Can Chickens Eat Locusts? Yes, if Nobody Sprayed Them

A healthy adult hen can eat a locust, and she’ll run one down if she gets the chance. That’s less strange than it sounds, because a locust is just a grasshopper that has joined a crowd. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization calls the Desert Locust “one of about a dozen species of short-horned grasshoppers”. So everything on this page goes for the grasshoppers in your yard too. The one thing I’d never do is hand your hens a hopper from ground that someone sprayed or baited.

I rewrote this page from 18 sources, and they’re all listed at the bottom. The locust facts come from FAO and from Feedipedia, a feed database run by French agricultural research bodies with FAO. The worm warnings come from the Merck Veterinary Manual. The feeding rules come from Colorado State and Alabama Extension, plus a hatchery for chicks. The lubber facts come from the University of Florida, and the cicada facts from Maryland and Kentucky. I’ll name each one as it comes up.

This page used to open with a story about a swarm landing in somebody’s backyard and a brave hen gobbling locusts one after another. Two more stories had pails of live hoppers dumped into a run. I can’t vouch for any of them, so they’re gone. The old page also called locusts lean and packed with vitamins and minerals, and it promised better eggs and shinier feathers. I couldn’t find a source for any of that. Feedipedia says the fat in these insects runs from under 5% to over 20%, so “lean” isn’t even right.

The old advice went too. It said a flock could keep your yard free of pests and help with swarms, and it listed signs that a hen had eaten too many. It said frozen hoppers keep for winter and dried ones keep for months. It told you to mash them up for chicks. I couldn’t back up any of it. One of those claims gets its own section below, because the real numbers are kind of fun.

A word on the photos. None of them shows a hen eating a locust, because I couldn’t find a real one I’d trust. The big locust was photographed in Cairns in Australia, and the garden grasshopper in Bengaluru in India, going by each photo’s page. The farmer and the molting grasshopper come from the USDA’s own photo stream, shot in July 2021 in grasshopper-hit fields near Malta, Montana. The hens at the horse-trailer coop are from the same stream, on a farm in Maryland. The cicada is from Maryland’s Brood X.

The short version.

• A locust is a grasshopper that swarms. Locusts and grasshoppers are both fine for adult hens as a treat, and so are cicadas.
• Five to seven big ones make up a hen’s whole treat share for the day. That share is 10 to 15 grams.
• Never feed one that was sprayed or baited, and never a dead one. FAO says pesticide-killed locusts “should under no circumstances be consumed”.
• In the Southeast, keep hens away from the eastern lubber. If a hen ate something that was sprayed, or she acts off, call a vet who sees poultry. We aren’t vets.

Yes. A Locust Is a Grasshopper in a Crowd

Here’s the whole trick of the word. Feedipedia says locusts are “a group of grasshopper species that become gregarious and migratory when their populations are sufficiently dense.” FAO says the same about the Desert Locust. When conditions are right, it “can quickly form dense swarms of adults or bands of hoppers”. Jeffrey Lockwood, writing in the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, puts it in one line: “a locust is a type of grasshopper capable of forming immense, migratory swarms”.

If you live in the US, that matters. We used to have a locust of our own, the Rocky Mountain locust. Lockwood says farmers destroyed the habitat it needed without meaning to, “leaving North America without a locust species.” He adds that “the last living specimen was collected in 1902”.

So when someone in the US says locust, they might mean one of three things. Most often it’s a grasshopper. Sometimes it’s a cicada, which isn’t a grasshopper at all. Once in a while it’s the long pods of the honey locust tree. I cover cicadas at the bottom. Tree pods are a different question for a different page. This one is all about the insect.

Turns out your hens eat grasshoppers already, all on their own, if you let them out. Colorado State University Extension says “Free-range chickens will consume insects to add to their protein intake.” Merck says birds that get outdoors “supplement their diet by foraging and eating insects.” Feedipedia notes that farms feed locusts “live to free-range chickens”. Live and whole is how it’s normally done.

Gram for Gram, About as Much Protein as Layer Feed

Grasshoppers get sold as a protein bomb. On a dry basis, they are one. Feedipedia puts locusts and their cousins “in the 50-65% DM range” for protein, where DM means dry matter. But a live hopper is mostly water. As Feedipedia puts it, “The dry matter content is 23-35%.”

So I did the math on a fresh one, and honestly, it surprised me.

Take 23% dry matter at 50% protein, and you get a hopper that’s about 12% protein as it comes. Take 35% dry matter at 65% protein, and you get about 23%. Now compare the bag you buy. Alabama Extension says laying hens “should receive a layer diet with around 18 percent crude protein to maintain good egg production.” A fresh grasshopper lands right around there. It’s a pretty good snack. It’s just not the supercharger folks make it out to be.

Even the protein figure may run a little high. Feedipedia’s 2023 review of locusts and grasshoppers says “Protein content may be overestimated by 7% due to presence of chitin.” Chitin is the stuff of the hard outer shell.

Calcium is the real gap, though.

