ABSTRACT
Our country, Pakistan, is facing an issue of low livestock production due to low or shortage of quality production of fodders. Summer (kharif) fodders, including maize, sorghum, millet, guar, Sudan grass, Napier grass, and cowpeas, are the biggest sources of nutritious feed for our livestock. However, attacks of various insect pests, including sucking and chewing, deteriorate the fodder quality and reduce the yield significantly. The fodder damaged by these insect pests is not preferred for silage. The summer fodders are damaged and deteriorated by chewing (stem borers, pod borers, armyworms, hairy caterpillars, cutworms, grasshoppers, shoot flies, foliage beetles) and sucking (pyrilla, aphids, jassids, sucking bugs, hoppers) insect pests which cause both qualitative and quantitative losses in these fodder crops. Farmers mostly practice blind and injudicious sprays of toxic insecticides on these fodder crops against insect pests. When these insecticide-contaminated fodders are fed to livestock, they result in mammalian toxicity, which magnifies through the food chain into the body of a human. Proper identification of insect pests and their environmentally safer control is crucial for tackling this health hazard issue in livestock and humans. This chapter focuses on the field identification of insect pests of summer fodders and their eco-friendly management with the least use of safer insecticides.
