Karen and Dan were moving a batch of pullets from the brooder house onto the pasture one evening, and saw three rats scurrying around. You know what that means: if you see three in the open, there must be thirty in hiding somewhere!

We usually don't have much trouble with rats on the pasture. Our chicken feed is in big galvanized range feeders outdoors, and we move the feeders each time we refill them. Any rats who take up residence in tunnels under the feeders have their tunnels exposed when the feeders are moved. Something — probably owls — takes care of the rest.

Only it's not working right now. Natural pest control is great when it works, but when it doesn't, now what? That's the problem with farming. You do the same thing over and over, but the results are different every time!

Well, whatever you believe about "live and let live," you have to draw the line at a rat population explosion. Their population can balloon really fast, and you can't have them overflowing from the pasture into the house! So it was time to take steps.

The simplest method of dealing with rats on a pasture occupied by hens (barring the use of a sniper rifle and a night-vision scope), is to use rat poison in tamper-proof bait stations. Now, I don't like using poison any more than you do, but this is a good example of Plamondon's Law: "The alternatives are even worse."

Bait stations are basically plastic boxes that creatures larger than a rat can't get into. On the better bait stations, the bait is secured one way or another to prevent the rats from carrying it off and possibly leaving it somewhere inappropriate. They have to eat it right there in the bait station, where any crumbs won't cause trouble.

(I also looked up the poison in question, and it's a lot more toxic to rats than it is to chickens, not that the chickens will get any exposure to it with the spiffy bait stations I use.)

I have some J. T. Eaton 903CL Rat Fortress bait stations, which I like very much. They have a clear lid so you can see if the bait needs to be replaced, which is a great feature. They're surprisingly hard to find. [Update: an Alert Reader found them at FarmTek.com — a good outfit that I've done business with many times.] Except for the clear lid, the Motomco rat bait station below seems to be equivalent.

I use the Tomcat brand bait blocks, which are weatherproof one-ounce cubes with a hole in the middle, so you can thread them onto a retaining wire that keeps the rats from walking off with them.

I put three bait stations on the pasture four nights ago, each next to a feeder. I didn't expect much activity, since the feeders were full, but I figured that when the feeders went empty, the rats would switch to the bait. The next morning, though, all the bait had been eaten! The rats preferred it to chicken feed and whole corn, apparently. The next night, almost all the bait had vanished again (one bait station was relatively unvisited). The next night, the same. Last night, some bait was left in all of the stations. [Update: The bait is no longer being eaten at all.]

I think this means that the rat population is starting to dwindle. In the past, I've used bait stations around the house, brooder houses, and barn, and the pattern was the same: initial interest in the bait, followed by lessened activity and a distinct absence of rodents that sometimes lasted as long as a year.

(By the way, if you are of the opinion that "rats are something that happen to other people," you will eventually be proven wrong. Sadly, they're likely to strike your brooder house first, and kill a lot of baby chicks. You don't want that! I recommend using bait stations or snap traps in your brooder house when it's not in use, or bait stations outside it all the time. Having your helpless baby chicks killed by rats is just too heartbreaking.)

You want to get the good bait stations. I just bought some cheap ones, and I regret it now. Too flimsy and insecure. I'm probably going to throw them away and buy some of the ones above.

By the way, there is now an organically certified rat poison. Is that weird, or what?

If you're wondering what kind of grass is best for grass-fed chickens, the answer is, "green grass."

What I mean is, lush green grass is loaded with vitamins and is has lots of available nutrients, but as it fades to brown, it becomes more and more useless to chickens. Chickens aren't ruminants and can't digest cellulose, so it's the soft, green, palatable grasses that count.

Lush spring pasture is the best, of course, and that's easy enough. The trick is providing green grass year-round, or close to it. Cool-season grasses will stay green all winter in mild climates, and warm-season grasses will stay green all summer when the cool-season grasses have all browned off.

Wheat and oats make great pasture for poultry until they die in the summer. Perennial fescues aren't my favorite grasses, but they hold up well year-round, and (as it turns out) poultry don't mind endophytes the way cattle do, so the biggest black mark against fescues simply isn't relevant with poultry.

I've even heard good things said about crabgrass as a poultry grass!

And let's not forget clovers. In a lot of climates, Ladino clover is considered the best, partly because it provides good nutrition (vitamins and protein, but few calories, just like grasses), and partly because its season is later than most grasses, giving lots of summer greenery when the grasses have faded.

So, remember, focus on stuff that stays green first, and worry about the details later, if at all. Most henyards will require a mix of species for long-season greenery.

And for the complete word on green feed for chickens, you'll want to read Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser. Heuser was a poultry science professor at Cornell University, and he wrote this poultry nutrition book right at the tipping point — just after poultry nutrition became fully understood (with the discovery of vitamin B12), but just before the move to factory farms. So the book has a small-flock, traditional mindset that matches the mindset of today's dedicated hobbyists and farmers like us, while still being modern and trustworthy. And it has a whole chapter on green feed! It's a big book, very detailed and thorough, and (unlike more recent books) was written with the intelligent layman in mind. This book can open up new horizons, while saving you from the many feeding blunders that people make.

Keeping predators out of daily-move pasture pens can be difficult, since predators are motivated and can dig their way into the pen. Some things that help:

• Having a dog close to the pens. I'm told this always works. We haven't tried it.
• Electric fence surrounding the area with the chickens. This mostly works. See my Electric Fencing FAQ. Most people think that electric fencing has to be way more elaborate that is really the case.
• Electric fence wire on the pen itself. Does anyone do this but me? Hammer in a few nail-on fence insulators around the perimeter of the chicken pen, about four inches off the ground, add wire, and attach to the fence charger of your choice -- possibly a battery-powered one attached to the pen itself.

These precautions are fairly effective, but sometimes you get a predator who isn't afraid of an electric fence and wreaks havoc in spite of it. I'll talk about that in another post.

I've been shamefully neglecting my Norton Creek Farm Web page. This is the Web page aimed at folks who are interested in buying our farm products, as opposed to raising their own.

So it's actually up to date for once, and has some good info on it, including where to buy our free-range eggs and pastured broilers. (Hint: The Corvallis Wednesday Farmers' Market has moved.)

And the page doubles as a dollar-off coupon if you print it out and bring it to the Farmers' Market.

In other news, Corvallis has rung down the curtain on its free downtown Wi-Fi network, much to my disgust. How am I supposed to keep the kids from each other's throats without Wi-Fi? I bought all those laptops for a reason! I am looking into alternatives...