It would take a lot of rodents to eat 50 lbs of feed in one day. 100 mice or a dozen rats might eat a pound each day.
On that topic though... In December I started talking to some folks about a mile and a half down the road from us about renting their 2500 bird hen-house as they no longer wanted to continue producing eggs on their farm. When I went to look at it they hadn't cleaned the old litter out of the barn yet and as I walked through there were hundreds of mice running every direction. I figured there must have been thousands of mice in there. They were so thick that you could just gag on the smell from the musk and urine. I decided to rent it from them and I cleaned out about 40 tons of litter, pressure washed and sanitized the place. I then went around and sealed up every possible hole where the mice could have been coming in. After I cleaned it up there were still some mice running around in there. In the middle of the day, I could sit on a stool in the egg room and count several dozen mice at any given time. I set eight "tin cat" traps in the egg room and caught about 500 mice within a week before I had the place completely clear of mice. Those were just the ones that were left after cleaning the place out! By my figuring if there was one mouse for each hen in there (2500) with each mouse eating 3 grams of feed each day, then those 2500 mice would eat 3 tons of feed per year. At the current organic layer feed prices that would be over $1800 a year in feed, and that's with a very conservative estimate on the amount of mice that were in there.
On that topic though... In December I started talking to some folks about a mile and a half down the road from us about renting their 2500 bird hen-house as they no longer wanted to continue producing eggs on their farm. When I went to look at it they hadn't cleaned the old litter out of the barn yet and as I walked through there were hundreds of mice running every direction. I figured there must have been thousands of mice in there. They were so thick that you could just gag on the smell from the musk and urine. I decided to rent it from them and I cleaned out about 40 tons of litter, pressure washed and sanitized the place. I then went around and sealed up every possible hole where the mice could have been coming in. After I cleaned it up there were still some mice running around in there. In the middle of the day, I could sit on a stool in the egg room and count several dozen mice at any given time. I set eight "tin cat" traps in the egg room and caught about 500 mice within a week before I had the place completely clear of mice. Those were just the ones that were left after cleaning the place out! By my figuring if there was one mouse for each hen in there (2500) with each mouse eating 3 grams of feed each day, then those 2500 mice would eat 3 tons of feed per year. At the current organic layer feed prices that would be over $1800 a year in feed, and that's with a very conservative estimate on the amount of mice that were in there.
