Two Alberta inventors hope to hear snaps, crackles and pops emanating from prairie fields next year.
Ken Podgurney and Roger Beaudoin of Whitecourt, Alta., are marketing a giant towable bug zapper that kills grasshoppers in its path.
“It’s quite loud when it’s killing,” said Podgurney, who runs an oilfield hauling and rental business in Whitecourt.
“It actually zaps like a miniature lightning show.”
The patented Grasshopper Zapper is a series of steel mesh panels affixed to a square tubing frame mounted on castor wheels.
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Each panel receives 15,000 volts of static electricity produced by a 3,500 watt generator. Bugs that come into contact with the electrified grids are instantly killed.
The main section is six metres wide and 1.2 m high and sells for $16,000. Hinged wings can be added for another $4,500 a piece.
Podgurney expects most buyers will want to add two wings, which would double the width of the machine and raise the price to $25,000. The company has sold two 12-metre models since it opened for business in June.
A 12-metre machine comes with eight adjustable wheels and can be towed by a quad or small tractor.
No controlled tests have been conducted, but Podgurney estimated the Zapper kills about 35 percent of a field’s hopper population.
“You don’t get them on one pass, you’ve got to make a few,” he said.
Farmers can use the machine as soon as the insects become active. They have to be leaping “a good foot” into the air for the Zapper to work.
Podgurney thinks the machine will especially appeal to organic farmers, who have few alternatives for grasshopper control.
Brenda Frick, prairie research co-ordinator with the Organic Agricultural Centre of Canada, said the Zapper could be a useful tool, but because it requires the pests to jump a foot in the air, it will kill only adult hoppers.
“That is a bit of a limitation,” she said. “It would be lovely if you could get the little guys too.”
Organic farmers have a few ways of dealing with grasshopper infestations, but most of them are long-term controls and none are foolproof.
One method is to incorporate crops such as peas and oats into rotations. Those crops don’t attract as many grasshoppers and can reduce the following year’s populations.
Another technique is to plant barrier strips around the edges of crops. A strip of peas can help deter the pests from infesting one of their favourite crops, such as wheat.
Or farmers can take the opposite approach and plant a trap strip around their fields of a crop that appeals to the bugs.
Frick said the Zapper would work nicely in conjunction with a trap strip. Once the hoppers are lured into the trap zone, farmers could electrocute them with a few passes of the Zapper.
But she wonders if some producers might balk at the idea of shelling out $25,000 for a machine that helps control a cyclical pest.
“It wouldn’t be the kind of purchase that a combine is, that you know you can use all the time.”
Frick said it might be more feasible for a group of farmers in an organic co-operative or certification chapter to share the cost of such a big ticket item.
Podgurney hopes to use that same logic to sell a few units to municipal governments, which would then rent them to farmers. He is now negotiating with some counties in Alberta.
The company has three machines left in its inventory. Once they are sold, another batch of five Zappers will be manufactured at the Lennox Welding plant in Edmonton and shipped to Whitecourt.
“We’re trying to build them five at a time to keep costs down.”
