Killing pea leaf weevils with ‘trap crops’

May 31, 2023

In the fall of 2016, Meghan Vankosky had an “aha” moment.

Vankosky, an Agriculture Canada entomologist, was conducting a grasshopper survey in a crop of field peas in Western Canada. The crop was already combined but she noticed a large number of adult pea leaf weevils, feeding on volunteer peas at the edge of the field.

In that moment, she had her idea.

“That made me think. Maybe this is a way we could reduce the population (of weevils),” said Vankosky, who works for Ag Canada in Saskatoon and specializes in pests of pulse and oilseed crops.

Her idea was to attract adult weevils to a trap crop, then kill the pests with an insecticide or an insecticide alternative. That would reduce the number of pea leaf weevils that over-winter on the Prairies.

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Video: How American Farmers Harvest 1.15 Billion Pounds of Sunflowers

Across the open plains of North Dakota and South Dakota, sunflower fields turn the American landscape into a sea of gold. In this farming documentary, we go inside modern sunflower farming to see how farmers plant, grow, harvest, clean, dry, process, and transform sunflower seeds into valuable products used every day.

In 2024, American farmers harvested about 1.15 billion pounds of sunflowers. This video follows the full journey from warm spring planting to combine harvesting, seed cleaning, storage, oil extraction, refining, roasting, packaging, and animal feed production.

You will see how sunflower seeds are processed into cooking oil, roasted snacks, bakery ingredients, birdseed, livestock feed, and useful byproducts. From golden fields to modern processing plants, this is the story of how a beautiful flower becomes one of America’s important oilseed crops.

Watch until the end to discover how sunflower farming connects farmers, machines, factories, food production, and sustainable agriculture.