The distintive chirp of a grasshopper was a sound few farmers wanted to hear.
How do you kill bugs without commercial insecticides
on fields or gardens? "We used to pick potato bugs off
the plants and put them in a can of gasoline," said
Albert Friesen.
Grasshoppers thrived during a season with little rainfall.
Without large-scale commercial insecticides, farmers mixed
up homemade formulas.
"It was banana oil and I don't know what they
mixed with it, but that'd kind of draw the grasshoppers to the mash.
It was a bran, a wheat bran is what it was made out of. Then you'd run up along the roadsides
or whatever, in the pastures and so on and spread that around there. And it was
quite effective." -- Dean
Buller (Quicktime required)
"We would make what they called poison bran … and
they would scatter it all around the edge of the field
where the grasshoppers come in…They would eat several
rows of corn…but we didn't have them eat the
whole field." -- Harvey
Pickrel (Quicktime required)
Killing
Bugs One at a Time 
