Brown locust Comments and Observations

Brown locusts are a scourge and cause famine due to crop loss.

This is a "Biblical-type" of statement, and true in a First World environment. If you are a subsistence farmer living from one season to the next dependant on on the crop in the ground then, drought, locusts, hail or other "Acts of God" are life threatening.

In a more modern context, if you are an irrigation farmer reliant on the crop under your centre-pivot irrigation system to pay your interest on loans etc, then a crop not insured against "Acts of God" are at risk.

In South Africa crop farmers put huge pressure on authorities to kill the locust swarms while they are still in the "hopper" stage and before they fly. Brown locust eggs survive decades until conditions for hatching are just right before they arrive as a plague. Soil moisture and temperature are the main determining factors.

A positive spin off that "God's Act" has is that they excrete pellets of processed organic material. See the picture.

These they excrete continually, even when flying. The deposits can leave a layer on the ground. Ants carry them underground. In a desert or semi-desert environment this form of fertilization is vital, in my view. It is hard to see fresh grass disappear before your very eyes even before the livestock has had an opportunity to benefit from scarse seasonal rains, but there is the fertilization consolation, if you want consolation.

When they are young, poisons are sprayed onto the hoppers and they die. Later the swarms are followed in trucks with spraying equipment waiting for the swarm to settle an feed, usually in the evening. Then they are sprayed and soon die.

The conflict of interest is this;

Irrigation farmers can't, or don't want to spray poisons onto their crops prior to harvest. The reasons for this are obvious. Residual effects of poisons and the marketing resistance to these kinds of poisons are but two reasons.

The alternative is to spray them while they are still in the semi-desert stock farming areas.

Here, "Bat-eared foxes" eat them and so do birds of almost every description. Bat-eared foxes populations implode after locust swarms.

Sometimes the swarms die a hundred kilometers from where they were sprayed.

The "veld" or pasture can be covered in dead locusts.

Sheep eat them.

The poison residues can end in the fat deposits which ultimately ends on the plate. There is much less publicity of this unfortunate reality.

I have barely scratched the surface of these conflicts of interest.

Suffice to say that by law I am expected to report the presence of Brown Locusts on my farm so that they can be sprayed.

I will have to break the law.