Back when I was teaching political science at the US Air Force Academy, I would often talk with my cadets about the types of issues that make it to the desk of a high-ranking government official. I noted that nothing easy to decide ever ends up there. Rather, all the easy stuff tends to get settled much farther down the chain of command. And the ramifications of decisions are not always immediately known or fully understood. People like, say, President Biden must decide things with what we fancy poli sci types call “imperfect information,” which is a fancy way of saying you make the best judgement you can with the information available. The same is true for other folks way up there in the governmental chain of command, like, say, cabinet officials such as the secretary of agriculture. (note the clever foreshadowing…).

As my regular reader (Hi Jeff!) will recall, I’m quite fond of the Colorado Politics column “Out West Roundup,” which informs readers about, well stuff happening out west. A recent story appearing in the Roundup helps illustrate the point I hopefully made above, while also involving a creepy insect. It seems our ongoing drought in the West (I’ll postpone my regular rant on climate change for the moment) has had a number of unexpected and quite negative consequences. One of the most difficult of these has been the rise in the numbers of voracious grasshoppers. It seems these always-hungry critters love hot dry weather, and our current conditions make for excellent grasshopper reproduction.

Any rancher or farmer will tell you that a plague of grasshoppers is one of the worst things that can happen to your pastures and ranch lands. Clouds of these insects can strip vegetation, leaving behind plant stems and economic ruin. The CP article notes that a typical infestation of grasshoppers can remove as much as 20% of forage plants from the range involved, with nearly a billion-dollar impact on the ag industry.

So, it makes perfect sense to kill off as many of these vile bugs as possible, right?

Well…

In late June, the US Department of Agriculture began a massive spray of the pesticide Diflubenzuron, which has been used widely in agriculture since 1976. The EPA, always very thorough, says that the chemical is “used primarily on cattle, citrus, cotton, mushrooms, ornamentals, standing water, forestry trees and in programs to control mosquito larvae and gypsy moth populations. Formulations include a soluble concentrate, flowable concentrate, wettable powder and a pelleted/tableted. Diflubenzuron is applied by airblast, aircraft and hydraulic sprayers.” That’s a lot of different uses, and it appears that this chemical is not especially bad for other parts of the environment or people. I’m not quite sure how they figure this out, but the EPA has calculated that people face less than a 1% chance of getting sick from the chemical, even if consumed daily over a 70-year period. Impressive.

So, the Ag Department started spraying what they believe to be especially important areas of Montana to kill off the grasshoppers widely enough to help the farmers and the ranchers save their crops and livestock. They plan to ultimately spray an area the size of the entire state of Rhode Island – twice over.  That’s about 3,000 square miles. So, bye-bye grasshoppers and all is well, right?

Maybe, not so much…

There are other concerned scientists and environmentalists who point out that Diflubenzuron doesn’t just kill the grasshoppers that are causing all the problems. Rather, the spraying operation will also kill huge numbers of valuable bugs like spiders and other helpful critters, including those that like to munch on the aforementioned grasshoppers. We’ll be killing off things that kill off grasshoppers. Oh, and if you have an organic farm in the area that gets sprayed, your livelihood is pretty much shot for the year.

So, what’s the right thing to do? This is yet another example of those difficult issues that current US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack must decide. Vilsack is in his second tour of duty as secretary, having had the same role under President Obama. Before that, he was the governor of Iowa, so you know he knows about agriculture issues. And given that the spraying is ongoing, Vilsack has decided that the risk from grasshoppers is greater than the threats noted above. With 2.6 million acres to be sprayed, I sure hope he is right.

Harry Truman famously had a sign on his desk that stated, “the buck stops here.” Senior governmental officials must make tough calls when the buck stops at their desks. And few, if any, of these decisions result in clear and obvious “wins” with no downside. The chemical spraying of Montana’s grasshoppers is no exception. 

Like most of these columns, I end without actually offering any real solution (Ed: sigh…). I only point out the difficult challenges facing the folks making the big decisions. I sure hope the spraying works, but I do worry about the unintended consequences as well. 

Let’s hope it is the least bad outcome.