In a community that celebrates Hopper Days each summer, it would be easy to assume that grasshoppers have gained some stature in the town of Hartney, Man.
Hopper Days is a community fair, complete with a social, parade, ball games and bingo. A long-standing part of the event is a contest to see who can capture the biggest grass-hopper.
Donna Drummond enjoys the festivities, but her attitude toward grasshoppers hasn’t softened a whole lot. She and her husband farm southwest of Hartney and know the threat the voracious pests can pose.
Read Also
Russian wheat exports start to pick up the pace
Russia has had a slow start for its 2025-26 wheat export program, but the pace is starting to pick up and that is a bearish factor for prices.
“We don’t appreciate grasshoppers,” she said in a friendly but matter-of-fact manner. “They don’t do anything good for us. They’re destructive little … devils.”
Drummond and her husband farm close to an area where grasshoppers are notorious. She has friends in the nearby community of Grand Clairiere who quit planting gardens because hoppers would munch their way through most of the vegetables.
“There’s just nothing left,” said Drummond, describing the way grasshoppers can pillage a garden. “They’ll eat an onion right down into the bulb and they’ll clean off your tomatoes. They’ll just eat anything.”
Hartney sits in southwestern Manitoba, an area where grasshoppers occasionally plague parts of the farming community. Southwestern Manitoba is now among the areas where a red flag is being waved about the potential threat of grasshoppers this year.
The agriculture departments in Manitoba and Saskatchewan have prepared risk maps showing potential hot spots for the six-legged pests in 1999. The maps are based on the number of adult grasshoppers counted last fall.
Hoppin’ with hoppers
Although a plague of biblical proportions isn’t expected, there could be a bumper crop of grasshoppers in certain pockets across the Prairies.
“Farmers should be vigilant no matter where they are,” said Manitoba Agriculture entomologist John Gavloski.
“Given the right conditions, things could flare up.”
Last year’s long, mild fall offered good conditions for grasshoppers to lay eggs. The eggs were laid over an extended period of time, which could translate into an extended grasshopper hatch this spring. A gentle winter could add to the problem.
A deciding factor will be the spring months. A hot, dry spring will work in the grasshoppers’ favor, said Gavloski, while a cooler, wet spring would help curb the insect count.
Environment Canada’s most recent forecast is for above normal precipitation this spring across most of the Prairies. Temperatures are expected to be near normal, according to that forecast.
“There will be hot spots where people have to spray,” said Grant McLean, an extension agrologist with Saskatchewan Agriculture. “The weather will affect whether they have to spray larger acreages.”
When grasshoppers lay their eggs in the fall, they tend to look for areas where there is still green vegetation. Two likely sources are ditches and the edges of hay fields. Those are key areas that farmers should monitor when scouting for grasshoppers this spring, McLean said.
If the grasshoppers appear in numbers large enough to threaten a crop, the best time to spray is before they move into a field and become entrenched there. Trying to control them once they spread only adds to the costs of buying and applying insecticides.
Depending on the weather and the grasshopper count, early June may not be too early for concerned farmers to start spraying, Gavloski said.
“If there’s a lot of them around the field edge, that’s the best time to hit them. They’re very susceptible at that time of year.”
Few non-chemical practices are available to farmers wanting to prevent a scourge of grasshoppers. However, one option cited by Gavloski is to plant early, giving the crop a chance to get a head start and to better withstand any grasshopper onslaught.
