Mention the word snail to farmers and watch their eyes roll. A proliferation of the Olata lacta, or milk snail, is feasting on any and everything that they grow.“We’ve had them for a couple of back-to-back years, but in the last two years they’ve manifested themselves and become a real nuisance,” said farmer Carlos Amaral.“This year we are flooded with snails. They are all over the plants and doing damage. Like chickens, they don’t stop eating,” added farmer Roger Pacheco. “I lost a whole field of collard greens to them.”But the slimy invaders don’t limit their feasting to collard greens.“They’re not the most picky eaters,” said Mr Amaral. “I’ve seen them feeding on compost and decaying weeds. Whatever is available they’ll work on.”All farmers I spoke with noted that the snails at the moment are loving the tops of onions. “We can find as many as eight or ten on the top of one onion,” said Mr Amaral.“They eat everything they get on,” said Mr Pacheco, “broccoli, greens, onions and thyme.”In an effort to combat the problem many farmers place snail bait around the perimeter of their fields. The idea is to prevent the snails from getting into the area where the crops are growing. The bait is a toxic granular substance that the snails are attracted to. Once they eat it they die. But even that is not working well. Mr Amaral said that baby milk snails are not attracted to the bait.“The granular knocks out the adults,” he said, “but the females lay eggs below the ground and the young ones don’t seem interested in the bait. The baits are yeast based with poison mixed in.”The result is that the babies easily make their way into the field.“And the babies tend to be the most aggressive eaters,” said Mr Amaral. “They gravitate to softer leafy vegetables, aggressively feed and mature inside the field,” he added.Not only are the milk snails reaching maturity in the fields, but they are also reproducing there, according to Mr Amaral, so tackling the problem is difficult.“They are very irritating to have, said Roger Pacheco. “To me they are disgusting, like cockroaches. Every time you pick up something they are there.”Once the snails are established within a field, planting from seed or small seedling is very difficult as the snails get to the plant before it is strong enough to withstand loss of leaves.According to Mr Amaral most farmers are avoiding their fields with heavy snail populations for fear of losing their crops. Mr Pacheco estimated that snails have set him back a few thousand dollars. Mr Amaral estimates he’ll have to use 200lbs of the commercial bait for his fields this year, where normally he uses only 50lbs for hot spot areas.While there are organic snail baits, many farmers say they are not effective for commercial growers.Robbie Smith, Curator of the Natural History Museum, said farmers should pick off all the snails and kill them. “That is the only effective solution,” he said.And that’s what organic farmer Tom Wadson does. “Every morning my guys go out into our fields and pick them off, put them in a bucket of salty water and that kills them,” he said.“They like it when it’s cool and wet, so on those mornings we spend a lot of time collecting them,” he added. But he said it was too hard to approximate how much the snail problem cost him in dollars.“It’s really hard to figure that out. For me it’s labour costs. It’s the time it takes to search and collect these critters,” he said.And at Wadson’s Farm the search isn’t confined to the areas where crops are growing.“We clean the brush areas around the field to prevent them from getting into the fields,” he said.Farmers have discovered that the milk snails love the plastic they use to protect their crops from weather conditions.“They thrive living underneath the cultivation plastic,” said Mr Amaral, “ and the drip irrigation we use makes it harder to control them going underneath the plastic during the day. Once they get under there, chances of getting them are slim,” he added.At Wadson’s Farm the workers have to pick the snails out of that plastic.And they are not only in the ground. They also climb up the walls in the greenhouses to get at the plants.“This is the worst year I’ve ever seen,” said Mr Wadson. “When we pull something out and see all the little micro ones, we roll a piece of pipe over them to kill them quick and easy,” he said.Also an organic chicken farmer, Mr Wadson said he’s tried to give the snails to his chickens to eat but the shells are often too hard for them to break.“When the shells are soft they can get at them but those adults have such hard shells that even when I stand on them they don’t break. They just sink into the ground. I have to stamp on them on concrete to the kill them,” he said.