October brings cooler nights and cooler nights often spark an influx of varmints scoping out new winter digs. How many of you have noticed more mice scurrying about as soon as there is a bite in the air? While mice might have been helping themselves to grass seeds in the fields most of the summer and are just now looking to move in, rats have already established themselves IN THE BARN, helping themselves to your profits.
Rats are NOT a friend to farmers. They will gobble up significant profit from any farm, feed mill or grain terminal. While a mouse scurrying across the aisle way of the barn might be met with little concern, rats are a different story. Farmers MUST maintain the mindset to aggressively eliminate rats!
Fifty rats on a farm may be manageable with rodenticides and traps, but they can multiply very quickly and become an “out of control” problem sooner than you think. By the time you realize you have a rat problem on your farm, it has probably become your neighbor’s problem, as well. And once the population skyrockets, they will move on to new opportunities very readily. In fact, rats cause an estimated $20 billion in damages to the U.S. economy every year.
Rats are eating and breeding machines. They will breed multiple times a day and eat to maintain their energy. Therefore the main attraction for rats is a plentiful food supply. The first step is to make your farm less attractive by cleaning up spilled grain and other edibles. Rodenticides should be used in conjunction with eliminating spilled grain and/or garbage.
There are two major species of rats. The black rat, named for its color, usually hangs out in trees and rafters and is generally a problem for the orchard industry. The Norway, or brown rat, is a ground tunnel-burrowing monster, who is at home in sewers, barns, irrigation ditches, etc. Brown rates arrived in the Americas during the 1700s as stowaways on European ships.
When there’s enough food available to supply the rats’ energy needs, their next focus is on breeding. Rats can breed hours after delivering a litter. It has been reported that a single female and her offspring can produce up to 15,000 a year! A female rat will have her first cycle between eight and twelve weeks of age and ovulates every four days until she becomes pregnant. She can deliver a litter every 28 days.
A plentiful food supply can lead to larger litters of 10 to 12 but you can reduce that to four or five when you make the food less accessible. And when the pickings are slim, mother rats will eat their young to help meet their own caloric requirements.
The most important component of rat control is making food, such as grain, unavailable. In search of essential nutrients, rats scavenge barns and barn lots, grain bins, feed mills, city garbage, leftovers found on city streets and alleys, and poorly sealed garbage cans or dumpsters. Farmers who don’t properly sweep up spilled and leftover feed are just asking for an invasion from these varmints. Take heed, clean up and button up!
Information gathered from AgWeb