New Farms and Families Exhibit Open

Imagine looking up to see clouds of swarming insects landing in your fields, hungry, and ready to devour anything in sight.  Anoka County’s farmers didn’t have to imagine it in the 1930’s  The hordes of grasshoppers were all too real.

            The Great Depression of the 1930’s brought many challenges to the people of Anoka County, but farmers had quite a few extra ones in the form of those pesky little ‘hoppers.

            Grasshopper plagues tend to run in cycles and the 1930’s were a high point for grasshoppers.  This was compounded by the conditions of the dust bowl.  Bird and rodent populations suffered during the years of drought and fewer of them were around to eat enough grasshoppers to help control their population.  Drought also favors the grasshoppers in that some of the natural diseases they are prone to are not as active in dry conditions.  Fewer diseases mean more grasshoppers laying more eggs, more hatching into mature insects and fewer predators to threaten them.  More adults mean even more eggs—and the cycle goes on until there is a “grasshopper plague.”

            An average grasshopper can eat more than half its body weight of green vegetation each day, so swarms of them can devastate a field in a very short time.  Grasshoppers eat vegetable plants off completely to the ground.  Crops such as corn are stripped of leaves, killing the plant.

            Anoka County farmers fought back against the plague by spreading a poison bran mash.  In 1932, the Agricultural Service reported that farmers had spread 40,000 pounds of the poison over about 10,000 acres of crop land.  They estimated some 20,000 bushels of crops were saved by the effort.  The battle continued during the next years, but the biggest infestation came in 1937-38.

            Cold weather early in the 1937 growing season delayed the hatching of the grasshoppers, but when they came, they came with a vengeance.  Severe damage was reported to corn, potato, vegetable and alfalfa crops and many farmers suffered great economic hardships as a result.  Something had to be done, so farmers formed a “grasshopper control committee” in Anoka County, with an insect control officer appointed in each township.

            Abe Fast, a farmer from Ham Lake, was in charge of mixing the sawdust, bran and sodium arsenate as bait for the grasshoppers.  Two mixing stations were set up and within just a few days, they produced 115 tons of poison bait.

            The next year was looking to be even worse as a survey showed two to three pods of grasshopper eggs per square foot as an average infestation rate.  Each pod holds 60-80 eggs.  Quick math puts the potential for hatching at over 200 grasshoppers per square foot—a plague by any standard.

            Something had to be done, so the grasshopper control committee was again organized.  They began mixing poison bait and built a spreader to help distribute it.  Their spreader was the rear axel of a Model T, a 50 gallon barrel, and a metal disk.  The machine was demonstrated at township meetings and quickly adopted for use.  That summer, seven more of the machines were built or bought by groups of area farmers.  The basement of the Freeburg Warehouse became the main bait mixing station.  It was staffed by Abe Fast as foreman and workers from the WPA (Works Progress Administration) program.

            The Anoka County Board of Commissioners needed to be sure that all affected acreage was treated, so they passed a resolution that should a piece of property go untreated, the county would handle treating it at the owner’s expense.  A display focusing on grasshopper control was set up at the Anoka County Fair that summer and many farmers stored bait material for 1939.

            Thanks to the hard work and widespread efforts the year before, 1939 saw only a few localized infestations of grasshoppers.  Still, farmers were taking no chances.  They spread 215 tons of bait on about 250 farms.  It was estimated that they saved about $150,000 worth of crops that season by spending just $565 in baiting efforts.

            Hard work and coordinated efforts beat the grasshoppers in the 1930’s and farming continued in Anoka County.