Horse Stables and Farms: How to Manage Rodent Control

By design, stables are open to the elements, full of warm and cozy bedding, and offer food and water to animals. However, rodents are more than just a nuisance in the barn. They can contaminate food, destroy equipment, chew through wires, spread disease, and destroy your tack through chewing and waste. Once they are established, their populations grow like crazy. A single female rodent can easily have up to 140 babies per year, and those babies reach sexual maturity within five weeks. Exponential growth means 2 rodents can turn into 15,000 rodents in a year. So, how do you keep rodents outs of your stables?

The tried and true method is to get a few barn cats. It may seem like a glib response, but barn cats do a relatively decent job of helping control rodents on a farm. Of course, if you choose to have barn cats, you take responsibility for their health. They must have fresh food and water, get regular checkups, and be spayed or neutered. If you do not want to take on that responsibility, then barn cats are not the solution to your rodent problem.

Holes in the wall around pipes provide easy access to rodents!

Your first step is exclusion. While stables are not airtight, you want to fill any cracks with caulk, including areas where pipes and wires enter the building. Add door seals to the doors. Consider using chicken wire to cover larger open spaces.

Another critical step is to protect your food. Even if it is in a closed container, rats can smell food. They can chew through plastic storage containers. So, keep all food in sealed steel containers. You also need to clean up after yourself. Sweep up any feed. Loose food attracts rodents. In addition, if you set baited traps, you do not want to have to compete with spilled food.

Contact a professional pest control agency like Flick for a targeted pest control plan. Every stable or farm is different. That means the approach that works at one may not work in another. At Flick, we bring our SMART technology to your rural spaces. That means we can monitor and track where rodents appear, then tailor our pest control to their most traveled routes. Want to find out more? Contact us today.