Peas could be in danger if the western bean cutworm makes the trip to Western Canada.
A University of Guelph researcher who has fought the bug since it invaded Ontario in 2008 issued the warning during the recent Manitoba Special Crops Symposium.
“This thing scares me more than anything else I’ve worked with,” Chris Gillard told the conference.
The insect attacks crops between late July and September, eating seeds and pods of beans, peas and corn.
The western bean cutworm was first noticed in southeastern Nebraska 60 years ago. It stayed close to homefordecades but began moving in 1999.
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It first crossed the western U.S. corn belt, then the eastern corn belt, then advanced up around the Great Lakes to Michigan in 2006 and into Ontario in 2008.
The insect punches holes into seeds and pods rather than doing the type of damage usually associate with cutworms, such as shearing early season stalks.
“This is a late season cutworm … that feeds on the marketable part of the crop,” said Gillard.
“They chew big holes in the seed. It’s fairly ugly damage.”
He said pea crops haven’t been badly damaged in Ontario because they are harvested in mid-July for the fresh market before the bug is fully active as a pest.
However, it could be a different story in Western Canada, where hundreds of thousands of acres of peas are allowed to stay in the field until late summer and early fall.
“They love peas,” he said.
The only way to find the bug is to look for dead moths in milk jug traps, Gillard said. If many moths appear in traps, farmers can hit the crop with an insecticidal treatment a week or two later and control the pest.
“A single, well-timed application seems to be all you need,” said Gillard.
He urged growers and agrologists to start looking for signs of the bug because it could be bad if it arrives in the West.
“They are moving and you should at least know when they’re coming in.”
The cutworm’s present range of the U.S. corn belt and the Great Lakes region is much warmer in the winter than it is in Western Canada. Gillard said it is unknown if the bug can survive prairie winters.
“The big question is, do they overwinter?” said Gillard. “What we don’t know is more than we do know.”
