'It's like a decaying body': Australian farmers battle mouse plague

A mouse plague is terrorising farmers across large swathes of Australia, with the rodents running rampant around homes and ravaging fields of grain. Farmers are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into either re-planting crops or laying down bait. Geoff Cosgrove, who runs a 14,000-hectare farm in Mingenew, Western Australia (WA), says, "It's a big cost and it's not just the price of the bait." He also says, "They do play with your mind - running around at night, in the ceiling, the air conditioning units. You can hear them and you can smell them - it's like a decaying body."

Cosgrove has been farming for 25 years and says this year's mouse plague is "way worse than the one in 2021." Farmers in WA first began reporting plague-like numbers of mice in March, with their neighbours in South Australia following suit shortly after. Belinda Eastough, an agronomist and farmer, recalls the mouse plague that hit WA about five years ago. Eastough says, "The last time [in 2021], they were in my handbag," from her 5,500-hectare farm in Nolba. She estimates there are about 8,000 to 10,000 mice per hectare in her canola paddocks.

Eastough is urging farmers to bait as soon as possible after planting the seeds. She says, "If the baiter hasn't followed quickly enough behind the seeder, the mice are coming along at night and eating the seed out of the furrows." She also says, "If you finish seeding at 8pm at night and you come in the next day, you'll have rows of crop missing."