Arianne Cease has spent over 15 years studying some of the most destructive insects on the planet, and she still manages to find them charming. “They’re very destructive when there’s a lot of them, but one-on-one, what’s not to love?” she says about locusts. It’s the kind of perspective that probably helps when you’re dedicating your career to understanding creatures that can wipe out entire harvests.
Cease leads Arizona State University’s Global Locust Initiative, and her team just published something that could change how farmers fight back against these biblical pests. The discovery is almost embarrassingly simple: add nitrogen to your soil, and locusts suddenly lose interest in your crops.
The breakthrough happened in Senegal, where farmers have been battling the Senegalese grasshopper for generations. These insects don’t form the massive swarms you see in disaster footage, but they show up more frequently and can actually cause worse damage to local communities. One hundred farmers planted two millet plots each, one with nitrogen fertilizer and one without.
The results were ridiculous. Fertilized plots had fewer locusts, less damage, and harvests that were literally twice as large.
The Donut Diet That Fuels Destruction
Here’s where it gets interesting. After years of research, Cease discovered that locusts are basically endurance athletes running on a terrible diet. When crops grow in nutrient-poor soil, they produce plants loaded with carbohydrates and almost no protein. It’s junk food for insects, and locusts absolutely thrive on it.
“This carbohydrate bias, or the ‘donut diet,’ is optimal for populations of locusts and swarming grasshoppers,” Cease explains. Just like marathon runners carb-loading before a race, locusts use these carb-heavy plants to fuel their long-distance migrations. The more donuts they eat, the further they can fly, the bigger the swarm becomes.
Plants grown in nitrogen-rich soil flip the script entirely. They contain more protein and fewer carbohydrates, which sounds healthy until you’re a locust trying to digest it. Their bodies can’t handle the excess protein and they don’t get enough energy to fuel their destructive lifestyle. It’s like forcing an ultramarathoner to eat nothing but steak before a race.
The question was whether this actually mattered outside a lab. Turns out it really, really does.
From Lab Theory to Real Farms
The Senegalese villages that volunteered for this study had worked with Cease before, so they understood what was at stake. These communities lose significant portions of their harvests regularly, and chemical pesticides aren’t always accessible or affordable.
Researchers weren’t sure what would happen in real farming conditions. Would locusts just migrate from untreated fields nearby? Would high-protein crops attract different pests? They counted locusts and measured damage three times during the growing season to find out.
The treated plots consistently performed better across every metric. Fewer locusts showed up, the ones that did caused less leaf damage, and harvest yields doubled. Even better, there was no evidence that nitrogen fertilizer made other pest problems worse.
Mamour Touré, the lead author from Université Gaston Berger in Senegal, says the results matter beyond just the science. “The study gave them a better understanding of grasshoppers and locusts, as well as a practical way to control them at the local level.”
The Compost Solution Nobody Saw Coming
There’s an obvious problem with this discovery: nitrogen fertilizer costs money that many farming communities don’t have. It also raises sustainability questions about long-term soil health.
Cease’s team is already ahead of that concern. They’ve been testing compost instead, and the results look just as promising. “Ongoing work is focused exclusively on compost, and we seem to be getting the same results,” she says.
Even though USAID funding for the project ended in early 2025, farmers in Senegal kept going on their own. They’ve stopped burning crop residues after clearing land and started composting instead. Touré notes that farmers “unanimously stated” they’ve mastered the composting technique and are seeing reduced grasshopper infestations because of it.
That kind of organic adoption is rare in agricultural research. Usually there’s a gap between what works in studies and what farmers actually implement. When communities embrace a technique without external funding or pressure, you know you’re onto something real.
Why Americans Should Actually Care About This
The U.S. doesn’t have native locust species right now, which makes it easy to treat this as someone else’s problem. Cease isn’t convinced it’ll stay that way. She’s watching the Central American locust, whose range currently stops about 200 miles from the U.S. border.
“We can say with pretty high certainty that Texas will be very suitable for locusts in about 10 to 15 years,” she warns. Climate patterns are shifting in ways that could make the southern U.S. much more hospitable to these insects. Whether they’ll actually establish populations and cause damage is still unknown, but the possibility isn’t theoretical anymore.
Even without locusts, American ranchers already deal with serious grasshopper problems. The USDA tracks 12 species of rangeland grasshoppers (plus one cricket) known as the Dirty Dozen. When these insects swarm across western grazing lands, they strip vegetation and compete directly with livestock for food.
Chemical pesticides remain the primary control method, but the environmental and health costs of widespread pesticide use keep adding up. What Cease’s team learns from fighting locusts in Africa and Asia could become essential knowledge for managing migratory pests in North America.
The Global Locust Initiative is part of ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, and they’re taking a systems approach to the problem. Environmental conditions, insect behavior, economic pressures, public policy, and land management all feed into locust outbreak cycles. Understanding those connections creates opportunities to interrupt the cycle before swarms form.
Right now, the research team is looking for funding to expand this work into other regions affected by locusts. The method is simple enough to scale, affordable enough for subsistence farmers, and effective enough to double crop yields. That’s a rare combination in agricultural research, especially for something that addresses a problem affecting millions of people across multiple continents.
It’s wild to think that the solution to ancient biblical plagues might just be better compost, but sometimes the most elegant answers hide in plain sight.
