Baking soda for rat control

[Birdielee]

Ugh again. I think one of the rats is living in Penny's nest. Gross. I was closing her up for the night and i opened the egg door to make sure there weren't and rats in there. And there was!! It played dead, so i wasn't sure if she killed it or it was injured or what. I got thick leather gloves and a heavy hammer and a big metal garbage can. I grabbed it by the tail and tried to quick drop it in the garbage can. I missed and it ran away. I think poison happens tomorrow.
I had noticed recently that there are food pellets in the nest and thought that was weird. I thought maybe my son did it, trying to feed her by hand. But no, a rat did it.

 

[Malquid]

I thought warafin ( blood thinners) was the “poison” in rat blocks. I’m not sure how that would poison predators and scavengers. Then again I’m no expert.

 

[Malquid]

Al makes and sells his own. Look under his signature for a link to his website.

If he wants to elaborate, he can, but my take is he ran into a problem with rats while raising his own chickens, and being familiar with things mechanical, set about to make the rat proof feeder, which he later started making and selling.....as a small sideline to a larger, different business.

I would also suggest that in doing this endeavor, he has done something much more produtive than most of us......who mostly offer advice.......both good and bad......but otherwise nothing constructive.

Thanks so Much Howard. It took me a while to find the link, but I’m sold on the principle of the feeder. I bought the medium exterior soft close. I’ll update how I like it once it’s installed.

 

[Al Gerhart]

Cool, appreciate the business. Be sure the feeder is installed on a wall or post using that wood block that came with the feeder. Fasten that block to the wall or post, slip the feeder over the block (there is a cavity in the back just for this purpose) and run a screw in from each side, make your own holes with the screw. That keeps the vibration down so the feed doesn't shake down too much and prevents feeder from falling over if a big old rooster jumps on the treadle.

Next, make sure that treadle bottoms out on the ground or something. Birds won't use the feeder if they are wobbling around, they will pin the treadle down with one foot and stand on the other once it is properly installed. Add a chunk of 2 x 4 or dig in a patio block to the right height.

Then make sure ALL other feed is removed. No free range, no old feed in the deep litter, no snacks. Get them hungry for a few hours before trying to train them. Then be tough, let them go hungry for a half day if needed. They will learn, one of them will learn first and the others might try to push her out of the way but they will eventually give up and the smart one will come back and slowly they will learn. This is assuming you have actually read the instructions and watched the video and have assembled the feeder properly and installed it properly. Do that and the training is quick.

Don't miss the video on adjusting a spring. You want it to keep the door closed but not so stiff that it is hard to use for the lighter birds. Our main side, .net ending, has the videos. Above all else, if you have problems, email with pictures and I will walk you through a solution.

 

[Al Gerhart]

Curious how the commercial poultry farms keep rats under control?

I know I see bait stations outside the doors of Orscheln, and perhaps some even inside. Probably the same at many feed plants. I was at a nut processing plant in CA a few years back and they had both traps and bait stations out throughout the facility. So bait is what most professional exterminators use.

But it also seems that 90% + of BYC members have both small flocks AND a bias against the use of bait blocks. So if they are not going to be using them, they need an alternative, which is where rat proof feeder enters the picture. Cost should not be an issue for them.

Probably the most effective strategy of all is to use both......the rat proof feeder plus a few bait blocks to pick off the stragglers. Once you get them under control, the feeder will keep the population down, nullifying the need for bait blocks as a general practice. But if left in bait stations, and nobody is eating it, leaving those out there does nominal harm to anything.

The short answer is they spend a lot of money and just barely keep the rodents under control. There are contractors that come in and fumigate burrows or use powder that reacts with ground moisture to produce the fumes. Then a constant baiting and trapping program that never stops.

Not sure if even treadle feeders would work for all commercial flocks due to the size of the birds. The broiler farms start out with chicks, it would be a few weeks before even a broiler would be big enough to use a treadle feeder and they would have many houses close by with existing rat colonies. Maybe four of the six weeks a treadle feeder could be used and that might be enough to keep the numbers down if all the houses held the same age birds.

We have had two commercial operations using our feeders. The first bought 24 feeders, that would feed 2500 birds if you re filled once per day. They had a massive rat problem and initially the rats mobbed the feeders. I got a call from a mad supervisor, had a couple of feeders full of smothered rats. Next morning the guy called back to apologize. The feeders that had killed rats were cleaned out with chlorox water and put back into use and the next morning they were untouched and more of the other feeders were stuffed with smothered rats. Took a week to run out of feeders or they ran out of rats, they were never sure what happened but their rat problem was over with. Rats are that smart, they would refuse to use a feeder that had killed rats and could tell somehow even after the feeder being disinfected.

The other commercial operation was Fifth Crow Farms. They have around 36 feeders now I think. They had a bird problem, google their name with chicken feeder and they have the story up on their website. Not sure why they never had a rat problem, might have been that pastured chicken plots have so much open ground that the rats don't have enough shelter and they moved the pallets with the feeders constantly, disrupting any burrowing.

