- 7 weeks ago
A mouse scratching in the wall at 2 a.m. is enough to send most people reaching for poison, but this old farm method takes a different path: it targets rats and mice with a cheap pantry mix while avoiding the dangers of secondary poisoning for dogs, cats, hens, hogs, and wildlife. Elias explains why poison can keep killing long after the rodent is gone, then breaks down the simple baking soda bait his family used on a Lancaster County farm.
The recipe is plain but specific: two parts baking soda to one part food, sweetened with honey, syrup, or molasses for mice, and bound with bacon grease or tallow for rats. He also shows why placement matters, from covered bait boxes to setting them tight against the wall where rodents travel, plus why patience is needed with wary rats. This is practical homestead pest control, old-fashioned farm wisdom, and a hands-on rodent removal guide rooted in everyday kitchen ingredients.
Created for viewers searching for safe rat and mouse control, pet-safe pest solutions, homemade mouse bait, barn pest control, and Amish homestead tips. It also fits searches for farm life advice, pantry pest prevention, and natural rodent control methods for houses, barns, grain rooms, and old buildings.
The recipe is plain but specific: two parts baking soda to one part food, sweetened with honey, syrup, or molasses for mice, and bound with bacon grease or tallow for rats. He also shows why placement matters, from covered bait boxes to setting them tight against the wall where rodents travel, plus why patience is needed with wary rats. This is practical homestead pest control, old-fashioned farm wisdom, and a hands-on rodent removal guide rooted in everyday kitchen ingredients.
Created for viewers searching for safe rat and mouse control, pet-safe pest solutions, homemade mouse bait, barn pest control, and Amish homestead tips. It also fits searches for farm life advice, pantry pest prevention, and natural rodent control methods for houses, barns, grain rooms, and old buildings.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00It is the sound that wakes you. Not a crash, nothing so honest as that. A scratching. A small,
00:08dry scrabbling inside the wall by your head, in the dead quiet of two in the morning.
00:14You lie there, and you tell yourself, it is the house settling. It is not the house settling.
00:21It is a mouse, and where there is one, there are forty, and right now, while you lie there listening,
00:27they are in your grain, in your wiring, gnawing the foam off your pipes, and leaving their filth
00:34across the shelf where you keep your flour. Most folks reach for the same two answers,
00:41poison or a pest company. And here is the trouble with both, the trouble nobody tells you until your
00:48dog is sick or your barn cat is dead. The poison that kills the mouse does not stop with the
00:56mouse.
00:57I am Elias. My family came over from the Palatinate in 1838, and we have farmed this
01:04same Lancaster County ground ever since. On a working farm, you live close to mice your whole
01:11life, closer than any city man ever does, and you learn early that the easy answer is often the one
01:18that costs you the most. So today, I am going to show you the old way we kill rats and
01:25mice,
01:25a way that is deadly to the rodent and harmless to your dog, your cat, your hens, your hogs,
01:33and the hawk and the owl that hunt your fields. Cheap as dirt, made from what is already in your
01:39kitchen, and it does not put a single thing into your animals that you would not eat yourself.
01:46Let me start with the part that changes everything, the part that explains why people poison their barns
01:52for years and never win. The mouse you catch is not your problem. The mouse you catch is already too
02:00late.
02:01Your problem is the ten you did not catch and the forty they will become by autumn.
02:07I learned this from my mother, of all people, in the grain room off the back of the barn. A
02:14pest fellow had come
02:15through the county selling his poison, and a neighbor had bought it, and within the month that neighbor's
02:20good barn cat was dead. My mother never forgot it. She took me into the grain room and she said,
02:28Elias, listen to me. Anything strong enough to kill the rat in your wall is strong enough to kill the
02:34cat
02:34that eats the rat. She called it the poison that does not stop. The rat eats the bait and dies
02:42slow,
02:43and while it is dying, slow and sick and easy to catch, the cat takes it, or the owl takes
02:49it,
02:50or the dog finds it under the porch, and the poison goes right on up the line into the animal
02:56you love.