Feedipedia says “The calcium content is low, as in other insect species.” Alabama Extension notes that “The eggshell is composed of around 96 percent calcium carbonate.” If your hen fills up on hoppers instead of layer feed, she’s skipping the calcium her shells need.

The feeding trials say the same thing in a roundabout way. In Niger, researchers fed 140 ISA Brown hens for four months on diets where grasshopper meal replaced the fish meal. Laying rate and feed intake didn’t change in any way that counted, and neither did egg weight or shell thickness. The paper calls those differences “statistically insignificant (P>0.05)”. Yolk color and the Haugh unit, a measure of egg white quality, improved. In Nigeria, broiler chicks did better when desert locust meal replaced half the protein from fish meal. That meal was just 1.7% of their total diet.

Both of those were dried meal inside a balanced ration. Free-range birds are another story. Feedipedia reports that on the Tibetan Plateau, chickens raised on grassland “containing a large population of grasshoppers had lower live weights” than chickens fed a soybean meal and maize diet. Grasshoppers work fine as part of the diet. A field full of them doesn’t replace the feeder.

Five to Seven Big Ones Is a Whole Day’s Treats

Here’s how I work out the treat share for any snack you give. Colorado State says “Treats should make up no more than 10% of their daily diet.” Alabama Extension says “A laying hen will consume between 100 and 150 grams of feed per day”. Ten percent of that comes to 10 to 15 grams of treats per hen per day. It’s the same 10% rule our durian page uses, and it covers every treat together.

FAO says an adult Desert Locust “can consume roughly its own weight, about 2 grams, in food every day.” So a grown locust weighs about 2 grams. That makes five to seven of them a hen’s whole treat share for the day.

Your grasshoppers won’t match that exactly, of course. Colorado State’s grasshopper page says “Over 100 species of grasshoppers occur in Colorado” alone. One on its list, a bird grasshopper, it calls “A very long grasshopper (ca. 2-inch long)”. I couldn’t find a weight for American species. If you’re catching them on purpose, weigh a handful on a kitchen scale once and you’ll know.

Don’t forget what she catches herself. Feedipedia’s review says “A chicken can eat up to 70 insects per day”. If a free-ranging hen spends the afternoon snapping up grasshoppers, she’s already had her treats. Skip the extra handful that day.

Our Can Chickens Eat It? checker plays it safe here. Type in locust or grasshopper and it says “Not rated here”, because none of the official sources it uses rules on them by name. Type in insects and it says “Fine as a treat”. Its reason: “Not on either avoid list, and protein-rich — which is exactly why they count toward the treat limit rather than replacing feed.” I’d say a clean grasshopper falls in that same insect bucket.

Never Feed a Sprayed or Dead One

This is the part that actually matters, so stick with me.

Locusts and grasshoppers are crop pests, so people spray them. Feedipedia says they “may be sprayed with insecticides in governmental control programmes or by farmers, resulting in significant amounts of residues in consumed insects.” After Kuwait’s 1988 and 1989 outbreak, locusts collected for food carried high levels of organophosphorus pesticides. In one trial, broiler chicks fed sprayed locusts ate less than chicks fed untreated ones.

FAO is pretty blunt about it. “Locusts that have been killed by pesticides should under no circumstances be consumed, because they may still contain traces of pesticides.” It also warns that “Pesticide does not always kill the locusts immediately.” So a live hopper from a sprayed field isn’t safe either.

FAO goes one step further, and this is the line I’d want every chicken keeper to see. “As a precaution, people are warned not to eat treated locusts or animals that may have consumed them.” Your hens are animals that may have consumed them. FAO doesn’t say anything about eggs. Even so, if your flock got into sprayed hoppers, I’d call your county extension office before eating the eggs.

You don’t need a government spray program for this to happen. Colorado State’s grasshopper page says garden “baits containing carbaryl (Sevin) can be used”. It adds that the bait kills “grasshoppers that feed on the bait.” A hopper can eat bait in a neighbor’s garden and still make it into your run before it dies.

Feedipedia’s review has the rule I’d go by. It says collecting these insects for food and feed “should never be done when pesticides are used.” Contaminated ones “should only be used in composting.” It recommends “collection of only live locusts for use as animal feed, and the dead ones could be used for composting”.

Here are my own rules, built from those. Only feed hoppers from ground you know nobody treated. Never feed a dead one, or one that’s slow and twitchy for no reason. If you hear that the field next door got sprayed, keep the flock in for a while. Ask your extension office how long. Our page on what not to feed chickens has the rest of the never list.

Wild Hoppers Can Carry Worms

There’s a second catch with wild bugs, and it’s an old one. Merck’s table of poultry worms lists grasshoppers as a carrier, the go-between host, for three roundworms. One, Cheilospirura hamulosa, ends up in the gizzard. Another one settles in the ceca. That’s Subulura brumpti, and Merck rates it mild. The third is Tetrameres americana, which lives in the proventriculus, the glandular stomach. Merck rates that one “Moderate to severe”.

That third one is the one to know. Merck describes Tetrameres americana as “a bright red worm discernible through the proventricular wall”. It says the worm “causes diarrhea, emaciation, and, with heavy infestation, death.” Merck also says “Field studies show that poultry maintained under free-range conditions may be heavily parasitized”.

