How to Protect Your Outdoor Cannabis Crops From Pests | How to buy Skittles Moonrock online
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Mason Walker is stressed out. With the already intense pressures of running his cannabis farm in Oregon, he’s facing another challenge this season: more aphids threatening to chew up his plants at East Fork Cultivars.
“This year, I’d say we’re facing a problem with 50 percent more aphids than last year,” he says, “and the conditions this summer in Southern Oregon have let them thrive even more.”
Mason Walker of East Fork CultivarsPhoto courtesy East Fork Cultivars
Monitoring and Sanitation Are Crucial
Taking an anticipatory approach to pest management also requires careful monitoring of your plants, whether hemp or cannabis, Cloyd says.
Growers can use visual monitoring methods such as placing sticky yellow cards above the crop canopy, which can commonly catch whiteflies and similar bugs.
But don’t forget the beat method, he advises. Growers should place a white piece of paper attached to a clipboard under their plants and then shake the stem and let the bugs fall on the paper. Mites, thrips and aphids are commonly found with this method, he says.
“This approach has to be done at least once or twice a week because you need to detect those populations early in order to spread out your biological control agents,” Cloyd says.
What About Hemp?
Cultivators of all species of Cannabis sativa L. face pressures to keep their plants insect-free, including hemp growers, says Marguerite Bolt, the hemp extension specialist at Purdue University.
The challenges, however, can vary by region, Bolt says. In western states, for example, the beet leaf hopper is an increasingly problematic pest due to how it’s the vector of the beet curly top virus. Industrial hemp growers in some dry, western states are experiencing grasshoppers chewing up plants at a high rate. In the Great Lakes region, growers see caterpillar pests, including corn earworm and yellow-striped armyworm, which feed on the female flowers and in the grain heads.
Monitoring hemp plants is also integral for hemp growers, Bolt explains. “I recommend growers spend time with their plants throughout the season and make notes on what damage is occurring and when,” she says. “Certain pests are going to be difficult to manage, so strategies like altering planting or harvest dates, selecting tolerant and resistant cultivars, sanitation practices, and the use of registered pesticides may be necessary.”
Learning as much as you can about the pests that are increasingly invading your crops can also help, Bolt says. She adds, “Some pests, especially foliar feeding beetles, cause some ugly damage, but if plants are larger, they can withstand a lot.”
Yeti Farms’ Shawn Honaker uses a propane-fired weed burner, resembling a Bush Hog mower, attached to the back of a pickup truck, he says, “but instead of blades, we use propane flames that penetrate the soil and destroy as many grasshopper eggs as we can.”Photo courtesy Yeti Farms
Cloyd highlights an issue for hybrid growers who manage both hemp and other commercial crops. “For outdoor hemp growers that have hemp close to corn or soybean fields, during harvest the hemp will be more susceptible to insects moving in, such as the corn earworm.” (The corn earworm is a common pest of corn, as well as tomatoes and several other crops, according to Purdue University’s Entomology Extension.) “That’s why you have to get proactive,” says Cloyd.
For a more extreme solution to stave off invasive pests, growers can fight fire with … well, fire. Honaker uses a propane-fired weed burner, resembling a Bush Hog mower, attached to the back of a pickup truck, “but instead of blades,” he says, “we use propane flames that penetrate the soil and destroy as many grasshopper eggs as we can. That’s what we call our organic weed killer.”
David Silverberg is a freelance journalist who writes about cannabis and the cannabis industry.
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