The stench hits you first. A sweet, cloying rot that hangs over the paddocks like a curse. Then the rustling. Thousands of tiny claws scrabbling in the dark. Australian farmers are living through a mouse plague that agronomists are calling ‘biblical’. But the real story isn’t the rodents. It’s the system that let them breed.
Sources on the ground in New South Wales and Queensland describe fields swarming with mice. One grazier told me the ground ‘moves like a living thing’ at dusk. Another, a wheat farmer near Dubbo, said his crop losses are now above 40 per cent. ‘It’s like a decaying body in the shed,’ he said. ‘You can smell the rot where they’ve chewed through the grain bags.’
The official line from the state government is that this is a ‘natural cycle’. But documents obtained by this newspaper tell a different story. Internal emails from the Department of Primary Industries warn that years of drought-breaking rains followed by a warm autumn created ‘perfect breeding conditions’. The department had data predicting the outbreak as early as last September. No action was taken.
‘They knew,’ says Dr Helen Forster, an ecologist who has studied mouse plagues for two decades. ‘We have models that can forecast these events with 80 per cent accuracy. But the agricultural lobby blocks any preventive culling because it might harm export markets.’ The result? Farmers are now spending up to $150,000 on poison baits that barely dent the population.
The financial toll is staggering. The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics estimates that this single outbreak will cost the sector more than $1.2 billion. That’s lost grain, destroyed machinery (mice chew through wiring), and contaminated stock feed. But the real hit is to rural communities. In the town of Walgett, the local hardware store has run out of traps and poison. The pub has closed. Farmers are talking about walking off the land.
Yet there is money to be made. Uncovered contracts show that the chemical giant Bayer has its rodenticide production lines running at full capacity. Its stock price has risen 8 per cent since the outbreak began. The company declined to comment, but internal sales targets obtained by this paper show a projected 40 per cent increase in profit for its crop science division this quarter.
‘It’s a disaster economy,’ says Senator Janet Rice, who has called for a royal commission into agricultural policy. ‘The same companies that sell the poisons are the ones lobbying against long-term solutions.’ She points to research from CSIRO that shows integrated pest management, using natural predators and crop rotation, can cut mouse populations by 70 per cent without a single pellet of poison.
But that research has been shelved. A memo from the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, leaked to this newspaper, warns that non-chemical methods are ‘economically unviable’ for large-scale farms. The memo was co-authored by a former Bayer employee. Conflict of interest? The authority says it has ‘robust protocols’.
Meanwhile, the mice keep breeding. A female can produce 500 offspring in a single season. The plague shows no signs of abating. Farmers are now burning their fields to try to starve them out. The smoke hangs over the plains like a shroud.
‘We are watching the land die,’ one farmer told me. ‘And no one in Canberra gives a damn.’
This is not a natural disaster. It is a policy failure, compounded by corporate greed. And the bodies are still piling up.
