I have chickens, sheeps cattle and horses. They are being hounded by flies on them. Can you feed DE freely, or put it on the animals?

You can do both. We feed DE daily and you can make bag, fill with DE and hang in tree where cows frequent. What they get rid of helps build soil with trace minerals.
Bob Bard

cattle take de free choice, i've not found that the other animals do so. chicks and ducks will sometimes fluff in it if it's on the ground. with the other animals you need to scatter it on the feed.

i've not had a lot of luck with the bag stuff, robert what type of bag did you use. i've got one that was manufactured for pesticide disposal but it seems the de is too fine for it ie it doesn't come out of the bag freely. right now i've got a butcher calf that's tame and i'm just dustin him by hand. fair results.

What would happen if the DE got wet? I was thinking that you could put DE in one of those sprayers that look like a bicyle pump with a bowl at the end, it seems it would spray out the dust. We have about 9 head that are not necessary tame but will come to the truck for treats and maybe we could spray them then. I wonder how often it would need to be done?

I use burlap bag. Cows are fed ground up alfalfa everyday with some sugar beet pulp. molasses, DE, and kelp if they are not in pasture with mineral feeder (free choice kelp, DE and salt).
Horses are also given DE daily and they have not had any bot flies in 4 years.
Bag isn'r great but have had some success. I feel sorry for animals when they have flies, but if they are healthy with out chemicals, they will make it just fine. I will not relent to chemicals, which work poorly anyway.
Robert D. Bard[/i][/u]

Robert thanks for the help. You talked about the sugar beet pulp. Where do you find the sugar beet pulp? And how much do you mix together? Does anyone know of a feed ration for all livestock. Something that could be fed to cows, horses, goat, and sheep?

We get sugar beet pulp from feed store.and just mix some in with ground up alfalfa. We also throw in some molasses because of trace minerals in it like DE. The horse and donkeys get a little grain in pellets, but cows get none. Sugar pulp give energy with out grain. We used to give cotton seed cubes but found out that it reduces breeding fertility of bulls. Molasses, sugar pulp, kelp, and DE don't do this. We raise minature polled Herefords and they do really well on grass and hay and the little bit of supplements that we offer.
Bob Bard

How much DE should be added to horse feed? What does this do for flies? Thought it was a natural wormer. Has anyone ever tried using a garlic tea for flies. I used it last year on my garden to ward off grasshoppers and it worked great, always wanted to spray the horses with it just to see if it would work for flies but I never had any left after spraying the garden and roses. I know the grasshoppers hate it.