Pictured is a common grasshopper, Phoetaliotes nebrascensis. Grasshoppers both big and small have been overrunning backyard gardens and ranchers’ fields in Shasta County and elsewhere in the North State. (Photo by Stephen Ausmus/USDA Agricultural Research Service)
Call it the great grasshopper plague of 2024.
Backyard gardeners, nursery growers, farmers, ranchers – you name it – are having their plants stripped to the stems by hordes of grasshoppers invading Shasta County.
“They’re just bad. It’s a biblical proportion,” said Ginger (Shoup) Fowler of Ono, whose family has been in the cattle industry since 1897.
“From Shingletown to Millville to Ono, our ranches are really getting hit hard,” Fowler said.
Masses of the grasshoppers are migrating from dry, brown fields into backyard gardens and open rangeland, leaving growers exasperated.
There are horror stories of gardeners losing their carefully-tended vegetable plots within 30 minutes of being overrun.
To battle back, some are grabbing flyswatters to crush the invaders or resorting to sticky traps. Using plastic net mesh isn’t always effective because the buggers will chew through it.
Experts say eliminating the threat is pretty much a lost cause once the grasshoppers are in their adult stage.
Grasshoppers are voracious this summer in parts of the North State. They’ve been stripping the leaves in backyard gardens and chewing up rangeland grasses. Here a hopper is munching on crested wheatgrass. (Photo by Jack Dykinga/USDA Agricultural Research Service)
Fowler recently shared a video of thousands of hoppers swarming a concrete walkway beside a brick wall at her commercial cow-calf operation.
Another video shows her husband walking in a dry field with thousands more skittering away from his boots.
“In 2007, we got grasshoppers and they were bad, but this year it was really bad,” said Fowler, a fifth-generation rancher who’s also secretary for the Shasta County Cattlemen’s Association.
Like other ranchers and farmers, the invasion is financially affecting her bottom line as the insects are devouring her fields.
“I’m going to have to start feeding hay during the summer months because the grasshoppers wiped out my forage,” Fowler said.
She’s trying to protect the hay in her barn that she’s saved for the winter, but grasshoppers can still get in.
More than a nuisance
A pesticide temporarily helped kill the swarms on that sidewalk but then getting rid of the dead insects required a leaf blower.
“They were in such massive quantities – they would come in and then die. And so every day we would have to blow them off of our porches,” she said. “They would come back in just as much the next day.”
To make matters worse, the grasshoppers leave behind a secretion that smells really bad.
“If you were to come to our ranch and get out of the car, you could smell it right away. Once a week, we have to use a high-pressure washer to get the sidewalks around our home clean. That’s the nuisance part for us,” said Fowler of the Rocking GM Ranch.
If that’s not bad enough, Fowler and her family have to be careful when they come and go from their car and home.
“Anytime you open and close the door, you can have them come in, or anytime you’re getting in and out of the car trying to bring in your groceries,” she said.
‘Jumping everywhere’
Cyndee Loucks, owner of Loucks Landscape Supply at the intersection of Churn Creek, Dersch and Airport roads, has been getting pleas for help over the hoppers.
“It’s bad. It’s the worst I’ve seen in years,” she said. “It’s been quite a while since it’s been to this degree,” Loucks said. “They are just jumping everywhere.”
Her advice helped Fowler kill the hordes on her walkway while she tries to tailor solutions for others.
“We have multiple products. They just need to come talk to us,” Loucks said.
When homeowners buy chemicals from her to use, Loucks says the grasshoppers are “dead as a doornail the next morning.”
However, sometimes it’s too late.
“There’s not a whole big bunch they could do,” she said. “By the time they call me, usually your garden is annihilated.”
She said an application of diatomaceous earth may help. “There’s tricks they can do. And next year, I just need to be able to help them.”
Loucks said despite the enormity of the situation, she’s surprised the county’s grasshopper plague hasn’t been widely covered in the mainstream local news.
“It should be. That’s a much better topic than half the news that comes out. I’m glad you’re talking about it,” she told A News Cafe.
Loucks said for whatever reason, grasshoppers are drawn to certain plants more than others, such as oleanders. “It’s ugly,” she said.
Gardeners share woes
The Shasta County Gardeners group on Facebook has been buzzing for weeks with tales of their woes.
One contributor said he bought a 500 pack of low-tech yellow sticky traps in bulk off Amazon and laid them out on the ground in a checkboard pattern.
Once one side was coated with grasshoppers, he flipped it over to catch more.
Another gardener posted that she fought the invaders for about a week before giving up. She saved important plants by protecting them in cages with metal mesh but otherwise, diatomaceous earth, bait from a feed store, pyrethrin, garlic spray and traps proved futile for her.
She did hire a pest control service to kill hundreds of hoppers that she sucked up with a shop vac.
Mitsy Marx answers a lot of questions on the Facebook page and gives some her condolences. She has a garden in a small valley along East Stillwater Creek west of Bella Vista that’s been affected.
“I have a bad infestation, but I’ve endured worse,” she said.
Her plants were wiped out in the 1980s when she lived near Shasta College in the Redding area.
Wasps are one of the grasshoppers’ natural predators. Here’s a Polistes paper wasp with a chewed-up grasshopper in its mandibles. (Photo courtesy of Mitsy Marx)
“I knew these eating machines could be a disaster,” she said. “My garden was eaten to bare ground in 24 hours.”
After that, the grasshoppers started tearing into oak leaves.
Back then, she said the grasshoppers looked like popcorn popping on the roads, making driving “treacherously slick.”
