Does anyone have any smallholder-appropriate solutions to control zonocerus elegans?
We don’t have these pest here in Haiti but we do have plague like volumes of huge katydids and at least two cricket types. I’m curious to follow the responses here to gain some ideas. What we’ve been doing so far is free rangeing chickens and muscovy ducks plus hand picking them at night to feed to the chickens.
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Hi Nathan!
What size is your growing area that’s affected? For the most part, I’ve only heard of small, mechanical control for lubbers (what we call them locally). I typically cut them in half with my pruners or hand-pick them and put them into a bucket of soapy water. But these aren’t good tactics for larger scale. There are plenty of trap crops that pull lubbers to them like tall grasses or foxtail millet that you could plant on the border of your main crop. In the past, I have sifted wheat flour into the whorl of young corn plants to combat young grasshopper feeding (not lubbers, just normal grasshoppers). It doesn’t kill them, but makes it difficult for them to eat by gumming up their mouthparts and so deters them from feeding on your plants. I don’t think it would be effective on mature lubbers because their mandibles are so large, but it might help with nymphs. It would need to be re-applied after rains.
Garlic Spray Natural
Make garlic spray blend two bulbs garlic with 10 cups water heat to boil let set over-nite
To use mix 1 part garlic with 3 parts water spray top and under leaves. Need to respray if rainLet know results
Not familiar with that bug but leaf footed bugs are said to be resistant to many insecticides and difficult to control yet are easily controlled with vinegar. Vinegar is our go to insecticide. For extremely difficult bugs, we infuse with leaves of Neem and sometimes gliricidia. Just let it soak for a few hours or overnight.
To determine what works, we capture a few and put them in a container and spray them to know what works. Pretty simple.