Baking soda for rat control

[Birdielee]

Are they eating the poisoned rats live or dead?

 

[cmom]

Lol about the poison salesman. Too funny.
I like the idea of your feeders but I have over 500 birds right now and a lot of pens between breeder pens and grow out pens. It wouldn't be cost efficient for me to buy a feeder or feeders for that many pens.
I think its been well over two years maybe three since I had the rat problem so just maintaining stations seems to be working and isn't very expensive.
I totally agree about how smart rats are and agree you can never trap them gone.
I think the reason poison worked well for me was because I put so much out at a time. Plenty for every rat and then some and then I switched poisons often. I think that gave the opportunity for so many to take the poison before getting smart to it.
Rats breed fast, really fast. You have to have a plan that eliminates them faster then they breed. Or I guess you can buys some of the feeders and hope they move on.

I'm in the same boat. I change baits too now and then. I usually have anywhere from a couple hundred birds plus plus. I have very rarely found a dead rat. I'm still convinced they go down into their tunnels and die. I did originally use the Tomcat baits but the rats weren't toucking them. The feed store down the road used the Just One Bite bait. I bought some and tried it and the rats gobbled it up and as I said I didn't find any dead rats laying around.

 

[Birdielee]

Search for "secondary poisoning from rodent bait blocks". Seems to be rare, but there are plenty of BYC members who get their knickers in a bunch about it, especially when it comes to raptors. Owls and such.

And if that is a concern, there are bait blocks that do not have this side affect.......like Terad.....with vitamin D3 as the active ingredient.

Ugh. Thanks. I searched what you said and really don't want to cause anything to be in death throes for up to a week. I'll go back to being more diligent about making food unavailable in the afternoon, and research the just one bite bait. I guess I'm not quite to the point of bait.
Ah, but I just remembered that in the last 2 days they dug and chewed 2 potatoes and rook some bites out of almost 10 tomatoes. I assume it was the rats. Not cool.

 

[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]

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.

 

[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.