Grasshoppers Coming

Just as the wheat farmers and cattlemen in the old dust-bowl area saw success ahead with lots of rain, big crops and good prices, along--as always--came something else. Last week, in millions of waving green acres of western Kansas, eastern Colorado, and extending north into Nebraska and south into the Texas Panhandle and New Mexico, the something else was the promise of the worst grasshopper plague in 20 years.

Out of the ground, where female hoppers deposited pods of 50 to 75 eggs apiece last summer, crawled up to 600 tiny, green, perfectly shaped grasshoppers per square yard (60 is a bad infestation) in fine, husky condition because of the mild winter and heavy rain. In a few weeks the hoppers, now no bigger than a grain of rice, will be big brown adults, devouring every green thing in sight and, as if on signal, taking off in cloudlike migratory flight to other fields.

As federal entomologists ordered up all available spraying and poison-bait-spreading equipment for a cooperative federal, state and local property-owner field-by-field battle on hoppers, Colorado's Democratic Governor Steve McNichols led a delegation to Washington and urged stepped-up federal aid. (Colorado's legislature had refused to set up emergency funds for such disasters.) Warned McNichols: "They're crawling all over the land right now. If they take flight, the good Lord only knows where they'll go."

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