Our First Country Problem: Rodents Attacked Our Food Storage

Rodent damage to our Hard White Wheat bags.

Having lived in the city for the last 21 years, we have had to deal with ants, roaches, spiders, and noisy crickets. Never once did we have to deal with a rodent problem and likewise never had to defend our plentiful food storage.

In 2010, we constantly bought as much food storage as we could afford. I was working the equivalent of two jobs and we were lucky enough to pack away a year's worth of food for our family of eight. That was no small accomplishment.

We proudly displayed it on our kitchen loft for many months until a SurvivalBlog article got me to thinking "Maybe I shouldn't make this public knowledge." Some strategically placed cutouts turned our kitchen loft into a nice hidden cache. I found work lockers to be another great place to store additional food and put up a good 30-40 cans of soup there.

Another food storage casualty.

So our food storage had been safe...until now. When we packed up our food storage to relocate to northern Arizona, I made a great score in finding a DAILY discarding of big, wide meat boxes from our local Walmart butcher. These boxes held a ton, had nice notches for handles on the sides and were very sturdy. Before I returned from my Oklahoma journey, Wifey had packed 117 boxes with the help of the girls.

The food storage we bought in #10 cans was still in it's original boxing. The rest of our food storage was packed in mylar bags with oxygen eaters courtesy of our local LDS Cannery.  We packed hundreds of these mylar bags in boxes from Walmart and lugged them north. Little did I know, field mice were on standby, waiting for our arrival...and the handy little handle holes on the side of each box meant INSTANT ACCESS for our new friends.

They got several rice bags.

I also didn't know that mice would chew right through our cardboard boxes to get to our powdered milk.  Even the mylar bags proved no barrier for their little nibblers. We discovered tragedy today when we were looking through boxes for handles to add to the little girls' clubhouse wall. There they were, plain as day...mouse turds, all over the inside of the box.

As we began moving boxes away from the wall, the horror became more clear. They had chewed through the cardboard on several boxes and contents were spilled out onto the floor. We've been here three weeks and today we pulled 21 mylar bags aside that had holes in the bags.

So we spent half of our Sunday, which was very enjoyable up to this point, taking food storage out of cardboard boxes and putting them into home depot buckets and plastic boxes with secure lids.

Our question now is: "What do we do with the damaged items?" Do we have to throw it away? Some bags have such small holes in them that it seems hardly large enough to squeeze a rice grain through it. Having worked so hard to save up the money AND bag it all ourselves, I'm hoping somebody can tell me how to save this stuff. I guess the worst case scenario would be to feed it to chickens, once we get some more.

Besides the rice, we also lost:

All these bags have tiny little holes in them ranging from the large ones I imaged at the top of this post to little bitty holes only big enough for one grain of rice to slip through. So, are any of these salvageable? Should we dump them out and sift it for rodent feces to see if the bag got contaminated? Can we make the powdered milk and boil it or something to make it safe to drink?

I hope it's not all wasted.

~OJD