As the tractor drives between rows in the vineyard, hundreds of hungry devils go flying. This year in B.C., most farmers facing the wily herbivories have had enough, but sadly have to wait until next year to gain any control over the situation according to Susanna Acheampong, entomologist with the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
“Last year I got a few reports [of excessive grasshoppers], but not a lot,” she says. “This year is quite high.
“To control them effectively, you have to get them when they are young, before they start flying. Once they start flying it’s very, very difficult for farmers to control them.”
She says outbreaks have been most significant in the Thompson-Nicola region, Summerland, Cawston and Christina Lake.
However, there are innocents among the vandals.
Of the more than 60 grasshopper species in B.C., Acheampong says only four cause damage. Hopefully, the 56 others make it between the tractor treads. Yet, damage or not, the problem is annoying for people like Eckhard Zeidler, owner and winemaker of Cliff and Gorge Vineyards in Lillooet.
“Well, we’ve got about eight billion of them; if I’m out on the tractor, they are landing all over me,” he says. But he’s able to feed his friend Carl the ones he catches. “Carl, the 25-year-old lizard is very happy. He’s getting a big feast this year.”
Because the property also includes about 100 acres of alfalfa, it would take far more than a fly swatter to keep the grasshoppers from moving into the eight acres of vines.
“They are very, very rarely in the canopy,” he says. “If I see them on the vines, they’ve pretty much just landed there by accident, but they are not impacting our vines.”
Acheampong says the destructive ones are most preferential to a diet of grasses and broadleaf plants, but when the buffet gets scarce, they find new culinary delights. They make their way into orchards, vineyards and cultivated fields like teenagers heading into a 7-Eleven at lunchtime.
She’s seen damage in all kinds of crops and their ravenous appetites are causing serious concerns for livestock farmers this year as they munch through grazing and forage lands.
Cut flower grower Rachel Nichols of Fern’s Field in Princeton has seen far too many of the four damaging varieties get fancy with food choices. Edible flowers are fine for humans, but this is just too much.
“We normally have a small problem with them that usually minimal interventions can deter, but this year, it’s a mega problem,” she says.
“Walking through the field and grasshoppers are flying in front of you in a cloud of grasshopper. You have to shake them off a stem to pick flowers. It’s fine if they hit you, but when you start feeling their scratchy legs, it’s a little more yuck than normal.”
It wouldn’t be so bad if it was only shaking them off stems to pick flowers, but some grasshoppers are speeding up the process.
“First, they start with defoliating certain types,” she says. “They defoliated our yarrow crop. They’ve gotten into all the gladiolas. After they get through the greens, they started chewing the petals.”
If they don’t like those options, Nichols says they go for “the juicy bits” — the stems — leaving the flower head to die. She estimates damage to be about 30 to 40 per cent of the crop.
“It’s very discouraging,” she says. “We have some bag netting which is keeping out some. But it’s not on all our crops. We prioritize.”
Zeidler is grateful the invasion isn’t as bad as about eight years ago when he lost a significant portion of the alfalfa.
He’s not seen any correlation between the winter damage in his grapes and grasshoppers finding a shady spot to hang out and rub their legs.
Now is the time to watch where they are congregating and laying eggs, like a massive future newborn ward. Mark areas and start monitoring for hatching in May and June with a sweeper net and other tools. It’s the best time to get control, but this too comes with challenges.
“When they are young it’s hard to see them. They are less than a half inch long,” says Acheampong. “Controls are needed if their numbers are above 13 per square metre.
“We want the farmers to be using an integrated approach.”
Parasitoid flies, wasps, ants, beetles, spiders, birds and rodents all like grasshopper larvae and/or adults. Plus, they are easily diseased and killed in wet conditions. Additional controls include cultural, biological and chemical.
“It’s weather dependent,” she says of the flux of grasshoppers. “If we get an early winter, cold weather, then the females can’t lay all of their eggs before they die. But, if we have dry, hot weather for a couple of years, then you have these outbreak situations.”
If grasshoppers have knobs on their antennae, have red, yellow or orange hind wings and sing or cackle, they aren’t destructive.
Turns out silent is deadly.