[Music]
the age of five or six
we had a quite a big swarm of locusts
arrive on the farm
it was quite incredible to see how they
went to work to decimate the field
within 30 to 40 minutes
my name's robert salvi we've been
farming as a family
for five generations currently we're
experiencing
one of the biggest swarms in the last
decade
every week we're planting a new block we
obviously
do fear the locusts coming the next day
to eat them up i've got 150 hectares of
crop that we need to protect if we do
see
something we must try and scare them off
our fields
[Music]
your animals will die of hunger then it
will be devastating it is anyway
devastating for any farmer to lose his
animals
i'm christopher mellon i'm a farmer in
the middleburg
eastern cape district i farm with
mostly with cattle and sheep we will
basically finish the swarms
through the night so we won't leave a
farm or a swarm
that's not fully sprayed and finished
hopefully
as soon as we see them the teams are
always ready it's always teams
on standby to be caught and they
within an hour they're on site
first of all you have to look at the
wind direction because of the drift of
the insecticide you always want to have
the spray drift over the locust
we drive 25 meters apart and then you
just have your beacons because of the
dark you can't
judge at night so the beacons is just
there for us to drive in a straight line
we're winning the battle is struggling
that the rain is extremely difficult
where we are
so most of them we killed it's just east
large swarms that coming
[Music]
yeah of course it's it's tiring last
night was the first night
in seven weeks i had supper with my kids
and my wife
so that was quite nice no motivation
it's just it's just a service to the
community we actually do
as a farmer we tend to be resilient in
that
we farm with the elements and we have
many challenges
so this is just another challenge for us
to overcome