Texas Hay Growers Are Cutting Three Times Where They Used to Cut Eight

Danielle Sekula keeps the number in her head because it is the cleanest way to explain what has happened to forage in South Texas. Growers on Coastal Bermuda grass used to take seven or eight cuttings in a season. Now they take three or four.

Sekula is a South Texas pest management specialist with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, and she told Harvest Public Media this week that the drop is not one problem but two stacked on top of each other: a drought that shut off the rain for months, and a pasture mealybug that has chewed through the plant's health in the meantime.

"It's just a difficult pest to manage and it does affect the amount of cuttings you have," Sekula said. "And then on top of that, if we're going through these intense hot periods and there's no access to water, it makes it difficult, very difficult."

The mealybug is the newer of the two. It was first noticed in Texas in 2022, and nobody has established how it reached the United States. It is small enough to infest a field before anyone sees it, it feeds on the grasses growers actually bale — Bermuda, haygrazer, Johnson grass — and it injects a toxin as it feeds, which shows up as a rusty discoloration across a pasture rather than as an insect anyone can count.

Colin Graff farms hay west of San Antonio at Hondo, irrigated ground that produced about 12,000 bales for him and his wife this year despite the drought. Fuel costs hurt the margin. The mealybug hurt more. Tifton 85, a Bermuda variety, took the worst of it.

"We've got over a thousand acres of that and they flat hammered it everywhere," Graff said.

The insect's geography is the part that should worry growers outside the Valley. It has moved north from the far south of the state to within roughly 35 miles of the Oklahoma line, which means it is no longer a border-county problem — it is working through some of the best forage country in Texas.

The chemical answer arrived in August, when the Environmental Protection Agency granted an emergency exemption for Centric 40WG, the product AgriLife spent months testing. Sekula's assessment is that it works and is not a solution: the cost is real, the application window is narrow, and a pest you cannot see until the field is already infested does not lend itself to calendar spraying.

Last month Texas got a policy answer too, a federal bill filed by Rep. Monica De La Cruz to hand USDA a study mandate on the mealybug, and a seminar circuit that put the insect in the same room as screwworm. None of that changes the arithmetic in Sekula's head.

The rest of the squeeze is national and entirely familiar. Michael Marks, reporting for Harvest Public Media, found growers in southern Oklahoma who went 60 days without rain and took one cutting where they normally take two or three. Diesel is up more than $2.50 a gallon since the start of the year; Guy Algar, who grows hay in Central Texas, said his first cutting went in around $4 a gallon and the next will cost him closer to $6. The net wrap that holds a bale together is made from oil, and Algar said a roll that used to cost under $100 is now close to $300.

Hay is winter feed, so all of this lands in January on somebody's cow. Brock Ortner, a livestock extension educator at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told Harvest that the ranchers he works with went into this year with thin hay inventories, which is why there is no cheap pasture left to buy their way out of it.

For pest control operators, the practical read is that a forage pest now carries an economic signature that runs well past the field. A rancher who cannot buy hay at a workable price culls, and a culled herd is a smaller market for everything downstream — including the fly control, the rodent work and the structural treatments that rural properties buy.

Sekula's answer to the whole thing is unglamorous. Scouting, early detection, spraying what you have when the threshold justifies it, and hoping the rain arrives before the grass gives up. The wasp that might one day help with screwworm is still in a laboratory. The mealybug is in the pasture now.