Sorry for the late reply. I’m not sure exactly, they were there before I was born.

None of the cats were spayed or neutered. The hawks, cougars, coyotes, and eagles kept the population in check. We would often lose a generation or two overnight. At the most we had 20+/-, some years only 8… but we weren’t storing grain. I hear that’s x2 harder to control rodents.

Depends on what your homestead is doing I suppose.

As the child of an Asian Bakersfield farming family after WWII, I was always taught that the rhyme “There was an old lady” wasn’t a tragedy but a lesson in how one thing feeds another feeds another feeds another. The food chain (or circle of life) usually ends with domesticated animals.

One downside… cats are indiscriminate killers. Your squirrel, small bird, and some insect populations may go down. Which is why I suggested pygmy goats and chickens. They clean up the problems the cats made. That was our part control routine. Traded eggs and goats milk weekly with adjacent properties.