 We're now almost one week after we seeded and behind me, we've got a field that's a bit uneven to say the least Now one possible reason it could be uneven is rats. We do have a rat population here at Erie. I've got Dr. Grant Singleton with me who specializes in rats to tell us a little bit more about how rats interact with rats. Now I'm also thinking over here looking around here there's an area with a rat fence over to my left. And now that can be good because if you do have a rat problem last year there was a rat problem just here It's good to have what we call a trap crop where you plant an area early about two to three weeks early and then have traps with multiple capture traps entrances like this so the rats go in but can't get back out again. The other thing is yeah where and when should you conduct rat control? The when is now because the main we know from the breeding ecology of rats for every female rat that you remove at this time of the season it's equivalent to removing about 60 rats come the ripening stage of the crop particularly after the fellow period the rats there's big disturbance during the fellow period and the working of the soil so the rats then get moved out get moved to the edges and they aggregate and that's the best time to manage them and so along these areas where there's cover also here in the farm you have irrigation canals underneath and so the entrances of those canals because they're good habitats for rats as well so they need cover and they need areas that are not being disturbed. How? We have here trappy the rat and trappy is is used often right when I talk to farmers and we will show that they will enter into the trap here and he will force his way through and rats yeah trappy's big but see how they sort of crunch down and rats can do that as well the only thing that limits a rat they they can dislocate their shoulder shoulders or whatever it's the width of their head which indicates as the how big the the hole is they can get in and with a mouse you push your finger in a mouse can get into a hole with a rat it's more sort of a probably a large thumb so it's usually about 12 millimetres if you've got a hole bigger than that then the rats can get through and so often you know you don't need a very big opening here the rats will force their way through. When we first seeded Arkeam and I were most concerned about rats what we didn't think about was birds what do we know about birds and their interactions with Seeded Rock? In agricultural systems there were two approaches one is they will will spread um something to feed the animals just prior to the crop coming to the the stage of of Seed the other approach is is is scaring them away. Here here in the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia often it's just using of what you've got here the flags to just cause a bit of of disturbance not well they had seen not far from here where they have a little like a little windmill with a little ratchet on it making a noise and that's to keep the birds away as well so it's it's looking at at noise as a deterrent but really we don't know much at all about the bird problem and again one of the big questions is where are they breeding where are they aggregating and try to see if we can prevent the problem before it does escalate