The AG professionals say that an adult rat will eat 20 pounds of feed per year and will cause around $25.00 per rat in damage from chewing wires or buildings or undermining foundations. My own mom just spend $1600 on car repairs to a wiring harness after rats got into her car as it had been sitting for about a month. Rats have front teeth that never stop growing so they must chew constantly to keep the teeth worn down. So this is a lot more than wasting a few hundred bucks of feed each year.

 

[Birdielee]

of the other feeders were stuffed with smothered rats.

How did they smother?

 

[Al Gerhart]

Al makes and sells his own. Look under his signature for a link to his website.

If he wants to elaborate, he can, but my take is he ran into a problem with rats while raising his own chickens, and being familiar with things mechanical, set about to make the rat proof feeder, which he later started making and selling.....as a small sideline to a larger, different business.

I would also suggest that in doing this endeavor, he has done something much more produtive than most of us......who mostly offer advice.......both good and bad......but otherwise nothing constructive.

Thanks Howard. This is a sideline that is mostly done by a family in the Philippines that runs my shop for me. It isn't lucrative, lots of competition, you are selling a solution, not a product, so if someone imports some plastic or aluminum junk from China and puts it on Amazon people will snap at the cheap "solution" so that limits what you can charge. People need to remember that when I started this the Grandpa feeders were nearly $200.00 plus shipping, now they are almost half of that, and the Chinese imports are going to put them out of the market in the next year or so at least in the U.S.. And then the same thing will happen with all products sourced out of China; the initial dealers will bring in the Granpa clone till it is selling well then the Chinese suppliers will undercut their own dealers the day that the numbers start to decline and there is a race to the bottom on quality and price.

So at the end of a year you are doing well if you clear $6.00 per feeder sold. But all I have to do is finance a container load of feeders for a year till the container arrives and market them. The Filipinos are doing all the hard work of making them. Well, till this year, I am going to run out of the medium feeder so I had to set my equipment back up and build 400 to hold me till another container of feeders can be made and shipped. I own and run a cabinet shop so this is chump change compared to that. Won't make any money once I pay the extra costs of making the feeders in the U.S. even if I charge $15.00 more but people can always choose one of the Philippines produced feeders instead.

So yeah, this has never been a money maker but it fills a need and there are about a dozen Filipinos that are very grateful for a job with full benefits in one hell of a sh*t hole of a country. It helps with that one big objection that cities push when they refuse to allow chickens to be kept in backyards, rodents.

 

[Al Gerhart]

How did they smother?

A few dozen crawled in once they had forced the door open, wormed their way behind the door and trapped all of them. Literally, the bottom compartment was filled with trapped rats. The feed blocked the air from coming in through the feed chute and there were so many rats that they had the door shut tight. They guy said they had torn into each othe fighting to escape. They had thousands of rats though, suddenly the feed had disappeared, they could smell the feed and enough ganged up to get a door open, and a stampede was on. One by one till all the feeders had been overwhelmed and never touched again.

One of the reasons why we tell people to NEVER ever prop open a feeder door is that the biggest effect on implementing a treadle feeder is that this sudden disappearance of feed wrecks havoc on a rat colony. Literally hours later and the rats are hungry and getting desperate, 16 hours later and they are starving. Starving rats turn first on their own young, then each other, then any bait that they had refused to take before. You allow the colony to destroy itself and any survivors will leave. They have no choice but to leave.

Look up that original thread where I started working on the feeder. I had a basket ball sized ball of rats boil up out of a hole under a hanging feeder that I had set on the ground for some poults. Four days later, starving rats were staggering around in the yard looking for anything to eat and my two dogs were killing dozens of them every day. The original feeder was plywood, no spring, a simple 3/4" round steel bar counterweight running in a couple of 1" conduit clips on the side. Had a customer purchase a feeder the other day and she said she still had one of those plywood feeders in operation after eight years.

 

[Howard E]

Marketing aside, when I read Al's accounts of history he has had with multiple users of his feeders, I see where he is coming from as far as his notion that by limiting feed....you can get control of the rat population. They are attracted to and depend on the feed, so if you can limit access to the feed, you can literally starve them out. He has actual experience and history of just that.

Interesting bit of related news a few weeks back where rodent control experts in some major cities were documenting mass urban rat movements as their normal food source (restaurant food scraps in dumpsters) had dried up due to covid 19 imposed restaurant shutdowns. Rats were on the move and dominant groups fighting it out with established colonies as they were all desperate for food. So theory holds up.

So for BYC folks reluctant to use poison bait blocks, there is your solution. And even if you are willing to use bait blocks, they will be much more effective once the feed source dries up. Much more likely to go after the bait when they are starving.

BTW, I have been using one of his rat proof feeders for about 4 years now. I never had rats, but did have infestations of mice due to the spilt feed. Since my birds were wasting more than they ate......dragging it out......I also ordered the extension (which I still have and if I looked all day, might be able to find it) assuming my hard case birds would need it. Not so. Feed loss from birds went to zero with just the feeder alone.

 

[Malquid]

Feed loss from birds went to zero with just the feeder alone.

I am Really looking forward to not losing feed all over the ground. I think it’s been a significant loss and I never gave two hoots until this discussion. That was another important factor in buying this.