Barbara,
Knock on wood we haven't had severe grasshopper problems the last two years. Now I write this and see them attack. I hope you get your situation under control. Yes seems most are having some struggles. Some of us more than normal. I hope in the end everyone gets a good harvest. Seems some days has been harder to go on. Two years of severe drought and the increased problems it's brought. Everything is looking for something green here and my garden seems to be the magnet. Jay

Barbara,

It is an interesting theory, but I am not sure I buy into it. I think maybe they are just trying to sell books. Heaven knows you can't believe everything you read here on the information superhighway.

I'm not disputing the fact that the locusts had a downturn in population at a certain point in time, but don't know that you can link it to the planting of alfalfa. More likely the plowing of the land exposed eggs at the 'wrong' time for them to hatch and they died or were damaged and did not hatch out viable locusts. It also is possible that the plowing of the soil exposed diseases that affected the locust population.

I've never heard of any research that backs up the alfalfa theory and you'd think that if it worked, we'd see lots of 'alfalfa tea' or similar recommendations for locust control. You'd think we would see alfalfa products touted for grasshopper or locust relief and we don't.

Anyway, google and you'll see tons of info on grasshoppers and locusts feeding on and damaging alfalfa. So, I have to wonder if planting alfalfa would encourage more of them to come to your yard?

Like many things you see on the internet, the alfalfa-locust thing sounds too-good-to-be-true, and I always approach those too-good-to-be-true things with a very healthy dose of skepticism.

Dawn

Jay,

You and I were writing and posting at the same time, so I missed your comments. I agree that when everything gets dry, the pests just gravitate to the green areas that remain which, of course, includes everything we humans are watering.

As you have no doubt noticed, their population cycles up and down and is worse some years than others. They haven't been too bad here in southern OK the last couple of years, or at least they've only been bad for brief periods of time.

I have had lots of grasshoppers the last month or so, and started letting the guineas back out to roam....you know, the 4 remaining guineas who had survived the repeated predation we believe is being done by the cougar I saw in the yard. Well, I let those 4 out and something got all 4 of them in one day. One day! We've never lost more than 1 in one day before. So, now we have no guineas. We could get keats and raise more right now because one of the farm stores has had them in stock since about Father's Day, but decided there was no point in raising a new flock of guineas for the predators to eat.

Maybe next year we'll try again with guineas. We've never lost more than a couple a year, and about 20 lost this year is just more than I can take.

I guess the grasshoppers that are here will have their way with our plants because the chickens no longer free range either because of the predators. I am hoping the wild birds do their part to keep the hoppers down.

Barbara, I use Semaspore or Nolo Bait in the spring when I have lots of hoppers in the young instars---when they are about 1/4" to 1/2" in size. It works best in cooler weather and best with smaller instars, so I don't know that I'll put any out here in July. It will work in hotter temps and with larger instars, but just not as well. It does seem to have a residual effect. After I put it out in the spring, I usually don't have to use it again for 3 or 4 years.

For anyone with grasshoppers (they are notoriously hard to kill with chemical pesticides), there's a bait called Ecobran that targets them and I'll link it below. It is not organic, but I'd use it before I'd resort to spraying a broad-spectrum pesticide. As chemicals go, it is fairly safe because it is in a bait form that has to be ingested. It also is very low dose--I believe 2% carbaryl.

One problem with hoppers, locusts and crickets is that they can migrate in once they've reached full size, so you can kill off a lot of them in the younger instars and .....uh oh, more just seem to magically appear out of nowhere. That's one of the problems with migratory insects.

Last year, the hoppers were much worse much earlier here, so I hope that means they won't be as bad this year.

The last time they were really, really, really bad here, i had some luck drowning them in mason jars of alfalfa tea or molasses tea. Once they went into the half-empty jar to get a drink, they couldn't/didn't come back out and drowned. I just sat the jars around the garden and poured out the dead grasshoppers every morning and added a little more alfalfa tea or molasses tea to attract them.