Unstoppable advance
She says the hoppers start showing up in early summer after they emerge from underground egg sacks in fields and waste places.
“As they eat up the foliage around them, they migrate to yards and gardens and start their destruction,” she said on the Facebook page.
“Scatter baits are effective when they’re tiny, but nothing will help after they are bigger and on the move,” she said.
Once they get big, topical applications of pesticides or deterrents will be ineffective. Not only that, she said the bugs likely will chew through plastic netting.
Some garden group members suggest having free-range chickens go after them. Marx said in her experience, chickens do more damage than good in gardens.
She’s getting some relief because a young horde of starlings are making a meal of gorging themselves on the hoppers.
“When you consider the ‘plague of locusts’ causing such trouble in other parts of the world, ours pales in comparison, yet it can still be so awful,” Marx said.
Nursery hit, too
Another grower being plagued by grasshoppers is Kati Burnett of Lynn Rose Nursery in Bella Vista.
She was at the Redding Farmers Market this month selling plants such as flowering perennials, and described her grasshopper problems as “very intense.”
Kati Burnett of the Lynn Rose Nursery in Bella Vista talks with a customer in July at the Redding Farmers Market. Burnett says grasshoppers have been defoliating a lot of her plants.
“I mean they will cover plants – any and all plants,” she said. “They will defoliate a lot them.”
She also has a vegetable garden that they’re getting into. They’re breaking into the skin of her tomatoes before they’re even getting red.
She noticed a variety of grasshopper sizes.
“I have little guys, but they will congregate like five on a leaf. Then there’s the big guys,” she said. “If it’s green and luscious, they’ll eat it pretty much.”
“They’re really attacking the dahlias. They really like the hibiscus,” she said.
They’re even going after her lavender plants and fruit trees, both the leaves and fruit.
The hoppers seem to stay away from anything that’s fleshy, including her succulents and sedums.
Burnett is in her 19th year of growing and she says nothing compares to this year.
“This (year) has been my worst. I’ve never had to deal with grasshoppers like this before,” she said.
Burnett said she’s been researching treatment solutions but doesn’t want to do mass sprayings.
“Basically (I’ve) been grabbing them and killing them if I see them,” she said. “I’m at my wit’s end. I don’t know what to do.”
Ag commissioner’s view
The grasshoppers will “defoliate just basically anything in their path,” Shasta County Agricultural Commissioner John Ingram said.
The phone calls Ingram has been getting are mostly from Millville and the Millville Plains area, Palo Cedro and Bella Vista.
The ag commissioner explained that cattle ranchers will let their cows graze in fields in the summer months, but now those cows are competing with grasshoppers for their forage.
“If the grasshoppers are rolling through at the level that they’re at, they can, I guess, completely annihilate a dry-land field in no time and leave nothing for the cows,” he said.
Ingram said he personally hasn’t witnessed that level of destruction or received calls of such total destruction, but he said “the summer is not over yet. In another month from now, we might be having a different discussion.”
Ingram said once grasshoppers feed on the dry rangeland, such as rye and native grasses, they’ll move into gardens.
This undated photo shows a male migratory grasshopper. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service says swarms of grasshoppers can devastate grasslands as well as alfalfa, wheat, barley and corn. (U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service)
He said pest control dealers will sell types of bait labeled for agricultural use, but mom-and-pop gardeners will have a tougher time.
“As far as baits or sprays or anything in a garden setting, it’s really limited because by the time the adult grasshopper shows up at the garden, that ship has kind of sailed,” Ingram said.
“Like they said (on the Shasta County Gardeners Facebook group), 30 minutes later, their garden is gone. By the time you get to the store to get whatever you want to spray them, you know, they’ve already moved on to the neighbor’s garden.”
Widespread destruction
Ingram said he anticipated a grasshopper problem this year because the North State had a super wet spring. “Due to that, they really proliferated and spread, and here we are.”
He said other places experiencing problems are Butte, Yuba and Yolo counties, but especially Modoc.
“Modoc County had it really bad last year and then basically they set the bar for grasshopper issues,” he said.
The problem is so widespread that the Modoc County Agriculture Department is hosting an ag commissioner tour and meeting July 16-17. Ingram said state agencies have been invited also to see the destruction firsthand.
Ingram said he’ll learn more about which grasshopper species are the culprits and bring back more information.
From what Ingram has heard, grasshoppers have migrated from land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service to farmers’ and ranchers’ fields.
The nearby property owners believe the government should be better maintaining its land to stop the insects from hopping down from the hills.
“By the time (grasshoppers) make it to these people’s farm grounds, ultimately they’re in the adult stage of their life and they’re way harder to treat,” he said.
It’s not out of the question that if the grasshopper destruction continues and reaches a certain threshold of financial losses, a government agency could declare a disaster declaration.
Such a declaration could make one-time grant funding available or government loans to help growers get back on their feet.
Brooke Raffaele, a spokeswoman for the USDA Farm Service agency, said it’s too early to assess crop losses before any declaration can be requested.
When will it end?
Relief from the grasshoppers may not happen until the fall when there’s a cold snap or frost.
“We kind of have to wait until the (grasshopper) cycle runs out, which may be like in the fall possibly,” Ingram said.
One benefit of this otherwise plague could be all the wild turkeys that find and feast on grasshoppers.
Ingram said wild turkeys coming to the rescue is one thing he’s heard talked about on Facebook.
“One guy mentioned you need a flock of turkeys and then you could have Thanksgiving in a couple of months off of grasshopper-fed turkeys,” Ingram said. “Man, that sounds like it has a good tune to it.”
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