A Million Dollars to Find a Pest That Looks Exactly Like Drought

The reason pasture mealybug keeps winning is visible from the county road. A stand of Coastal Bermuda with the insect in it goes rusty, thins out and stops growing, which is what a stand of Coastal Bermuda with no rain in it does too. By the time a producer can tell the difference, the field has usually already lost a cutting.

That gap — between damage that is happening and damage a rancher can see — is what about $1 million in new grants is aimed at. Texas A&M's Center for Grazinglands and Ranch Management, known as CGRM, received the funding from the National Grazing Lands Coalition for two projects, one built around early detection of the insect, the other around pushing grazing expertise out to producers faster. AgriLife announced the awards Nov. 5.

"Because pasture mealybug damage closely resembles drought stress, infestations can remain undetected until severe economic and ecological losses have occurred," said Jeff Goodwin, CGRM's director and an AgriLife Research assistant professor in the Department of Rangeland, Wildlife and Fisheries Management. That sentence is the whole problem in one line, and it is why the money is going into appraisals rather than spray recommendations.

The detection project runs two years out of CGRM's Ranch Diagnostics Laboratory. It pairs statewide producer needs assessments with baseline grazing land health appraisals — measurements taken before the pest is found, so there is something to compare against when a pasture starts sliding. It will also establish demonstration sites showing integrated pest management and adaptive grazing, with targeted grazing and prescribed fire named as the management levers under study. Goodwin's team includes Jenna Likins, an AgriLife Research program manager with CGRM; David Kerns, the AgriLife Extension statewide IPM coordinator and associate department head in the Department of Entomology; and Stacy Hines, a rangeland habitat specialist based in Corpus Christi.

The second project has no field plots at all. "Expanding Ranchworthy: Digging Deeper into Grazingland Technical Assistance" extends CGRM's producer-led video program, which started in 2024 as a YouTube channel, into all the major U.S. grazing regions. Its how-to series, "Digging Deeper," will keep adding long- and short-form training, and the announcement says the platform will eventually carry pasture mealybug control methods as they emerge from the research. Barbara Rodrigues, an AgriLife Research scientist with CGRM, and Morgan Treadwell, a range specialist in San Angelo, round out that team.

Neither number was broken out. AgriLife describes the total as "about $1 million" across both projects, without a per-project figure, and no demonstration site locations have been named. G. Cliff Lamb, director of AgriLife Research, framed the investment in terms of scale rather than the insect: grazing lands are the largest portion of working land in the state, supporting food, fiber and biodiversity, and the work is "integral to addressing the emerging challenges facing sustainable production systems."

Set against what the pest has already done, a million dollars is a diagnostic budget, not a control program. The insect was first confirmed in Texas in July 2025 and has since been reported in 114 counties. Hay growers in South and Central Texas have described cutting three or four times a season where they used to cut seven or eight, with drought and the insect stacked on the same field. A Section 18 emergency exemption for Centric 40WG gave growers a chemical option in August, on a narrow window and at a cost, and a federal study mandate in H.R. 10542 is still working through Congress.

What does not exist yet is a threshold. There is no established number of insects per square foot at which a Texas producer should treat, which is the practical consequence of a pest whose damage mimics weather. The physiology work funded separately at College Station — measuring how heat changes what the insect injects into a plant, not how much sap it takes — is still being done on a related species in a greenhouse, which is another way of saying the scouting rule is not written.

Until it is, the useful thing a grant can buy is a baseline: a record of what a pasture looked like when it was healthy, taken in the same year the insect arrived, so that next summer's rusty patch can be diagnosed in a week instead of a season. That is what the Ranch Diagnostics Laboratory is being paid to produce, and it is a slower deliverable than a product label.

Ranchers who suspect the pest can reach their county AgriLife Extension office, and the agency maintains a pasture mealybug resource page that tracks the research as it is published.