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HOWELL, Box Elder County — No matter how tough being a rancher is, there's nothing Tim Douglas would rather be doing.
But boy, he could use a break every now and then.
“It’s a great life, and it teaches you a lot, but you're just at Mother Nature's mercy all the time,” said Douglas.
Douglas owns a cattle ranch in Howell, in northern Box Elder County, where 140 head of cattle provides his family’s livelihood.
The thing about owning cows, of course, is you have to feed them. Hay is too expensive to feed year-round.
"Economically, you can't feed cows more than three, four months out of the year and still make a profit,” said Douglas.
That’s why ranchers need grazing grass for their cows. Douglas has thousands of acres of grazing grass.
The problem, though, is a little bug is killing a lot of the grass.
“If we don’t continue to stay on top of this, over time it’s wiping out all our native species of grass for our livestock,” said Douglas.
The black grass bug is about half the size of your pinky fingernail, but the damage it does is huge. The bug sucks the chlorophyll out of grass leaving it dry and crunchy.
"It's the worst I’ve seen,” said Clint Hill, a local soil conservation district manager.
This seems to be our largest infestation. There are hundreds of bugs per plant.
–Clint Hill, local soil conservation district manager
Hill says the black grass bug is in this part of Box Elder County every year, but because there was no hard winter freeze this year, the bug is thriving.
"This seems to be our largest infestation," Hill said. "There are hundreds of bugs per plant."
In past years, farmers have fought the bug by spraying chemicals, burning their fields, or overgrazing it to try and eliminate the bugs and the eggs they lay in the stems of the grass.
“We have tried a lot of different things, but the bugs keep coming back. We may have to start looking at a different way to fight them,” said Lyle Holmgren, a county extension agent for Utah State University. “It might be using insects to control insects or it might be burning the fields in the fall to burn the eggs off and then get rid of them that way."
The bugs will die off naturally in about a month, but by then, the damage will have already been done.
“Sometimes you feel like farmers and ranchers have two strikes against them just about all the time,” said Holmgren. “It’s a serious problem. It can be a real serious economic problem for ranchers and that kind of thing.”
Douglas said if there isn’t enough grazing grass for cows, many ranchers have to decide between buying more hay or selling their cows.
“Trying to make a living at it and it's getting tougher and tougher,” said Douglas.
For those ranchers who decide to keep their cows, the higher costs will often get passed on to consumers.
"Eventually, it's going to go to the grocery store. The hamburgers, the steaks, the roast, lamb and other animals that use grass to produce protein are going to go up in cost,” said Hill.
Ranchers, farmers and other agricultural experts plan on meeting this week to decide how to go forward.
They know the bugs aren’t going anywhere unless something is done.
“If the fields are not disturbed, or if we don’t get a hard frost winter, the bugs will be as many next year as there is this year,” said Hill. “They have already laid their eggs for next year.” Contributing: Mark Wetzel
