Farmers and communities across large swathes of inland eastern Australia are being hit by their worst mouse plague in almost a decade, threatening to undermine post-drought recovery efforts. Mouse populations have spiked over the past 12 months as crop-growing conditions have improved across rural Australia and provided the rodents with favourable conditions for eating and breeding. Elevated mouse populations have been recorded from Central Queensland down to northern and central west NSW and into western Victoria. In some areas, problems with mice have reached plague-level proportions. CSIRO mouse researcher Steve Henry told AAP mice feast on the stubble of crops and reproduce roughly every three weeks once they reach six weeks old, making population control a near-impossible task. The last big mouse outbreak in Australia occurred around 2011. “The mice have continued to breed through the spring, into the summer and now the real concern is that they’ll continue to …