Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/25/in-the-1870s-enormous-swarms.html
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farmsteads on the American plains were beset by enormous swarms of grasshoppers sweeping eastward from the Rocky Mountains
If they’re swarming, doesn’t that make them locusts?
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Jeffrey Lockwood’s book Locust is a good read about that swarm.
For work I have a colony of a few hundred gregarious grasshoppers. I like the the little critters, but the idea of a swarm of 50 million locusts is horrifying. They eat everything. As the podcast said, some even ate hides off of horses trapped in stables.
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I haven’t listen to the pod cast. But does it go into what saved the US from the locust/grasshoppers.
Factory farming. The very act of plowing up ‘huge tracts’ of land destroyed their homes/nest.
It was a perfect solution that happened naturally.
Now we’re turning more land into ‘non farm land’ for development, and importing more food. This might be a problem.
The Rocky Mountain locust was made extinct in the the 1890s, long before factory farms.
Also destroying huge tracts of land is far from “perfect” or “natural”
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I should have said cast iron tilling and the mid 1800’s agricultural revelation in America.
Locust and tilling farming 1874
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