Driven by drought and thriving in hot weather, grasshoppers are causing trouble for farmers. These pests are eating up crops in central and southern parts of the province, putting food production at risk.
Robert Badry, a farmer operating his family’s cereal farm near Heisler, described how half an acre of his wheat crop was devoured in just a few days.
“The ground was literally moving with them. It was bare; you could see the soil. They just eat everything,” Heisler told CBC News.
Grasshoppers are destructive insects, similar to locusts, and even a moderate infestation of ten grasshoppers per square meter can consume up to 60 percent of the available vegetation.
This year’s hot and dry weather, which also led to historic wildfires in Alberta, has contributed to a surge in grasshopper populations. The dry conditions have stunted crops, making them more vulnerable to pests like grasshoppers.
“With the fire and the flood, we’re talking about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, right?”
said Vankosky jokingly.
Meghan Vankosky, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and co-chair of the Prairie Pest Monitoring Network, warned that this year is the worst she has seen in over two decades.
“It’s not just that we have a lot of grasshoppers this year; it’s that the crops aren’t necessarily growing very well, and so that damage is just that much more noticeable,” explained Vankosky.
She urges farmers to closely monitor their crops because grasshoppers will move onto crops for a meal as other food sources dry out.
Grasshoppers prefer cereals like oats, wheat, rye, and barley, but in a drought year, they will eat anything they can find.
Grasshoppers and heat go together like steak and wine. They lay eggs in the soil during late summer, and the young grasshoppers hatch in the spring, feeding on vegetation until they become adults.
Warm weather speeds up their life cycle, leading to faster growth and bigger hatches each spring. When they develop quicker, grasshoppers take wing earlier and fly to new food sources.
The End Is Nigh!
Alberta has experienced grasshopper outbreaks before. Swarms in Lethbridge in 2021 destroyed fields and gardens. The region was also once plagued by the Rocky Mountain locust before it went extinct in the late 19th century.
Like Exodus 10:15, these locusts “covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, and they ate all the plants in the land.” The Rocky Mountain locusts were so great in numbers that they blocked out the sun.
If this doesn’t scare you, it should. If the global temperatures rise by 1.5°C, this could trigger many irreversible tipping points. This includes more pest infestations, mass die-offs of coral reefs, frequent and devastating storms, and floods, to name just a few.
Grasshoppers and locusts are a global threat to food security, requiring an international effort to address problem species. Pesticides can help control pest populations but have other impacts.
Although predicting infestations and the resulting damage is challenging, the risks must be managed to prevent them from getting out of control.
While completely getting rid of grasshoppers is not feasible, taking measures to prevent their widespread damage is the best approach. By doing so, farmers can protect their crops and ensure food production for the future.
