Grasshopper

To Texas Farmer’s Burdens, Add the Grasshopper
New York Times, July 28, 2000

With grasshoppers pinging off the windshield like hailstones, Marvin Schrank mows through row after row of ripe milo maize, swarms of the insects rolling in waves of dust just ahead of his John Deere combine. "Those yellow hoppers have finished with the leaves and gone on to eating the seed," Mr. Schrank said. "They're hurting me now." At the edge of Mr. Schrank's grain field, his brother Alan shakes the branches of a native peach tree and sends dozens of grasshoppers skittering into the blazing afternoon sun. He points to a green peach eaten halfway through to the pit, saying, "Look here what they done." For Texas farmers and ranchers like the Schrank brothers - whose family has worked the same fields near here since the 1890's - a growing season marked by falling commodities prices and relentless drought has in the last few months added yet another burden: a costly infestation of grasshoppers. "It's the worst I've seen in my 31 years of working in Texas," said Cliff Hoelscher, an entomologist with Texas A&M University's Agricultural Extension Service.

Several warm winters in a row, combined with drought in much of Texas for the last three years, have created nearly perfect breeding conditions for the 15 to 20 species of grasshoppers commonly found in the state, Dr. Hoelscher said. "Without a cold winter or a wet spring, the eggs all hatch and all of the young grasshoppers are able to mature," he said. "The bigger they are, the more they'll eat." At least 63 of the 254 counties in Texas have been affected, Dr. Hoelscher said. And reports of infestations have come to his office from New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Hardest hit, Dr. Hoelscher said, are farmers and ranchers raising cattle food: leafy green vegetation like hay, grain sorghum and coastal bermuda grass. "They'll move into an area and strip 15 to 20 percent of the available forage away in no time at all," he said. "That's 15 to 20 percent more feed that ranchers have to buy to make up the difference." Though insecticides can help rid an area of the grasshoppers, Dr. Hoelscher said, many of the insects will escape and move to an adjacent unsprayed field. A natural enemy of the grasshoppers, the entomophagous fungus, would help control their numbers, but it only thrives in wet weather. "Wet weather is something we haven't seen a lot of in Texas for the last few years," he said.

Allen Knutson, also an entomologist and a member of Texas A&M's Extension Service, estimated that 21 million acres of pasture and hay fields have been damaged by grasshoppers in the state. "A significant presence of grasshoppers might be 8 to 10 insects per square yard," Dr. Knutson said. "But we're seeing incidents of 30 to 40 grasshoppers per square yard in some fields. And that's causing us real problems." Jeremy Rich, of the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, said his state was also suffering from the invasion of grasshoppers, but had not yet calculated the financial damage. "Some losses will be significant," he said. "I just don't know the numbers yet." In Arkansas, Glenn E. Studebaker, an entomologist with the Cooperative Extension Service at Little Rock, said: "I wouldn't call it a plague of locusts. We have some problem with grasshoppers in southern Arkansas: soybeans in particular and some rice and some pastureland. It's heavier than usual, but nothing like Texas." In Texas, Dr. Knutson said, losses for this year alone have already totaled at least $190 million in lost crops and treatment costs.