After more than 10 years as a migrant construction worker, Buy Roeun became interested in raising rats for meat. He had seen grilled rats for sale as street food in his hometown of Phnom Sampov, in Battambang province, but the 34-year-old did not intend to compete with the vendors of wild rats.

“I saw that the way rats are raised commercially in Thailand produces hygienic delicious meat and had the idea of doing the same,” he said.

Since migrating to Thailand to work as a construction worker in 2005, Roeun had enjoyed the rat meat of Thailand. He reasoned that it could be done in his hometown. In 2017, while working by day in construction, he began to study the art of raising rats. Once he thought he understood the correct techniques, he raised ten of his own.

“Although I live in Battambang which sells a lot of rat meat, I do not follow their example very much. I employ the Thai way of raising them,” he added.

Once he began raising them in Thailand, he started sending pregnant mothers to his parents, who followed his instructions and soon had hundreds of animals.

In addition to doing raising the animals, he created a Khmer language Facebook page “Sovanracha Rat Farm.” He updates the page often.

“When I started to create online content, I found that I attracted interest from many people. There was plenty of demand, and whenever I returned to my hometown, I sold many of my rats,” he said.

In early 2021, as Covid-19 spread across the two countries, Roeun made the decision to return home and commit to farming rats full time.

Although he has 400 to 500 rats on the farm at any one time, they are in various stages of growth, so he can’t sell them all at once. In addition, many people buy breeding pairs to try to establish their own farm.

He could say exactly how many people had tried to raise their own animals, did said most bought just one or two breeding pairs.

“Some of them have succeeded but many have failed because they lost interest. Only when you have a passion for this career will you achieve success,” he said.

Rats can reproduce five or six times per year, with each dam having from two to ten pups. Roeun said most of his breeders produced around five babies per litter.

Breeding the rats to saleable weight can take two and a half to three months old for females and three and a half to four months old for males.

Males can grow up to 1kg in five months, although most are not fattened for so long, and are sold at 550-700 grammes.

46-year-old rat breeder Mao Don, who bought more than 10 rats from Roeun, said he started buying them just over four months age.

“My ten breeders have already produced over 100 offspring and I have been able to sell breeding pairs to new farmers,” he told The Post.

He claimed that raising them was far easier than farming cows, as you did not need to watch them all the time.

“Once I have about 200 breeders, I will start selling meat at the market,” he said.

“I do not want to replace the field rat market, but establish a separate market. They will market wild rats and I will market farmed rats,” Roeun said.

He intends to diversify the market rather than compete with existing wild rat vendors.

Neither of the two farmers expect to be able to supply a large amount of meat to the market for a number of years. Roeun suggested that once he was ready to do so, he would take two or three days to sell his stock of rats.

He said that in Thailand, rat meat is very popular is sold in large specialist shops as roast rat.

“In the future, I want to have a restaurant in our provincial town which shares a name with my farm,” he said.

Although he is unsure about the costs of raising his animals, he said he would sell skinned rats for 20,000 riel per kilogramme, with unskinned going for 15,000.

He explained that the taste between his farmed rats and mice and wild rats was very different.

“I am not making disparaging remarks. I eat them myself. When I was a boy, I would catch them to eat all the time. Wild animals can sometimes have a foul smell because you don’t know anything about what they have been eating, whereas mine eat a precisely controlled diet,” he said.

Lina, who lives in Preash Sihanouk province,said she had been following Roeun’s farm on social media for a long time and wanted her husband to try them with her.

She contacted Roeun and asked him to send her 5kg of clean packed rat meat.

“I have never eaten rat meat, but when I saw how clean his farm was, I decided I wanted to try it,” she said.

Roeun said it was a little difficult to feed a huge population of rats, as you had to buy a lot of corn, rice and grass, as well as pig feed.

He added that finding a market for farm-raised rats is difficult for some farmers, as they have no sales and promotion experience.

“It is not difficult for me to find a market because I have a lot of acquaintances on social media. If other farmers raise them but cannot sell them, I will buy the animals from them,” he said.

“I want to attract people who are unsure of the safety of rat meat because they do not now its source. I want them to see my farm, which is just like that of any other animal. They should not think of my commercial rat meat as any different from pork or beef,” he added.