After the Harvest: Why Rats Head for Welsh Farmhouses Now

There's a phone call we get every year, usually from late August onwards, and it always starts the same way: "We've never had rats before." It comes from farmhouses outside Carmarthen, smallholdings up the valleys, and increasingly from ordinary houses on the edges of towns, anywhere with fields behind the fence. And the caller is very often right. They haven't had rats before. The rats were perfectly happy where they were, until the combine came through.

What the harvest actually changes

Through summer, a field of standing crops is a rodent's idea of paradise: food overhead, cover on all sides, and no reason to go anywhere near a building full of people and dogs. Cutting removes all three at once. The food is carted away, the cover becomes stubble, and the resident rats and mice, which had everything they needed a hundred metres from your door, suddenly need somewhere new before the nights turn cold. The nearest warm, dry structure with any food at all wins. That's your grain store, your feed shed, your stable, and if the gaps allow it, your kitchen.

The early signs, in the order you'll meet them

You'll usually hear them before you see them: scratching and scurrying above the ceiling or inside a wall, mostly after dark. Then come the droppings, along walls, behind the feed bins, under the sink, and the less famous signs: greasy smear marks along a skirting where fur brushes the same route nightly, gnawed corners on feed bags, and holes in earth banks or under sheds that weren't there in July. On a farm, watch the feed first. Spilled or accessibly stored feed is the single biggest welcome mat you can put out.

The part you can do yourself, and should

We make our living dealing with rodents, and we'll still tell you: the cheapest hour you'll spend on this is a walk around the building in September with a torch and a pessimistic eye. A rat needs surprisingly little, gaps under doors, a broken airbrick, the hole where the pipework enters, and mice need less still. Seal what you can, get feed into gnaw-proof bins with lids, clear the clutter and overgrowth along the walls that gives them covered routes, and you've prevented a good share of the winter's problems before they start. Our pages on rats and mice cover the signs in more detail.

When it's beyond a torch and a tube of sealant

Established rodents on a working farm are a different job from a mouse in a larder: livestock, feed, pets and children all constrain what can be used and where, and an infestation with a food source will shrug off the odd shop-bought trap. That's where a planned treatment earns its money, baiting or trapping matched to the site, followed up until the activity stops, with the proofing advice included so next autumn's arrivals find the doors shut. It's the bulk of what we do from now until spring, for farms and households alike, right across the Carmarthen area and the rest of South and Mid Wales. More on how we work is on our pest control page.

Get in touch

Hearing something in the walls since the fields were cut? Get in touch before it settles in for the winter.