Infested with Rats!!! Rat Proof Chicken Feeders Local Portland Vancouver Washington?

[whitg]

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[Alagrace]

Thank you all. I have had to put out a bait station. We have so many. Our girls will not roost anymore and we live in the city which our neighbors aren't very happy we have chickens to begin with. I've set electronic traps, snap traps, and locked all our food up at night in metal containers. Our coops have fresh bedding. We will see if this helps. If this doesn't help we might try elevating our coop to expose the nest under it.

 

[RonP]

I don't understand why anyone would resort to poison when it's the best front line deterrent. If used properly and not in pellet form then it's safe and should be a mainstay as much as feed and water dispensers in your run. If used from the start there is never a problem or even whisker of one.

To resort to implies it's the last line of defense. In reality it should be the first.

X2

Since maintaining a station 7 years ago, I have not seen any signs of pest rodents.

My dog would have to eat a pile of dead rats to see any detrimental secondary effects.

Without an established colony, little chance of this ever happening.

There is an enormous amount of information out there to support my opinion that it really is not an issue, but again, this is only an opinion based on my own research.

 

[Al Gerhart]

To answer the original question, no, I don't wholesale the feeders to that area. We sell to very few wholesalers because they usually want to double the price of the feeder. I don't do this to make a living, just a huge hobby, so I find it hard to understand why a company needs to double the price for stocking a few products on a shelf and taking the money from a customer. Twenty percent, thirty percent, maybe... but setting up a factory, hiring labor, buying materials, and advertising the product has to be worth a whole lot more than selling the end product in my opinion. This kind of greed is why we lost so much of our manufacturing to China, the product can be bought by Walmart for $9.33 instead of $10.33 from a U.S. factory.

So to keep the prices down as low as possible we ship direct to the customer. The shipping is high, it is a large and bulky product so dimensional weight kicks in. You can cut the shipping in half by using our multi packed feeders, around 20% shipping savings if you ship two, up to 46% if you ship four feeders, so find some neighbors or a local chicken group and put in a bulk order. We even have a Slow Boat shipping program where your order sits for up to two to three weeks and is combined with other orders in that zip code, all shipped to the most central address in that zip code so the other two or three customers pick up at that central location. I wish we could do more but we have a $6.00 profit margin built in at our current price.

So sorry about the high shipping although I consider it a bargain to take a two cubic foot package across the U.S. and to someone's home. Shipping to a business address is cheaper and there are far out in the boonie locations that cost extra too, both of those can add $7.00 to a package. We ship FedEx, USPS, and UPS but FedEx Ground is always the cheapest unless you are in our state then the post office will be a buck cheaper.

 

[Al Gerhart]

A year later and we do have a dealer in Eugene Washington. Look for the Eugene Backyard Farmer.

Shipping has just exploded in price the last two years. You go back to when we developed this product on Backyardchickens and we could ship to Washington State for around $25.00, not it is as much as 50% higher to ship there if you ship only one feeder. The UPS rep said that they were losing so much money moving Amazon packages that they had to bump up everyone else's rates to survive. Makes no sense why they continue if that is true. Selling through Amazon is so dang expensive though that we have been resisting getting involved with them but they have the cheapest shipping rates. Still, competing feeders that are sold on Amazon have to price in the selling costs plus freight to the Amazon warehouses so we are still price competitive with the metal and plastic feeders and still have the price of the Grandpa feeders even with our higher shipping.