02:57That is the thing the label is quiet about. They call it secondary poisoning, and it is the reason a
03:04man can bait his property for three years and bury two cats and still have rats. So the old people
03:11wanted
03:11a thing that killed the rodent and then simply stopped. Did its work and went no further. And
03:18it turns out there is such a thing, and it has been sitting in the kitchen the whole time.
03:23Quick word before I go further. The old methods my family uses, there is more of it than fits in
03:30any
03:30one video. I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long version.
03:38If you
03:38want it, it is there. I will not mention it again. Now, the bait. And I want to be plain
03:46with you about
03:46how it works, because the plainness is what makes it safe. The base is baking soda. Plain baking soda,
03:55the same box my wife Esther keeps by the stove, the kind you can buy for a dollar anywhere. By
04:02itself,
04:02a mouse will not touch it, so the whole craft is in hiding it inside something they cannot resist.
04:09Here is why it does what it does, and I will tell you straight so you understand it and do
04:14not just
04:14trust me. A rat and a mouse cannot belch and cannot be sick. Their bodies are not built to bring
04:21anything
04:21back up, not gas, not food, nothing. It only goes one way through them. So when they eat baking soda
04:29mixed
04:30with food, and it meets the acid and the moisture in their stomach, it makes a gas, the same fizz
04:36you
04:36have seen a hundred times in a glass. And they have no way to release it. That pressure is what
04:42does
04:43them in. No nerve poison, no blood thinner, nothing that travels onward, a thing the body cannot vent.
04:50And here is the mercy of it for every other animal on your place.
04:54A dog can belch. A cat can be sick. A hen, a hog, a child, all of them can bring
05:02it up or pass it the
05:04ordinary way. The very thing that makes it deadly to a rat makes it harmless to nearly everything else
05:11that walks your farm. That is not a trick. That is just how those small bodies are made.
05:17Now here is where most folks go wrong and get no result, and then say the old way does not
05:24work.
05:24They mix it half and half, one scoop of soda to one scoop of food. Too weak. The old measure
05:32my mother
05:33used was two parts baking soda to one part food. Twice the soda. That is the whole secret of the
05:41thing
05:41actually working. For the food you hide it in, you have two roads, and they depend on whether you are
05:48after mice or after rats, because they do not want the same supper. For mice, go sweet. Mice have a
05:57powerful love of sweet things. So you take a cup of baking soda, half a cup of cornmeal or a
06:04plain cornbread
06:05mix, and a good spoon of something sweet to bind it and pull them in. A little honey, a little
06:12molasses,
06:13a drizzle of syrup, about what you would put on a pancake, no more. Work it together until it holds.
06:20Mice will go straight to that where they might circle a strange new thing for days they take to this
06:27fast. For rats, throw the sweet away. Rats are bigger and warier, and they want
06:34richness. They want fat. So for rats, it is the same two-part soda to one-part cornmeal, but instead
06:43of honey, you bind it with grease. A spoon of bacon grease, or better, a little beef tallow, because
06:50tallow keeps and does not turn rancid near as fast as bacon grease in the heat. That fat smell is
06:57what
06:57brings a rat in. Same deadly soda underneath, different coat to suit the customer. That is the whole
07:05recipe. Cheap, made from the pantry, and there is not one thing in it that frightens me to have near
07:12the dog or the hens. Now, mixing it right is only half. Where and how you set it out is
07:20the other half,
07:21and this is the part the old trappers knew in their bones. First, get it off the open floor
07:28and into a covered box. You do not want it out where the cat can lick it up, not because
07:34the soda
07:35would harm her, but because you want the rodents eating it, not your animals cleaning it up. An old
07:41coffee tin laid on its side with a rodent-sized hole. A wooden box with a mouse door cut in
07:48it. Anything that
07:50lets a mouse in and keeps a paw or a beak or a child's fingers out. Covered, dim, and tight.
07:59That also keeps the bait dry and keeps the mice feeling safe, which matters more than you would
08:05think. Second, and write this on your hand, set it tight against the wall. Never out in the open
08:13middle of the room. A rat and a mouse have poor eyes and they do not like open ground. They
08:20run the edges,
08:21the baseboards, the wall lines, with their whiskers brushing the wall the whole way because the wall
08:28tells them where they are and the open floor tells them they are exposed. Set your box flush against the
08:35wall, in a corner, behind the bin, along the run where you have seen their droppings and you have
08:42set it square in their highway. Set it in the middle of the floor and they may never come to
08:48it at all.
