Researchers are jumping for joy over a promising new grasshopper biopesticide.
“It’s a hot new breakthrough,” said Dan Johnson, professor of environmental science at the University of Lethbridge.
Johnson has spent 20 years trying to find a non-chemical solution to the most pervasive pest in Canadian agriculture.
The only effective solutions he found over those two decades involved foreign predators, and for environmental safety reasons it is impossible to import such assassins into the country.
However, with the discovery of a naturally occurring green fungus in Alberta soil samples, Johnson feels his long hunt may be over.
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“Here we have one from Canada that kills grasshoppers,” he said.
The metarhizium fungus belongs to a group of fungi that have been effectively used in biopesticides to kill a variety of insects in Africa and Australia.
A couple of years ago Johnson employed a graduate student to use her “CSI-type” DNA forensic tool to see if she could find a Canadian relative of that deadly green fungus in soil samples collected from more than 20 Alberta locations.
Her sleuthing turned up three isolates of the fungus, one of which shows particular promise.
“It kills 100 percent (of the grasshoppers) in five days. We’re really impressed,” said Johnson.
So are his colleagues, such as Agriculture Canada weed biologist Eric Johnson.
“It is probably the most promising biopesticide that I have encountered in my career,” he told growers attending last month’s Crop Production Week conference in Saskatoon.
Dan Johnson said he is one year into the biopesticide project and so far everything is shaping up nicely.
“At every point you set it up thinking this is where it’s going to fail,” he said.
“It’s not going to do this, it’s not going to do that. It won’t store or it won’t survive or it won’t kill or something. And yet it keeps passing all the tests.”
One of those tests involved feeding infected grasshoppers to ring-necked pheasants. Veterinarians determined the grasshoppers had no ill effects on the birds.
Johnson said there will likely be two more years of research followed by a year of animal and environmental safety testing before the product hits the market.
Pest Management Regulatory Agency officials have told him they are keenly interested in the biopesticide and that if it passes all the safety and efficacy tests it has a much better chance of being registered in Canada than a foreign fungus.
Johnson said the university will eventually be looking for partners to commercialize the product. He feels it will have considerable appeal with conventional farmers looking for chemical-free control of grasshoppers around buildings and near wildlife sites. However, organic farmers would be the primary target market.
“This would be the first tool for them for controlling hoppers,” he said.
“I think that would be a real plus. They really need one.”
Not all organic farmers agree with that assessment. Doug Bone, president of the Saskatchewan Organic Directorate, has been farming organically since 1995 and has never had a problem with grasshoppers.
“Hoppers have been the least of my concerns,” said the farmer from Elrose, Sask. “I’ve had other challenges with weeds, but really hoppers have not been one of my headaches.”
Bone said he might have just been lucky but there are plenty of other equally fortunate farmers in his social circles.
“It is never something that came up as a huge problem at chapter meetings or anywhere where I’ve been rubbing shoulders with other organic farmers.”
