By Christine Souza, California Farm Bureau Federation
Farmers in counties along the California-Oregon border have reported millions of dollars of losses from a renewed torrent of grasshoppers and Mormon crickets feeding on rangeland and irrigated crops this season.
“The problem is getting worse,” said Marc Staunton, who farms in Tulelake. “As the landscape dries up, they are just continuing to spread. If you thought last year was disgusting, this year, it was unreal.
“It was a plague-like amount and totally destroyed crops,” he added.
Siskiyou County Agricultural Commissioner James Smith filed a request last week with the California Office of Emergency Services seeking a disaster declaration from the secretary of the state Department of Food and Agriculture. The preliminary damage to farmers in the county is estimated at $8.6 million in reported crop losses of pasture, rangeland, alfalfa and small grain crops.
“This year, the grasshopper numbers were just phenomenal,” Smith said. “Part of the problem is the dried-out refuges and the dried private ground in the Klamath Project. A lot of these areas are turning into very productive grasshopper nurseries.”
If the state approves the disaster declaration, Smith said, it could trigger the availability of federal financial assistance for affected farmers.
Exacerbated by warm, dry conditions due to drought during the past five years, grasshopper activity continues across Siskiyou, Modoc, Lassen, Sierra, Plumas and Shasta counties. The grasshoppers and Mormon crickets have been reported in 17 western states.
Rob Wilson, a University of California Cooperative Extension farm advisor based in Tulelake, said swarms of grasshoppers, which travel great distances and destroy crops in their path, were “higher in population than we’ve ever experienced” in Siskiyou County.
“We had so many grasshoppers, they were in crops that we never really associate with grasshoppers,” Wilson said. “Many people had anywhere from 20% to 60% crop loss, and that’s millions of dollars in losses, which is unacceptable.”
Tulelake farmer John Crawford said, “They ate our crops. They ate all the alfalfa, all the barley and all the pastures.
“I have an 18-acre pasture in front of my house, and they literally ate those 18 acres right to the ground,” Crawford said, adding that crop damage from grasshoppers was more severe in the county this year than in 2022. “On my 110-acre field of alfalfa, last year I took 207 big bales off of it, and this year I only took 41” due to grasshopper damage.
In his area, Crawford said, “If you drove more than 20 miles an hour along State Line Road, you could not see due to grasshoppers migrating from the south to the north across the road. They literally blocked out the sun; that’s how many were flying.”
In addition to grasshopper damage to pasture, hay and grain, farmers reported destruction of onions, potatoes and horseradish. Crawford said a lettuce farmer who tried to divert the grasshoppers with tall fences covered with cloth walked away from his crop after it was destroyed.
Locals say the grasshoppers, which lay eggs in the fall and begin hatching by summer, are usually more isolated to rangeland and irrigated pasture than irrigated row crops. Wilson said spring rains allowed the grasshoppers to grow. When their food source in the hills and wildlife refuges became dry, he said, they swarmed irrigated cropland.
“The one thing the grasshoppers don’t like is water,” Crawford said. “They came from the California side of the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, where it was dry. If you went to a place where there was some water, there was not a single grasshopper.”
In nearby Modoc County, growers last year reported the infestation of grasshoppers affected 400,000 to 500,000 acres. The challenges continued this year, though some reported less severe impacts.
“This year hasn’t been as bad, but it was still pretty terrible,” said Modoc County farmer Brian Ingraham of Davis Creek, who farms native grass and grain hay. He noted the infestation was so bad during the previous three years that it took up to 90% of his native hay.
To control grasshoppers and prevent them from laying more eggs, many farmers and ranchers have applied pesticides. But they said the infestations will continue without widespread treatments.
Ingraham said several ranchers have sprayed, but if they don’t all do it, then grasshoppers will lay eggs, and there will be an infestation again next year. Calling it “a valleywide problem,” he said, “there are hundreds of thousands of acres that they are on, so you could put a dent in them, but then they’re just coming back.”
Another challenge to treatment, Wilson said, is the grasshopper population is heavy, and the insects are constantly moving.
“It is not like a traditional insect pest that if you treat the field, you know you get lasting control. It is a moving target,” he said.
Laura Snell, UCCE livestock and natural resource advisor in Modoc County, said farmers and local agencies have requested grasshopper treatments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, which operates a suppression program in many states and conducts treatments on federal lands.
She noted USDA-APHIS often provides cost-sharing discounts for private lands adjacent to federal lands, saying treatments are critical for landowners and the neighboring Modoc National Forest.
“If you spray and your neighbor doesn’t spray, or if your neighbor is federal land and they don’t spray, the grasshoppers go back to overwintering on that federal land,” Snell said.
Those affected, Snell said, have been in communication with APHIS since late 2021 regarding the need for grasshopper treatments in affected California counties. She said locals were told this year that the agency must complete the National Environmental Policy Act documentation for the treatment, and due to budgetary issues, they will try to work on it in 2024.
Snell said some farmers have dealt with grasshopper impacts for three or four years in a row, and “they are feeling really left behind” without getting help.
While APHIS has no authority to conduct suppression treatments on private lands, Ryan Vazquez, the agency’s national operations manager, said treatment of grasshoppers is based on requests and whether APHIS determines it is warranted.
“We hope to survey these counties (Siskiyou and Modoc) in fiscal year 2024 if sufficient funding is available as part of our work on an environmental assessment for grasshopper suppression treatment in California,” Vazquez said. APHIS has not treated for grasshoppers or Mormon crickets in the state in the past 10 years, he added.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it plans to begin work on an environmental assessment and grasshopper survey at the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Siskiyou and Modoc counties next year.
The life cycle of the grasshoppers is coming to an end this year, but Siskiyou County farmer Staunton said, “If the trend continues, it will be utterly devastating next year.”
To report crop damage due to grasshoppers, farmers may participate in the following UC survey: https://surveys.ucanr.edu/survey.cfm?surveynumber=41215.
(Christine Souza is an assistant editor of Ag Alert. She may be contacted at csouza@cfbf.com.)
