Odour, flies and maggots shown the door

As farmers continue to live with shifting regulations around slurry management, one Suffolk farmer has had good success with reducing odour, flies and maggots on his farm. Anthony Hitchcock manages 240 sows and 25 acres arable (wheat) at Crossways Farm near Bury St Edmonds.

The smell would hit you

"We had very bad odour one winter time when ventilation was poor. The smell really was very strong in the pig house, it hit you when you opened the doors. On emptying, we couldn’t spread too close to the houses nearby, it was too strong." He also had an issue with flies in the farrowing shed. "We were using fly sprays and bait to try to curb the problem. We had problems on our flat decks as well - a continuous cycle of maggots which we couldn’t curb."

Count the flies on one hand

Hitchcock decided to try a 100% organic powder-based slurry additive marketed by Epizym. "A few weeks after applying the stuff I noticed a really big difference in the smell. I have a neighbour who often complained about the smell, but since using Epizym Pigs, along with a low level applicator, they’ve noticed a vast improvement in smell and flies. Nothing else we tried really hit the flies quite like this. It works to the point where we can count the flies on one hand. It’s made a huge difference." The slurry gets pumped into a large tank where it’s held for up to three months. It then goes back onto the fields.

Easy clean

"It’s far easier now to empty out and clean down the tanks. We wash one room a week and in the past it used to be a hard job to get all the slurry out through the little plug hole. Now we pull the bung and wash the pen down without even thinking about the slurry."

I have tried other methods and products to alleviate smell and flies, but they haven’t been successful for us – they took more work than it was worth bothering for. With one of them I had to dose the tank every week, which for someone like me is too time consuming. I want to put it in and forget about it. Others required stirring every week and adding a bit more product. Some dealt with smell by encouraging a crust to develop, which was not what I wanted as I wanted to spread the slurry on the fields."