Plagues of locusts across Australia are threatening sowing and yields in some of the country's richest cropping areas - and pose an even greater threat to maturing crops in a few months' time.
"It's like a time bomb waiting to go off," an entomologist, Mr Kevin Walden, said of the billions of eggs being laid by locusts infesting the states of Western Australia, New South Wales, and South Australia.
The locusts are by-products of good rains through Australia's usually parched outback areas, from breeding grounds estimated to span more than 75,000 square miles.
Able to soar up to 300 miles on a good windy night, the locusts have moved relentlessly through the flowering deserts, into arid pastoral land, and now into croplands - where they are multiplying in unprecedented numbers, officials say.
"Our female locusts over here are plump, chock-a-block full of eggs and laying them all over the place," said Mr Walden, from Agriculture Western Australia, the state's primary industry department. "All they have to do now is survive winter."
Officials and grain organisations such as the former Australian Wheat Board, AWB Ltd, say it is too early to assess what impact an uncontrollable plague would have if the hatched locusts begin to take off in October or November, just before harvest.
But South Australian authorities believe a bad outbreak could cause, at the very least, Aus$100 million (£52 million) damage in their state alone to crops including barley, wheat, vegetables, and grapes for the country's booming wine industry. "If the locusts complete their life cycle before the crops [grow] out of the ground, we are saved, but if the locusts are still about when the crops come out, then there's potential for damage," said Mr Walden.
"But that's only a minor problem, I think, compared to the problem we could have next spring."
For one South Australian wheat farmer, Mr Brian Leue, the issue is no longer academic as he took advantage of some early season rains to begin sowing.
Four days later, just as the crops began to peek out of the ground, the locusts arrived. "By next morning they'd cleaned up about 200 acres . . . and we've lost about 200 again this week," he said. "As soon as it pokes out the ground, they're after it."
"The crucial issue for farmers in the areas where there are significant numbers of locusts now is how they're going to get through the seeding phase and get their crops up and established while expending the least amount of money [on spraying]," said Mr Dennis Hopkins from South Australia's Primary Industries.
The South Australian plague is regarded as the worst in nearly 50 years, with the Western Australian outbreak likely to be the worst in a decade, now taking in 80 per cent of the wheatbelt.
Mr Hopkins said South Australia was planning a control programme to deal with hatching locusts in spring which would need to be up to five times bigger than any previous programme.