Posted on 06/27/2021 9:29:57 AM PDT by blam
By now, it’s become quite evident that the western half of the U.S. is facing one of the worst megadroughts in decades. We’ve spoken about fallow land and drying up reservoirs, but the question remains what happens next?
Well, it’s not great, and it’s straight out of the playbook from the 1930s Great Depression when the same parts of the U.S. were transformed into a desert, triggering a grasshopper plague.
A.P. News said federal agriculture officials are set to launch one of the largest grasshopper-killing campaigns in three decades amid an outbreak. The insects belong to the suborder Caelifera family and are probably the most ancient living group of chewing herbivorous insects. These creatures survive and multiply rapidly in drought or very dry conditions and will decimate crops.
Before we dive further into the grasshopper plague, the latest data from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows much of the western half of the U.S. is in some form of drought. Some places are more severe than others – but many of these lands produce an immense amount of farm goods.
So back to insect plague where A.P. spoke with a resident Frank Wiederrick of central Montana’s Phillips County, who said grasshoppers are springing up on his ranch.
“They’re everywhere,” Wiederrick said. “Drought and grasshoppers go together and they are cleaning us out.”
If extreme drought conditions continue in parts of the U.S., harvests this year could be severely impacted.
The United States Department of Agriculture has published a map of the grasshoppers spreading across arid regions of the western half of the U.S.
Agriculture officials had seen this year’s infestation coming after a 2020 survey found dense concentrations of adult grasshoppers across about 55,000 square miles (141 ,000 square kilometers) in the West. A 2021 grasshopper “hazard map” shows densities of at least 15 insects per square yard (meter) in large areas of Montana, Wyoming, and Oregon and portions of Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska. -A.P.
“Left unaddressed, federal officials said the agricultural damage from grasshoppers could become so severe it could drive up beef and crop prices,” A.P. warned.
Expect the MSM to run stories about how grasshoppers are the new lobster.
I think the United Nations has already suggested eating insects to curb food shortages.
Maybe they will come out with a recipe book, along with appropriate condiments !
It should be called "Getting Even with crop destroying Insects", or, "Munch and Crunch".
Sometimes I think the MSM are the same people who made younger kids eat a bug or a worm when they were children.
We actually had 2 decent days of rain last week here in Northern Utah. And there almost no grasshoppers where I live.
Everything is a fu*king crisis!
I remember reading about a plague of locusts in the late 19th century on the Great Plains: "they ate everything except the mortgage."
Birds that eat grasshoppers?
More than you ever wanted to know about grasshoppers: The picture shown seems to be what was known as the Rocky Mountain Grasshopper. Most of the time they find enough to eat in their home range and don’t travel much when moisture conditions are average. Dry conditions are favorable for egg development - moisture favors fungus/mold etc, less hatching. Once there enough for swarms, they eat all the vegetation in their home area and move on, maybe hundreds of miles.
During the dry years in the late 50s, we had a plague of big yellow grasshoppers in south east Nebraska. We sprayed for them, but that seemed to have little over all effect. The Rocky Mountain ones were a problem farther west.
I never noticed birds eating grasshoppers, but there was a concern that they would be negatively affected by eating the hoppers killed by the spray.
There was an early theory about rain following the plow, but there seemed to be little or no real evidence that that was true (sort of like covid masks). However the sea gulls did follow the plow. They showed up there in Nebraska in August when we plowed for the next year’s wheat. They seemed to work the newly overturned ground, so I don’t know if they were an effective anti-grasshopper weapon.
If you decide to feast on these little beasties, you may want to have someone else do some of the preparation. Grasshoppers, while under duress and trying to escape, will release a significant quantity of what farm youth termed tobacco juice. A more recent (and accurate) description of this substance by that age cohort is “Gross”.
Bring back DDT.
A bad wheat harvest was already expected. The CCP owns large farms in the West. How many know that they raise hay and export it back to China? They have a problem of Swine Flu and reduced pork production. This will affect them as well as us.
snip...For its part, China owned 191,000 acres worth $1.9 billion as of 2019. This might not sound like a lot, but Chinese ownership of American farmland has exploded dramatically over the last decade. Indeed, there has been a tenfold expansion of Chinese ownership of farmland in the United States in less than a decade.
Six states — Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Dakota and Oklahoma — currently ban foreign ownership of farmland.”
I live in the Central Valley, California. One year we had an explosion of toads. Every morning I was fishing the live and dead ones out of my pool. We even floated a few plywood sheets in the pool so they would have an island to get on. Then I’d rescue them every morning. Last summer it was lizards. Baby lizards everywhere. So this year it’s grasshoppers. Big shrug.
Save all living things.
According to people I know who have eaten them, they actually taste like shrimp.
I prefer to let the chickens and fish eat them.
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