How to Control Billbugs Destructive to Cereal and Forage Crops: Issue 1001, Part 1500

A. F. Satterthwait

Jan. 1919 · U.S. Department of Agriculture

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"Billbugs destroy or injure corn, wheat, rye, barley, oats, timothy, blue grass, Bermuda grass, Johnson grass, rice, sugar cane, peanuts, and chufa. The best-known form of injury is corn leaf perforation. The principal losses are caused by combined injury by the adult billbugs and their young or larvae. The heaviest losses are probably in hay and pasturage. Billbugs have only one generation yearly and are generally dependent on grass sods or wild sedges and rushes. Corn, sugar cane, chufa, and timothy probably are our only crops in which they can perpetuate themselves within the plant tissues. Clean cultivation, especially the complete elimination of wild sedges and rushes, suitable crop rotations, summer or early fall breaking of cultivated or infested wild sods, , early planting of crops menaced by billbugs, and the protection of birds, especially ground feeders, including the bobwhite and shore birds are efficient methods for preventing crop losses by billbugs. Parasites are valuable natural checks, but their work follows rather than prevents crop loss. Therefore, do not rely upon them to the neglect of control measures, or the results may be disastrous. Cooperate with your neighbors in active measures for destroying the billbugs." -- p. [2]