Farmers planning to market stored grain this spring and summer may get
a nasty shock.
The warm winter may mean grain-eating bugs are still alive, and as the
fields bloom in the spring and summer, so may grain bin pests.
“It can be very difficult to kill them,” said John Gavloski of Manitoba
Agriculture.
“Right now they’re in the bin, but below 15 C they’re not moving. But
they’re still there, so if you didn’t kill them with the cold weather,
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the grain warms up in spring and they start moving again. You take it
to the elevator and your grain is rejected.”
In the southern United States grain pests are a perennial problem,
forcing producers to treat their bins with poison gases.
Grain pests aren’t usually a big problem in Western Canada. If grain is
cooled to less than 15 C, the bugs stop moving. If the grain is cooled
below zero, the bugs start dying. If the grain is cooled to below Ð15,
grain pests can be killed in less than two weeks.
But in 2001, harvest came early, and crops came in hot off the combine.
Autumn was also warm and long. Grain retains heat well, so high
temperatures could have continued if producers didn’t take advantage of
the few cold days this winter.
“Some farmers are still waiting for a nice cold snap so that they can
do it,” said Gavloski. “Who knows if they’ll get it?”
Entomologist Blaine Timlick of the Canadian Grain Commission said grain
beetle infestations are widely reported this year and shippers and
exporters are nervous. They know the true extent of the problem won’t
be known until summer.
“We’ll probably see numbers spike again towards the end of the crop
year, if nobody’s done anything to control them,” said Timlick.
Cooling grain isn’t difficult. Warm grain can be quickly chilled by
augering it in and out of the bin on a cold night.
But with few cold nights so far, and only a month of winter weather
left, producers are beginning to realize time is not on their side and
any cold weather should be seized before it is too late.
“Normally you get two or three of those cold snaps coming through in a
winter,” said Timlick. “This year we didn’t get that.”
Scott Hartley of Saskatchewan Agriculture said he is reassuring farmers
that below zero temperatures, even if not brutally low, can still work
against the bugs.
“You don’t really need extremely cold weather,” said Hartley.
“What you need is cool weather.”
Gavloski said farmers are in a difficult situation. It isn’t cold
enough to kill grain pests in less than a few weeks. At -5, it can take
five or six weeks to kill grain pests.
But it is too cold to use the most common chemical treatment,
phostoxin. It isn’t able to dissolve and form gas at cool temperatures.
Diatomaceous earth is also ineffective now, because the grain is cool
enough that the bugs aren’t moving.
Until they come out of hibernation, the bugs will be invulnerable to
those kinds of treatments. That means right now there is little
producers can do if they have a problem, other than try to get the
grain as cold as possible.
Timlick said agrologists are working across the Prairies to alert
farmers to the potential problems.
“The world’s greatest fridge hasn’t worked so well for us this year,”
said Timlick.
