Summer is in gear and that means ticks are here!
Ticks are frightening arachnids that live in all fifty states and enjoy hearty meals of blood. My blood, your blood, the goat’s blood, all blood. It’s great that medicines have been made to keep fleas and ticks off of pets such as cats and dogs. Pour on treatments are also available for farm animals such as cattle. For humans, there are sprays that deter ticks from climbing onto them.
But ticks, like many other pests, carry diseases. Some of those diseases can be life threatening, so anything that will keep the numbers down is great. Honestly, I hate ticks. After being naive enough to go for a walk through the woods with some friends in high school while wearing a pair of the popular baggy, wide leg genes of the 90s, I ended up covered…
COVERED!
I’ve hated ticks ever since and will do whatever I can to keep them away from me, my family, my animals, MY FARM!
Thankfully, there is a fantastic answer to my worries: Chickens.
Chickens love to devour bugs of all kinds. From fly larvae, to centipedes, horseflies, deer flies, spiders, slugs, and so on. Chickens eat bugs, and they especially eat ticks! A single chickens, when given the ability to free range and hunt for her food, can eat anywhere from a dozen to as many as one hundred insects in a day. That’s a lot of pest control.
When we first moved to our farm, there was a tick problem. At the time, we didn’t know about chickens liking the taste of ticks. We did know about their ability to keep fly populations down by scratching at cow manure and, so, set up a leader/follower system behind the cattle. Within the season, we started noticing less ticks on our clothing until finding a tick became a rare occurrence.
Along with cattle, we’ve given the chickens access to the pigs’ areas:
And we’ve kept them with goats:
If you’re looking for a way to get rid of ticks naturally, look no further than chickens. As a bonus, you’ll get some awesome eggs and meat too!