By DEBRA JOPSON
July 30, 2010 Peter Hammond cradles the tiny white eggs in his hand that could ruin his 2200-hectare sheep and cattle property near Lake Cowal when they hatch in spring. ”When you squash them, they create moisture, so you know that they’re actually alive, that there’s grasshoppers in them,” he said. Farmers are on alert across the four Murray Darling Basin states to watch for the first hatchings from egg beds laid so extensively and in conditions so kind to locusts that a massive plague potentially costing billions of dollars has been predicted this year. And now the senior ranger at the Lachlan Livestock Health and Pest Authority, Craig Ridley, said the predicted hatching date of mid-September for central western NSW may be brought forward because of mild weather. ”It’s going to be a war of some note and we can’t let the locusts win,” said Graham Falconer, an agronomist and the deputy mayor of Forbes Shire Council, who has calculated a ”little plague” in autumn wiped out 35,000 hectares of crops worth about $40 million there. … Mr Hammond’s father, James, aged 95, remembers a 1930s plague so bad that the locusts ate the farmhouse’s green blinds. The son, Peter Hammond, said that after running an irrigation property for 10 years without water, if locusts eat his crops and pasture, he will have to quit, but wonders by how much it will devalue his land. ”Even worse, if we wanted to get out we probably couldn’t,” he said.
After drought, farmers must now face a plague of locusts
