There’s no iron curtain running along the 49th parallel, which is why Manitoba Agriculture officials want corn growers to start looking for signs of corn rootworm in their crops.
The pest has been spotted a few kilometres south of the border and might have already skipped past the customs and immigration posts.
“We haven’t found it yet,” said Manitoba Agriculture entomologist Brent Elliott said during the Manitoba Corn Growers Association’s annual corn school.
“That doesn’t mean it’s not here. What it means is we don’t know, because we haven’t looked for it.”
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The corn borer is a well known and despised crop pest in the Red River Valley, but the often devastating corn rootworm is so far unknown and unmissed.
However, its range runs as far north as the two North Dakota counties immediately south of the North Dakota-Manitoba border.
“We’ve got a bit of a buffer, but it’s not huge,” Elliott said.
Corn borer bugs cause damage throughout the corn plant, but the corn rootworm in its first stage of life stays underground, among the roots, so it’s damage is hard to see until after plants start falling over.
“Corn rootworm looks a lot like wheat lodging,” Elliot said. “The whole plant kind of goes flop.”
In the spring and early summer the bug is a white worm that wriggles around in the roots, but it metamorphoses into a beetle in late summer. As a beetle it leaves the soil and begins chomping on the cob.
A corn plant plagued by rootworm doesn’t look different from the others standing in the field, but it can be easily pulled out of the soil because the roots have been eaten away.