Some of my old farmer neighbors told me to leave the hoppers in the jars and that the dead ones would attract more hoppers (they are cannabilistic), but I didn't like staring at floating dead grasshoppers while working in the garden, so I dumped them out.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Ecobran Grasshopper Killer

We are seeing a lot of grasshoppers now too, teeny little ones are thick - we cut hay today and the air was thick with hoppers. I've also seen several of the big ones - 4" or more - I catch those and give to my guinea keets.
Dawn, please give your recipe for the alfalfa/molasses tea. I have pets and several birds so don't want to use poison - can the chickens have the dead hoppers after they drown in the tea?
We got 1" of rain Thursday night and the temps are in the 90's instead of 100+ - that surely helps plants and people too.

Farmgardener,

I just throw 1 cup of alfalfa meal or pellets into a 5-gallon bucket of water, stir it and let it 'brew' in the sun for 2 or 3 days. Then, I pour it into Mason jars, filling them about half full and place them in the garden in places where the grasshoppers can easily find them.

For the molasses tea, just mix 1 part molasses to 9 parts water in whatever quantity you want to use, and half-fill canning jars (or leftover sphaghetti sauce jars or whatever) and put them in the garden. I leave my jars on the surface of the ground, but some people with unfenced gardens dig a hole and half-bury them so the rabbits and armadilloes and such can't knock them over.

I don't usually add anything else to the molasses/water mixture, but some people add a thin layer of canola oil to the top. I've never tried the canola oil, but it is supposed to attract grasshoppers and also it is supposed to keep bees out so they don't drown in the sweet molasses water.

Neither tea attracts huge numbers of grasshoppers, but they do attract some and I figure every dead grasshopper is one less that's eating my plants.

I don't see why the chickens couldn't eat the dead hoppers since they merely drowned in the sweet water and weren't poisoned.

The jars of molasses seem to work better than the alfalfa tea, but the alfalfa also attracts crickets, June bugs and Japanese beetles, and sometimes cucumber beetles as well.

Naturally, the hotter and drier the weather, the more attractive the water-filled jars are to the pests.

Dawn

For me, the large grasshoppers are similar to tomato hornworms and corn worms in that some of the best memories of my childhood involved the search for them. For grasshoppers, what endeared them to me was catching a couple hundred or them during the morning hours and then tossing them to the bass in my pond. After a couple of weeks of doing this, a handful of bass would swim to the edge of the water when they saw me, and they would wait there for me to toss one grasshopper at a time onto the water. Those were some fun times.

Dawn,
Come to think of it, I think I remember reading recently that Blister Beetles move into alfalfa fields in order to feed on grasshopper larvae, and then on the alfalfa blooms, after that. Ok, so apparently the alfalfa doesn't upset the grasshoppers digestive tracks as much as the author of that book seemed to think it did, if it happens to be one of their favorite smorgasborgs. Hmm...hard to tell why the locust went extinct in the United States. I guess sometimes things just do. In that famous Rocky Mountain plague, they ate fence posts, saddles, clothes off people's clothes lines, and just about anything in their wake. I read they are the only pest ever to have dynamite used to try to control them, lol Now that's BAD!

You may remember I had a Blister Beetle attack in a few of my tomato plants recently, which I managed to get under control with Spinosad. But the Blister Beetle invasion was not concurrent with the grasshopper invasion and certainly did nothing to control the outbreak of nymphs. I noticed that the hatching area of the hoppers seemed to be primarily in the front border of my property which tends to be very sandy and dry. Fortuntately, they have'nt moved into my main garden area...(yet).

Apparently, their are quite a few predators that control grasshoppers,... birds, chickens, and guineas amongst them.

Dawn, I'm so sorry you are being plagued with a poultry predator, and about losing the four guineas. The rancher I worked for told me that buying keats without a "pack leader" is not such a good idea, because they have to be taught the ropes. I had been wanting him to get some guineas to control the ticks on the ranch. He said to talk to the neighbors about buying some of their adults, and then buying the keats afterward. But, he said I'd have to keep them all penned up for awhile until they adjusted to their new surroundings because they are very territorial.