08:50Third, have a little patience, because a rat is a suspicious creature. There is a word for it,
08:57they are neophobic, which only means they fear a new thing in their territory. Put a strange box in their
09:05run and a wary old rat may circle it for two or three days before he trusts it enough to
09:11feed.
09:12So do not set your bait at night and pronounce it a failure in the morning.
09:17Set it and leave it and check it across several days. The good news with this bait is that once
09:24they do take to it, they take to it hard, because it is hidden in food they truly want, not
09:31sitting
09:31in a bare metal trap that smells of your hand and of danger. And do not throw out the old
09:38ways while
09:38you wait. The plain snap trap still works, baited with a smear of that same sweet or that same fat.
09:46A good barn cat still works, the way one has on this farm for as long as there has been
09:52a farm here.
09:53And Esther's cat has kept the flower room clean of mice better than any contraption I ever bought.
09:59The bait and the trap and the cat together, that is a net the rodents do not get through.
10:06Where the poison route catches the homeowner is they lean on the one thing and skip the rest.
10:12Now let me tell you who profits from you not knowing the dollar box of baking soda would have done
10:18it.
10:19Not to stir you up, just so you see the shape of the thing, because once you see it, you
10:25will not
10:26unsee it. There is no money in baking soda. None. No company can patent it. No service can bill you
10:34monthly for it. The dollar store already sells it to you for the price of a candy bar. But there
10:40is a
10:41great deal of money in the poison and in the visit. A bait that kills slow brings the man back
10:48out next
10:49month to bait again. A poison sold by the pail keeps selling by the pail year on year because it
10:57never
10:57quite ends the problem. It only manages it. And the homeowner who buries a cat and still has rats does
11:06not blame the poison. He calls the company again. I am not telling you a man sat in a room
11:12and schemed
11:13this. No one had to. It is worse than a conspiracy because it is a system nobody had to coordinate.
11:21It simply pays better to manage a rat forever than to end him once with a dollar box of soda.
11:29The old farmer ended it once and for almost nothing, because nobody was paying him to come back.
11:36So there it is, the whole of it. Two parts baking soda to one part food.
11:42That is the measure people get wrong. Sweet with honey or syrup for mice. Rich with bacon grease or
11:50tallow for rats. Hidden in a covered box so only the rodent gets it. Set tight against the wall where
11:58they run, not out in the open. And given a few days of patience for a wary rat to trust
12:04it. Keep a
12:06snap trap going and a good cat on the place, and you have a thing that clears your barn and
12:12your pantry
12:12without putting one drop of poison into the animals you would grieve to lose.
12:19Now I want to hear from you. I am asking honest because I learned the whole country from these
12:25comments. Tell me in the comments below what you have been fighting, mice or rats, and what you have
12:32tried before this. And tell me your county and how old your house or barn is, because the older the
12:39building and the more ways in it has, the harder this fight runs. I read them, and I learn where
12:46the
12:46trouble is worst by what you write me. Next time, I want to walk the outside of the house with
12:53you,
12:53and show you where these things are actually getting in. Because killing the ones inside is only half
13:00the battle, and the folks in real trouble are the ones who keep killing and killing and never close
13:07the door the mice are walking through. I will show you the gaps you cannot see, and how the old
13:14people
13:14sealed a house tight against them, so you are not fighting this same fight again next winter.
13:21A farm is a place you share, whether you like it or not, with more creatures than you ever invited.
13:28The old people understood that, and they never tried to poison the whole world clean. They just drew
13:36a firm line at the door of the grain room and the flower shelf, and they held that line with
13:42cheap,
13:42plain things, and a good cat, and a bit of patience. The house that stays fed through the winter
13:49is the house that remembers how to keep the small thieves out without poisoning everything else under its roof.
13:57The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.
14:04and she turns out there to be twofolding.
14:04The house that is for a long-term home, is that,