GRAIN grower Bronwyn Hunt is no stranger to scouring growing crops for pests.
Last year, Mrs Hunt found native budworm, in 2008, it was weevils and, four years ago, it was cabbage aphids in the canola.
This season she has had to scour the pests for plants on the land she farms with husband Dr Geoff Hunt, at Normanville, southwest of Kerang.
The couple has watched dumbfounded as the plague of locusts repeatedly devoured about 600ha of wheat crops during the past two weeks.
Mrs Hunt said a plant count of one bare paddock suggested they had consumed 100 million leaves in a matter of days.
"We'd sown four or five wheat crops back in April," Dr Hunt said.
"They've all come up - one got quite nice and green - and now they're all back to bare earth."
The Hunts point to a paddock of correll wheat sown on April 28 and 29, which should have two leaves and be 10cm tall.
But each time the plant struggled above ground, locusts chewed it off.
There is no sign of plant life in the paddock sown to canola.
Spraying with insecticide had proved fruitless and despite two cool days last week, the locust activity had not abated.
Dr Hunt said they were only a third of the way through their sowing program. The question now was whether to resow or wait to see if crops re-emerged, he said.
Meanwhile, the Victorian Coalition has pledged to provide insecticide for farmers and local government to control locust hatchings in spring.
Opposition agriculture spokesman Peter Walsh said if the Coalition won the November 27 election, it would fund the supply of insecticide to spray up to two million hectares of public, private and local government-controlled land.
