One bite at a time, grasshoppers are nibbling away at the profit
margins of many West River farmers and ranchers this summer.
And, the battle isn’t over.
“We’ve had an extraordinarily heavy amount,” Philip farmer and rancher Terry Buchert said. Buchert plants winter wheat, corn, millet and oats on the 6,800 acres he farms in Haakon and Meade counties.
Like many West River producers, Buchert waged a dogged fight this summer attempting to control grasshopper infestations threatening his crops. He has sprayed the borders of his corn fields twice and sprayed his whole corn fields twice.
After the first crop of alfalfa hay was cut, his fields stayed brown until Buchert sprayed them for grasshoppers.
“They greened up immediately, as quick as we sprayed it on,” Buchert said.
It only took the hungry bugs a few days to eat their way through 100 acres of a 500 acre field of bird seed millet at Plainview in Meade County, Buchert said.
Buchert has heard reports of a neighbor losing a quarter of his 1,400 acres of corn.
“They cleaned it out in three days, I guess,” Buchert said.
Several Haakon County producers have waged war on grasshoppers this summer, but they are not alone.
For Ken Vahle, owner of Warne Chemical in Rapid City, grasshoppers have been good for business. Warne Chemical markets agricultural chemicals and equipment to the region.
“This is probably about the fourth big grasshopper infestation,” Vahle said, looking back on his 36 years in the chemical business. In Rapid City, it could be the fifth peak year, he said.“They started out tough last year, and they’re fairly tough this year,” Vahle said.
Pennington County farmer Scott Eisenbraun has fields scattered from Creighton to Wasta, and he has grasshoppers everywhere.
“I guess I’ve sprayed hoppers until I was blue in the face this year,” Eisenbraun said. “Basically, the grasshoppers have taken all of the profit out of farming for this year.”
An abundance of spring moisture and ideal growing conditions almost assured a bumper hay crop this year, but grasshopper “hot-spots” spoiled that promise. Eisenbraun lost the second cutting of alfalfa he expected to harvest.
“The second cutting they wiped out, it was coming pretty nice,” he said. Second cuttings are often rare for the non-irrigated plains, but when conditions are right, the extra hay is as good as money in the bank.
Eisenbraun estimates that he had to replant 300 acres of his 1,500 acres of sunflowers this year.
Eisenbraun treated some crops with pesticide three times this summer to fight the hoppers. He has sprayed those same fields twice for other insect pests.
“I don’t know what to do about them, but to try and protect your crops,” Eisenbraun said.
Paul Bruch of Sturgis cut hay early to head off grasshopper damage at his Sulfur Creek ranch in Meade County, but hoppers managed to strip leaves off the last of the crop, leaving behind only the barren stems.
“It was strange looking, Bruch said. “They didn’t eat the stems, which were green, too.”
At Bruch’s headquarters east of Sturgis, the hoppers selectively chewed the silk off ears of corn but left the leaves. They consumed potato plants down to the stems but left the tomatoes alone. Caragana shrubs are devoid of leaves.
Corn silk catches the pollen that fertilizes the corn, producing corn kernels. Corn growers won’t know how much damage grasshoppers have done to their grain crops until harvest time.
“It’s always interesting to see what they like,” Bruch said, noting that the insects apparently have a taste for the big leaves on burdock thistles. “They left the stems and the seeds.”
Bruch’s children raised about six acres of organic sweet corn they harvested as soon as it was ripe to save what they could from the hoppers, he said.
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More than 90 species of grasshoppers are common in South Dakota, and “they’re all eating something,” according to Bruce Helbig, plant health director for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service.
“It’s a tough year. We’ve seen so much with grasshoppers,” Helbig said. This is one of the worst years for grasshoppers Helbig has seen since 1986, he said.
Last fall, the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service — commonly called APHIS — predicted potentially large grasshopper outbreaks in South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming. The predictions were based upon rangeland surveys of adult grasshopper populations made at the end of last summer.
Almost $11 million was set aside for grasshopper and Mormon cricket control programs on rangeland on federal and private lands in 17 Western states. The program offers limited protection for cropland bordering federal lands.
“The (APHIS) program is designed to save and protect forage,” Helbig said. It’s a cost-share program paying 100 percent of the cost on federal lands, 50 percent of the cost on state-owned land and one-third the cost of spraying privately owned rangeland.
However, little of the funding was used in South Dakota.
In mid-June, APHIS sprayed 44,693 acres of rangeland in Dewey and Ziebach counties on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Aerial spraying in strip applications covered a 74,936 block of rangeland using what is called a reduced area agent treatment system, which uses very little chemical material.
“In this case, we used Dimilin — a growth regulator that keeps the grasshoppers from maturing,” Helbig said. The product was applied at a rate of one-half ounce per acre. The spraying seems to have worked, although there are still spots with heavy infestations, according to Jamie Murray, land operations officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“It’s reduced the density of the hoppers,” Murray said. “We still have some in little pockets.”
Murray started getting complaints about grasshoppers invading grasslands in mid-May. That’s when he started talking with APHIS about control efforts, even though the range was green and lush.
