I haven't done fermented feed in a long time, but I've noticed variations in bags of flock raiser. Sometimes I get a bag with a good date, but the feed is very dark looking and doesn't smell that great. Some of the flocks won't eat it. I bought some recently to boost protein around the molt, and this bag smells better and they are eating it. The lack of consistency is frustrating. Even the "good feed" that I buy in New Sharon sometimes seems like I got the bottom of the pile, where all the finer particles rest, although it consistently smells fresh.
Sorry about the rats. I am having a temporary success with them here, but I've gone to great measures.... The entire run in the old flock is now lined with hardware cloth (even under the dirt floor that I dug up this summer). I latched pieces together with interlocking folds, and where this wasn't possible, I sewed the pieces with florist wire. It seems to be working.
In the hoop coop, I started burying hardware cloth vertically 2 feet down. Every time I completed a little section, you could see where they tunneled along, just below the ground surface for the length of hardware cloth and emerged at the far edge. We kept going with this little game every weekend. I've only done half the coop now, but at the end of the last stretch of hardware cloth, I filled the ground with rocks and put in wadded up scraps of hardware cloth. I drove a series of earth staples very close together down into their tunnel right before the rock pile too, just to further discourage them. I haven't seen any evidence since, and the feed is lasting longer. Of course, they will be running through the compost and eating my winter greens until I convince them to eat poison, but they aren't appearing in the coops right now.
