Alberta crops infested with grasshoppers, subject to extreme damage

Alberta has seen it all this spring, snow, floods, wildfire and extreme heat. But it’s the heat that is causing major issues for farmers, not only because it’s making it harder to grow crops, but it’s also leading to another challenge — hungry grasshoppers.

“So they grew rapidly; they are two weeks ahead of their normal growth, and they’ve been damaging crop now for a couple of weeks now, and they are a little bit older than they would normally be at the end of June,” said Dan Johnson, a professor at the University of Lethbridge.

“And combined with kind of a long open fall last year, we have very heavy egg ling by grasshoppers, and with the warmer, dryer weather this spring, we have a very early emergence of those grasshoppers, so we’ve had pretty much constant pressure with grasshoppers since the crop has emerged from the ground,” Lyle Jensen, an agronomist with Agro Plus, added.

Dry and warm weather is the perfect environment for the insects.

Experts say they are causing some of the most severe damage we’ve seen in the past 20 years.

“So what happens is what you thought earlier is a non-serious level of grasshoppers only feeding on some of the leaves it doesn’t really matter,” Jensen explained. “When they start cutting the heads off and all of a sudden your heads are on the ground, it becomes a very serious problem, because you have nothing else left to combine.”

Read more: Extreme weather events continue in Alberta

Unlike other pests, grasshoppers don’t poison the crop or go inside it — they just chew.

The damage is visible, which wouldn’t be a big problem with effective control. But, when there are too many feeding on the grassland, they can cut off the crop to the ground.

Wheat and barley are the most susceptible to grasshopper damage, especially later in the season.

“That little area of the stem is quite often one of the last green pieces on that plant as that plant matures, and these larger grasshoppers will chew through that as the crop dries down because it’s the last greenery in the field,” said Jensen.

The Alberta government monitors grasshopper outbreaks, however, grasshoppers are a worldwide problem and very difficult to control.

“The best time to control them was basically a few weeks ago when they were smaller and less mobile. Now the grasshoppers are larger and they are moving, they are way harder to control,” he said.

“They’ve been around for a long, long time, thousands of years and only with the introduction of modern agriculture have they become kind of a real pest because of the big advantage to have all those big fields full of food,” Johnson adds.

Johnson says if the trend continues, serious infestations will continue to escalate.