Gordon Berg said he inspected a paddock at Serpentine this week and found a frightening number of the pests in egg beds. "Literally the first shovel full of soil we turned over had a thousand eggs in it and we walked into the paddock and we found the same thing into the paddock, so it wasn't just in the fence lines and the areas we might normally anticipate dense egg beds, it was right across the paddock," he said.

Berg said farmers will be legally obliged to control locusts on their properties this spring, or be billed if they refuse. "For example, if there were critical situations where, for whatever reason, people didn't want us to control locusts, we do actually have the power to come in and control them," he said.