Farming is no small feat. It takes tons of sweat and money to yield anything from the soil here in Florida. But what if an insect can destroy all the fruits of that labor?

That is what one small farmer in Oakland is dealing with as Lubber Grasshoppers take over her flower beds.

Niesa Putigna never dreamed of becoming a farmer. She’s a nurse by trade, but after buying 13 acres in Oakland six years ago, she now finds herself caring for a cow named Butter, lots of goats, pigs and practically any other animal you can think of.

“We had seven kids, and we wanted them active on the land and we kind of wanted to do something together and it ended up being Farm Nine, so we started a little hobby farm together,” Putigna said. 

While she loves caring for the livestock, her true passion lies in the dirt.

“I think I like being out in nature, working hard with my hands, bringing life from a seed and then sharing that with everybody and beautiful things are just beautiful..." she said. "Flowers are not hard to make people fall in love with.” 

For the last several years, she’s planted unique flowers.

“These are Celosia, so a pretty big flower coming out of these guys,” she said, placing tiny seeds into the soil. 

She puts in hundreds of hours turning these small seeds into beautiful mason jar bouquets that she sells in her Farm Nine flower shop.

“If we don’t sell them by the bundle, these are a light airy flower and we wouldn’t sell them by the pack but we would put them in our largest and smalls and we would sell them at the stuff we take to the Farmers Market at Winter Garden,”  Putigna said. 

But this year, for the first time, nearly all her summer flowers were destroyed.

“We got over taken by grasshoppers so that ended it,” Putigna said. 

While she’s trying to look ahead to spring, it’s hard for her to ignore the heartbreak caused by these pests in her now-ravaged fields.

“Oh look, it’s on my new growth,” she said, while spotting even more grasshoppers.

What she hoped to be a beautiful bed of roses, now instead, is a hotbed for Lubber Grasshoppers.

“We knew we couldn’t fund a way to keep them out, it was very frustrating” she said.

According to the University of Florida, Lubber Grasshoppers are known for destroying crops. They are also hard to kill and reproduce in big numbers.

“They are everywhere, they are still everywhere, they are just annoying. They really did do some serious damage,” she said.

They created a nightmare for small farmers like Putigna, who says the creatures have cost her roughly $10,000 this season.

“The fact that we don’t have anything in our field right now has definitely changed what our mason jars look like and what we can offer at the Farmer’s market so its definitely affected the business,” Putigna said. “Because at the end of the day once you buy the plants, water the plants take care of the plants and you didn’t get anything out of it, you are basically throwing that money away.”

She claimed she’s always seen them around the farm, but for the first time, she says thousands made it to adulthood creating a swarm large enough to destroy her entire crop.

“And I have no idea why, but once they are adults, they have a kind of armor shield on them and the amount of pesticides needed to kill them would have been insane, so we are look OK, they won,” Putigna said.

Because of that, she’s concerned about how many grasshopper babies will show up next year. She explained they are looking into plans to keep this from happening again, but she’s unsure if it will work.

“Because we had so many. Hopefully, they won’t be devastating to our land again. We don’t want Farm Nine to not have flowers in the summer for two years,” she said.