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Columbia Basin potato growers seeing more psyllids Published 11:18 am Thursday, September 3, 2026 Columbia Basin potato farmers are seeing higher numbers of potato psyllids than normal, but the industry hopes the risk of zebra chip infection remains low. Psyllid populations this year are comparable to “huge numbers” in 2016, when Washington State University Extension vegetable and seed specialist Carrie Wohleb collected more than 30,000. “The following year, we collected like 750-something,” she said.. Wohleb points to a warm, late winter with a healthy overwintering population this year. The psyllids remain active. “I was out sampling potatoes yesterday, shaking plants over a bucket and we got potato psyllids in our buckets, which is unusual,” Wohleb said Sept. 2. “Most years, they’re rather hard to find on the potato plants.” Usually, Wohleb and other researchers catch the insects on sticky card traps that sit in fields over a week. “I wish we had another category for ‘very, very high counts,’” Wohleb said in a WSU Potato Pest Alert e-mail in August. Zebra chip risk low Psyllids are only a concern when they are carrying the bacterium that causes zebra chip disease. With a low infection rate, incidence should be low, occurring only in random pockets, Wohleb said. USDA’s Agricultural Research Service unit in Wapato, Wash., tests collected psyllids for the bacterium. So far, one “hot” psyllid’s been found this year. “With very low infection rates, finding an infected psyllid on a sticky card is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Wohleb wrote in the pest alert. Enough are collected and tested to detect the presence of the pathogen in the region, but not enough to pinpoint where zebra chip is more likely to occur, she said. One unlucky farm Psyllid monitoring began in 2013, following several severely impacted fields in 2011 – the first time zebra chip had been reported in the Basin. “Since then, zebra chip will be found in tiny pockets here and there, but it’s not causing these whole-scale disasters we were really concerned about,” Wohleb said. “We’ve learned a whole lot about psyllids in the years since then.” Other regions have maintained higher levels, but it’s a manageable disease for Columbia Basin farmers, “probably because we’ve been blessed with low infection rates,” she said. She hopes farmers keep the pest in their thinking. “There’s the potential that one farm is going to be the unlucky farm where unfortunately you get a pocket of infected psyllids, because we know there are still some out there,” Wohleb said. “It can happen again … It’s such an easy to manage pest, really, that we should be able to avoid it.”