Saskatchewan is dealing with an influx of grasshoppers as the calendar shifts to late August.

That could be unwelcome news for farmers, as grasshoppers have been known to eat crops and other plants.

"Their numbers are very very high this year," said Cory Sheffield, a curator of invertebrate zoology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. "It's high numbers of grasshoppers that eat crops and eat plants and are defoliators. It could be bad news."

Sheffield suggested that crops are more at risk when there are large groups of grasshoppers, which appears to be the case this year.

"I think they probably are consuming a lot of crops. If there's high numbers of them you might see them even going after plants that they might not normally go after," he said.

As for what drives up the population of grasshoppers, Sheffield said there are a number of factors at play.

"How many of them survived the winter from the last year, like eggs in soil, versus how many of them are being preyed upon or fall victim to their own natural enemies, and then the climate of that season too."

"A good year for grasshoppers might be considered a bad year for us."