Prairie crop insect pests: how can we improve our economic impact estimate?

Abstract

There is no agreement on which insects are the most important Prairie pests or an estimate of their approximate total economic cost to Canadian agriculture. There are multiple reasons for this: (1) thresholds (2) and surveys are lacking for key pests, (3) there is no repository of acreages impacted, (4) or record of the land area where a control action was taken along with costs, (5) or estimated efficiency of control actions, (6) or records of resulting values of the grain and quality losses. In this review, we estimate these costs by assigning nominal values based on annual pest reports published in the minutes of the Western Committee on Crop Pests (WCCP) from 2015 to 2024. We concluded that flea beetles, grasshoppers, cutworms, and lygus bugs were the dominant pests and along with other pests they cost Prairie farmers around 204 million dollars in an average year. We suggest that future standardization of the qualitative pest reports can improve estimates of economic impacts and allow stakeholders to prioritize research funding. Furthermore, we provide an extensive commentary and review of the potential use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to aid us in developing future predictive models to refine tools to improve the accuracy of control decisions. We conclude that to aid in this endeavour, Canada needs to maintain a curated long-term data repository to capture and integrate multiple data on biotic stressors, climate, abiotic conditions, and agronomic practices across the Prairies.