Today, many households keep a pantry stocked with emergency supplies in an outage or natural disaster. This includes staples such as grains, often held in sealed containers to prevent spoilage. If you have a home grain storage system, it’s essential to choose the right store for your grain storage. The right store location can reduce the risk of rodents getting into your stored grain, and it can also help protect the value of your investment.
In the past, grain was stored in warehouses lined with concrete or steel. In some parts of the world, these buildings still stand. If your store is located inside a warehouse, you can more easily protect your grain by putting a pest barrier around your storage area. The best way to protect your stored grain from insects and rodents is to keep it indoors and away from the open air. Because of their preferred habitats, vermin love to find stored food items close to their nests and dens—the ideal trash trove for them!
If you don’t have access to a warehouse that’s still in use, look for structures still occupied by other businesses or residents. These structures will usually be made of wood; they may also be steel or concrete if they were built before 1940 (This is changing as more buildings are converted into warehouses). If you do find a building used as an old one-story warehouse, make sure you take steps to keep vermin out of this building. Traps for rodents can help keep unwanted prying critters away from your grain storage at McNaughts location. For example, you could use old car tires filled with dry cement or wood chips. Place these traps where there’s plenty of room for them; if there aren’t many cracks and holes in the floor that rats can fit through, place several traps there instead; consider placing one trap near each entryway that leads into the building but not past it (or someplace that many critters will have to go around the traps, like behind a partition or door frame). If there’s an active business that uses the building, such as an old textile mill, then be sure that all workers are aware of hungry vermin in the area and clean up any refuse immediately. You might also want to enlist the help of a pest control company to take care of any stray rodents found on your premise.
This isn’t just about rats—other vermin may make their way inside during regular building maintenance, and you could end up with lots of mice scurrying in your grain storage structures. You can prevent these unwanted pests from entering your warehouse by sealing off all openings and holes around your grain bin. When you are closed for business, you may want to consider using a metal tarp to cover large holes or “doorways” where rodents can travel into the building. If you have more than one loading dock at each entranceway into your buildings (which would be ideal), use rat bait bags or steel wire mesh to keep even larger critters out of your buildings’ most vulnerable areas (like roofs), which can be secured with heavy-duty plastic bags that have been sealed with duct tape.
