do not want to damage the flourishing beneficial insect and animal habitats in our pastures, we choose not to use pesticides for fly control. We have brought 28 Muscovy Ducks onto the farm. Muscovy ducks are easy to care for, and they control flies and other insects the natural way. They forage for most of their own food, resist disease, and reproduce easily. They are particularly helpful controlling flies, mosquitoes, grasshoppers and locusts. If you put them in area with cows or calves they will eat most of the flies. In one experiment where two year old Muscovy ducks were put in cow pens, the fly population was reduced by 80 to 90 percent.
Fly Predators, sold by Spalding Laboratories, are gnats that eat fly larvae before they hatch; it can take several years before the little “fly killers” are colonized, but by all reports, it is well worth the patience. On average, farms using the predators see a near elimination of flies within four years. Because they prevent flies from emerging they eliminate the need to spray the flies themselves.
Our name is inspired by a river and its surrounding moorlands in Devon, England. The River Taw rises at Taw Head, a spring on the central northern flanks of The Dartmoor National Park. It reaches the Bristol Channel 45 miles away on the north coast of Devon at a joint estuary mouth which it shares with the River Torridge.