Anyways, I hope you find out what's killing your flock. If whatever it is has run out of poultry, I would certainly be wary of my dogs and cats being the next prey.

We have so many coyote problems around here, as much as I would like to have chickens, I would'nt want to have to deal with the predator problems that would inevitably occur, as I do have 4 cats. And these coyotes are not adverse to snatching small unaware domestic pets, and their getting bolder all the time.

Best luck to everyone with their various garden struggles. I suppose if that's all we have to worry about and can still put some food on the table and in the cellar or freezer, we ain't doin too bad :)

Jay, that last comment was especially for you. As much as you put into the work, thought, love and pleasure growing your crops, you are very deserving of a break. It will come this fall, hopefully.

Barbara

Barbara,

I'm pretty sure it is the cougar who's been prowling the yard and neighborhood, because all the coyotes have pretty much disappeared too as have some (but not all) of the deer. The rabbits are nervous wrecks and are coming out to eat in late afternoon a couple of hours earlier than usual, instead of waiting for twilight.

Aside from me seeing the cougar in the yard, a neighbor has the biggest tracks he's ever seen on his ranch and a lot of us have noticed both wildlife and pets are extremely nervous and antsy and jumpy at night.

We've started keats from scratch without a leader before and have had great success, but we keep them penned up for months before we let them roam. I've been around guineas all my life (my uncle raised them) and I love them and I appreciate how wonderful they are at bug control. I just can't see feeding them needlessly to the cougar though.

I actually was thinking that the 7 mature ones we had last year, which we eventually combined with the 20 young ones we raised last summer, had gotten to where they roamed a great deal farther than any of the others we've ever had, so think the overly-bold old-timers may have led the younger ones off too far. I hope to train the next bunch to stick around a bit better, but that's a new challenge for next year. I'd say this last batch was wandering twice as far as the previous ones did. I guess all the acres of pastures around us, which are of course full of bugs, are just so tempting.

We have an elderly neighbor up the road a couple of miles who has lost many of his guineas too, and he's got a lot more 'civilization' around him than we do, so it is just a horrible year here for predators.

At least we haven't lost any of our dogs as some people have.

At this point, a coyote hanging around the yard would be almost welcome....because if he felt it was safe, I'd know predators larger than him had moved on elsewhere.

So, whether it is the cougar or something else, it has really scared off the skunks, possums and armadilloes for the most part, but I'm certainly not complaining about that either.

I don't know the ultimate solution. Luckily, when we have a cougar problem it usually is only for a few months and then we generally don't have them around (as far as we know) for several years.

During the previous bad grasshopper year here in the early 2000s, we did have grasshoppers eating our window screens and the cotton rag rugs on the porch. They also ate the peaches and plums right off the trees. This year, at least so far, they are not at all that bad, but it does seem like there's more than most years.

I still can carry a couple of chickens from the fenced run to the fenced garden and turn them loose to eat in there, and might do that, but even the 7' tall fence won't keep some animals and predator-type birds from getting the chickens. I'm just tired of all the dead animals. It hasn't been this bad since our first or second year here.

This is the only year I've ever had a coyote run into the yard, grab a hen right in front of me, and run off with the poor thing in its mouth.

I am very concerned about the dogs and cats. My smallest dog is 60 lbs. so no match for a really big cat but at least the dogs are usually not alone--they have other dogs with them. However, even the largest kitty cat we have would be pretty defenseless if faced with a coyote or cougar. All our dogs and cats sleep inside either the house or predator-proof garage at night and none of them are allowed outside until well after sunrise, and are back inside before sunset.

Living as close as we do to the Red River....it is on three sides of us.....we always have had and always will have abundant predators. Most years, we manage to keep the animals safe from them. This is just a worse than average year and I hope things return to normal soon.

Dawn