Step 4 – Be proactive

If there are flies in your area, don’t wait – act now! Using your knowledge of the landscape (step 2) and knowledge obtained from monitoring (step 3), you can target key areas and quickly. Concentrated efforts in those parts of the landscape that monitoring has shown to be at risk of first emergence will put the management of later crops in a better position.

Make sure that you and your neighbours are aware of seasonal patterns (based on monitoring) and act together to match treatments to specific times (for example, by everyone catching spring emergence).

Our research has shown that coordinated efforts to reduce the number of female flies in the early spring population can greatly reduce fly numbers over the season. Focusing efforts on reducing the number of females in early spring, along with monitoring areas with a high potential for harbouring source populations of flies, can have a huge impact on the control of populations over the whole season.