“It was well worth the effort,” Murray said.
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Although spraying protected Dewey and Zieback county pastures, the APHIS protection program was not used for any crops at all this year, Helbig said. The program provides for spraying a buffer zone of up to one-half mile on federal grassland adjacent to cropland threatened by grasshoppers moving into the field from the grasslands.
“We did four of those last year on Forest Service land and Bureau of Indian Affairs land — trust lands,” Helbig said. “And, I’m surprised we didn’t have anything this year.”
Helbig expected local ranchers in Fall River County to consolidate the 10,000 acre blocks for spraying APHIS required, but it never happened.
It wasn’t that APHIS
didn’t encourage it, Fall River County Extension range management educator Dusty Jager of Hot Springs said. Jager serves Fall River, Shannon, Custer, Pennington, Jackson, Haakon and Bennett counties.
“The biggest deal down here is the out-of-pocket initial cost for producers to spray is fairly large,” Jager said.
The abundant moisture early in the year has made 2010 a good growing year for forage and grassland, making it tough early in the season to decide whether to take on the extra expense of spraying pastures, Jager said.
“We did see an increase in crop spraying,” Jager said. “We have some good crops, and people are trying to save those crops.”
Portions of Haakon County and other western South Dakota counties were hit hard not only by grasshoppers but hail, Jager said.
Between the weather and the grasshoppers, those areas appear as neatly clipped as a lawn.
“Those areas won’t catch snow like they should and won’t get grazed,” Jager said. “There’s nothing out there.”
Helbig visited Shannon County in late August to survey the grasshopper damage, but it is too late for the forage protection program, he said.
“We will not likely conduct any rangeland forage protection programs, as most of the grasshopper populations I saw were in the adult stage of development,” Helbig said. “For the producers that are adjacent to trust land with grasshopper populations moving or likely to move into their crops, we can still conduct buffer treatments to prevent that migration.”
Any spraying that is done now is nothing more than “revenge spraying” that kill adult grasshoppers on grassland, according to Vahle of Warne Chemical. Spraying will not curtail next year’s crop of hoppers because their eggs are already in the ground.
At this point in the season, spraying will not break or snap any cycles, Helbig said.
“As soon as they become adults, they start mating and laying eggs,” he said.
People concerned about protecting their rangeland should have done it weeks ago, Vahle said. For those who did, the investment was “money in the bank,” he said.
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As summer grasses cure from green to brown, grasshoppers are beginning to migrate into farmsteads and green fields, raising another concern for winter wheat farmers, including Buchert.
Ideally, he would like to delay planting as long as possible in the hope that disease and September frosts will slow the grasshoppers, giving tender winter wheat plants a chance to thrive.
But Buchert can’t wait that long; in order to have his fields planted in time to qualify for the federal farm program, he had to start around Sept. 1.
“I would like to wait until Sept. 10, but it makes it very hard,” Buchert said.
If he plants winter wheat, Eisenbraun is weighing the cost of treating the seed before planting, which will cost an extra $8 per bushel of seed.
By not treating the seed, he runs the risk of hoppers moving in and mowing off the emerging plants.
In 2009, Buchert had an exceptional wheat crop, but it could have been better. Hoppers gnawed about 150 feet into the field on all sides, eating leaves and stems of the wheat plants.
“They cut off a lot of heads,” Buchert said, wishing he was sharp enough at math to calculate how much wheat he lost. He figures he lost eight bushels to the acre or, in terms of last July’s market prices, more than $40 per acre, or close to $38,000.
“It would have paid me to spray it last year,” Buchert said.
The Haakon County commissioners recognized the seriousness of the grasshopper threat in June, according to Auditor Patsy Freeman. Commissioners approved a disaster resolution.
A similar resolution was passed in Shannon County, but neither resolution will bring any help to the counties, according to USDA Farm Service Agency officials.
“Almost all of our disaster programs do not recognize grasshoppers as a primary cause of loss,” said Duke Westerberg, executive director of the agency for Haakon County.
Grasshoppers are given consideration in situations where weather-related events have caused crop loss.
The state agency office in Huron has received weather-related crop loss reports from Bennett, Ziebach, Jones and Shannon counties, according to Jamie White. Those reports started appearing around July 20, she said.
Westerberg said winter wheat and grain crops that are already harvested were spared the worst of the damage done by grasshoppers this year.
“Row crops and oil seeds that were late planted will suffer the most,” he said.
Just how bad the grasshopper damage is won’t be known until those crops are harvested.
As Buchert readies his equipment for fall planting, he can’t help but wonder what next year will bring. Predictions that a cool, wet spring would be detrimental to grasshopper populations didn’t come true in his area last year.
“We had the wettest, coldest spring I can remember … and just as quick as it warmed up, we had hoppers with snow still on the ground,” Buchert said. “I’m terribly concerned about next spring.”
“We can bet that unless the weather does something different to take care of them that we’ll have them worse next year.”
Contact Andrea Cook at 394-8423 or
