Northern Cape farmer Barry Naude said the locusts had caused a huge amount of damage to his farm.
“Considering that we just came out of four years of drought and we received our first rains in November last year. In the farms that they have rested on, they have caused absolute mayhem,” he said.
Naude said he had lost the grazing land for his sheep.
“In a couple of weeks, we will go to minus degrees as it is winter, and the veld that has been damaged and now going to winter is a lot. They have eaten tonnes of food and have done a lot of damage to us,” he said.
The locusts arrived at his farm in Richmond in the Northern Cape on Wednesday afternoon and settled there, only flying away on Thursday afternoon.
“They left behind a trail of devastation. This must count as one of the biggest swarms in recent times… it covered an area of about 5,000 hectares… about 10,000 rugby fields,” he said.
Naude said that on Friday the locusts flew to Middelburg in the Eastern Cape.
“The chopper has been spraying them for the past three to four days,” he said.
Andrea Campher, Agri SA’s risk and disaster manager, said it was one of the biggest locust outbreaks that they had seen in many years.
“The outbreaks are occurring in the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Eastern Cape, basically in the Karoo belt. With the high or above normal rainfall we have seen now, locusts or pest disease outbreaks normally occur. It’s a normal phenomenon that locusts break out during high rainfall seasons, especially in dry and semi-arid areas such as the Karoo,” she said.
Campher said there had been massive locust outbreaks in the Northern Cape and Western Cape.
“They are estimating that some of these swarms are reaching 5km by 20km in diameter. Some say there are swarms that are bigger than 4,000 hectares in diameter. We have also seen outbreaks in the Eastern Cape in Graaff-Reinet and Aberdeen,” Campher said.
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