It has also been revealed too late for some grain growers and communities that the zinc phosphide dose previously approved for use hasn’t been anywhere near effective.
The industry, led by Grain Producers Australia, has in the past fortnight been granted an emergency permit to double the dose so that baits are fatal for every mouse.
No bait
But Schilling is short of the key ingredient and unable to provide bait.
“We have talked to our suppliers in India and I really feel for them. One of our suppliers can’t get people to come to work because of COVID and his workforce is dying on him. That really hits home. We have a mice problem and they can’t make the tech and this tech goes worldwide. There are not too many manufacturers.”
Mice have been wreaking havoc across prime farmland stretching all the way from Toowoomba in Queensland down to the border between NSW and Victoria. Dean Sewell
Schilling is a third-generation farmer, who started making baits at commercial scale about six years ago in response to a mouse plague in his home state of South Australia. He’s worried about the financial and emotional toll on farmers as mice run rampant through crops just planted in NSW.
“They attack the emerging crop and rip off the shoot,” he says. “There is a big mental health issue. Just think about a guy who has spent $3 million sowing his crop and then mice come along and he doesn’t know whether that crop is going to come up or not or whether he has to resow. That is just two weeks of hell, take it from a farmer.”
Even worse for those farmers who followed the expert advice, applying sterilised mouse bait costing upwards of $5.50 a kilogram across their paddocks, is that it didn’t stop the plague.
Grain Producers Australia (GPA) chairman Andrew Weidemann says farmers noticed zinc phosphide baits weren’t killing anywhere near enough mice.
The GPA, backed by CSIRO studies funded by grain growers, sought and was granted an emergency 12-month permit from the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) to double the dose of zinc phosphide.
The application for the APVMA permit was backed by farm chemical importers and manufacturers. However, the double dose product is yet to reach farmers and hasn’t been trialled in the field.
Meanwhile, the farmers are concerned about a move by the NSW government to seek urgent approval from the APVMA for the use of the chemical bromadiolone as part of a $50 million package to combat the mouse plague.
One farm industry leader described it as a napalm solution that would send a terrible message to export markets and put native wildlife, farm dogs and other animals at risk.
‘Really stressful’
Maggie Watson, an ecologist at the Charles Sturt Institute in Albury-Wodonga, warns bromadiolone is a highly lethal second-generation poison that causes secondary poisoning in wild and domestic animals.
“Because it is highly palatable, it can cause primary poisoning to animals that eat the dead or dying rodents and has been known to cause problems in a range of animals including domestic dogs, native mammals such as possums, and wetland and sea birds,” she says.
“When bromadiolone is placed on the soil, it can leach into low-nutrient soils and can bioaccumulate in insects, such as woodlice and cockroaches, and then be passed through the food chain.
“There are several alternative options available that have less risk of secondary poisoning, such as the first-generation rodenticides warfarin and coumatetralyl for home use and coumatetralyl and zinc phosphide for crops.”
CSIRO researcher and mice expert Steve Henry has been on the road speaking to farmers and rural communities about the plague and is alarmed by reports of the rodents still breeding so close to winter.
“With the rainfall prior to Easter, lots of farmers were hopeful that might put an end to their mice but while it slowed them down for a while, farmers are saying that, if anything, mouse numbers are increasing again in some locations, which is a little bit concerning because it is late in the breeding season,” he says.
Speaking on the road to Croppa Creek near the Queensland border, Henry says conditions remain perfect for mice to breed – warm temperatures, lots of foods, lots of shelter and moisture.
Henry has spoken at 25 community meetings in the past few weeks and listened to the tales of financial and emotional distress caused by the plague.
“It is really stressful and hard to deal with. A guy on one property had to burn a 3000 bale haystack. That’s a $120,000 loss right there,” he says.
“And it is not just the economic loss, it is living with the mice day-in, day-out. Even last night and at some presentations last week mice were running around the floor while I was presenting.”
You have never seen happier mice.
— Al Karanough, Coonamble mayor
Henry doubts there will be any outbreak in Sydney of the magnitude seen in the bush and major regional centres.
“I’d say no (to plague in Sydney) because there is simply not enough food in those systems and there is already competition in that system from a whole range of animals in the city,” he says.
Survival
Henry is advising farmers to apply zinc phosphide baits as they sow, but concedes that advice is now a little late with much of the crop already in the ground and in some regions being attacked by mice.
“We think numbers will plateau through the winter because they stop breeding and the harshness of the winter will determine levels of survival,” he says.
Farmers are being warned to prepare to bait again in spring when the breeding cycle resumes.
Henry, who led studies that showed the previously approved zinc phosphide dose was only working effectively on 50 per cent of mice, welcoms the move to up the potency so that every grain of bait represent a lethal dose.
Baiting and trapping has helped the NSW town, Coonamble, get on top of the mouse plague but not before a horror period when the mice ate their way through supermarkets and into homes, even through boxes to get to poisoned grain.
Coonamble mayor Al Karanough says farmers and townsfolk banded together to kill the mice helped by some heavy rain.
“The whole town and all farmers baited,” he says. “Farmers here didn’t want to lose their livelihoods so they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I mean hundreds of thousands, on poisoned wheat.”
Karanough can laugh about it now but will never forget how bad it got at the height of the plague when mice even ate the drugs out of the chemist in Gulargambone.
“You have never seen happier mice,” he says. Lobby group NSW Farmers estimates the cost of the plague at $1 billion and counting.
A study done after a 1993 plague, rated the nation’s worst until now, estimated the damage at about $100 million.
Australia has a plague locust commission, funded by the Commonwealth, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland, to respond to any outbreaks and keeps a stockpile of insecticide at the ready. There is no such body for mice plagues but the GPA says it is time to consider following the locust model.
Schilling says there is a mice plague about very five years somewhere in Australia’s grain-growing region and it wasn’t economically viable for bait producers to have big volumes of a hazardous chemical like zinc phosphide sitting around just in case.
“We did have a stockpile of tech but chewed through that in three months,” he says.
Bait makers like Schilling, a farmer first who took up production out of necessity and sells Last Supper direct at a small margin, have to account for every gram of zinc phosphide because it is on the list of Chemicals of Security Concern based on the potential for its use in terrorist attacks.
He said governments should look at the locust model and, in the absence of onshore manufacturing capacity, consider owning a stockpile of zinc phosphide big enough to avoid shortages in times of mice plagues.
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Poison chalice for farmers overwhelmed by mice plague - The Australian Financial Review
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