Now the other side. The same chapter says “In rare cases, affected birds develop clinical signs such as apathy or diarrhea.” Most wormy birds look fine. So honestly, this isn’t a reason to stop letting your hens range. It’s a reason not to make wild hoppers a daily staple. If a hen is losing weight and you can’t say why, a vet can look for worm eggs in her droppings. Merck lists “Detection of eggs in feces by flotation or sedimentation” as the test.

It’s the same worry we had with earthworms. Merck’s table lists them as a host for the gapeworm, and that’s why our page on raising worms for chickens keeps them in a closed bin.

Your Flock Won’t Stop a Swarm

The old page said chickens could help control locust swarms. I ran the numbers, and it’s not even close.

FAO’s locust commission for the western region says “A swarm contains at least 40 million locusts per km², and sometimes up to 80 million.” Feedipedia’s review says a chicken can eat up to 70 insects a day. Say you’ve got ten hens, and you give them a whole square kilometer of the smallest swarm. At 700 locusts a day, they’d need about 57,000 days to finish it. That’s roughly 156 years, by my math.

And swarms are rarely that small. FAO says one Kenyan swarm in January 2020 “covered an area of 40 km by 60 km (2400 square km.)” FAO says a single square kilometer of swarm “could eat the same amount of food in one day as about 35 000 people.” FAO also notes that “control by natural predators and parasites is limited since locusts can quickly migrate away from most natural enemies.”

Where birds do help is earlier, on open pasture, before anything swarms. Feedipedia cites a study from China where free-range chickens at “3.3 head/ha” kept pastures from being overrun by several locust species. That’s about 1.3 hens per acre. Feedipedia’s review mentions Chinese chicken and duck “armies” moved around to head off outbreaks. That’s a farm-scale plan for grassland. It won’t save your garden from a cloud like the one in the photo.

The US tried the army idea once, with people. Kansas called 1874 the “Grasshopper Year”, Lockwood writes, and the state tried to raise a “grasshopper army”. It required every able-bodied male from 12 to 65 to fight the locusts. The army didn’t end the Rocky Mountain locust. Farming did, years later, by wrecking the river-valley ground it bred in.

Keep Them Off the Eastern Lubber

One grasshopper is off the menu.

That’s the eastern lubber, the big, slow, yellow-and-black one of the Southeast. A UF/IFAS Extension blog post from Indian River County, Florida, puts it plainly. The writer lists the garden pests they’re happy to feed their chickens, from hornworms to grubs. Then comes the catch.

“But not the Lubber. Their body contains a toxin which may be fatal to birds.”

The University of Florida’s insect profile of the lubber explains the defense. “They can spray toxic chemicals a distance of at least 0.6 inches.” It says “Many vertebrate, but not invertebrate, predators are affected”. The bright colors are thought to warn anything with a backbone that the lubber tastes bad.

You’ll know one when you see it. UF/IFAS Gardening Solutions says females can reach “up to 3 ½ inches long”, and they mostly walk because they’re poor jumpers. The profile says they range from North Carolina down through Florida and west to central Texas. If you pick lubbers off your plants, bag them or squash them. Don’t toss them into the run, no matter how hard your hens beg. It’s the same idea as the toads on our frogs page, where some critters fight back with poison.

Cicadas Are Fine. Chicks Should Wait.

Plenty of folks call periodical cicadas locusts. University of Maryland Extension straightens that out. “Some people confuse cicadas with locusts, but locusts are in the grasshopper family.” Then comes the good news for chicken keepers: “If you have freerange chickens, they will happily scratch up the cicadas and eat them. The cicadas aren’t poisonous”. The University of Kentucky’s entomologist Lee Townsend agreed back in 2004. “Myth and rumor to the contrary, cicadas are not poisonous and do not sting or bite.”

So sure, let them feast when a brood comes up, within reason. The same 10 to 15 grams a day still applies to your flock. A brood year is a whole lot of free treats at once, and a hen stuffed with cicadas isn’t eating her layer feed.

Chicks need to wait. Cackle Hatchery’s guide says “Feed only starter ration for at least the first two weeks”. After that, grit comes first. Cackle says that when chicks “start eating anything fibrous, they need grit to help with digestion.” I’d count a grasshopper as fibrous, since Feedipedia says the fiber in these insects “increases with age”. Our page on baby chickens and mealworms walks through the same two-week wait.

One more thing about big hoppers. Feedipedia warns that “The presence of large spines on the tibia of grasshoppers and locusts may cause intestinal constipation”. The cases it gives are monkeys in the wild, where it was fatal. In people it has occasionally meant surgery. It recommends grinding them or pulling off the legs and wings first. I found nothing about chickens, and Feedipedia itself says farms feed locusts live to free-range birds. For young birds, though, I’d stick to small hoppers or snap off the big back legs first. That’s my call, not a study’s.

Sources

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, Locust Watch: Desert Locust Q&A.
• FAO Commission for Controlling the Desert Locust in the Western Region (CLCPRO): FAQ.
• Valérie Heuzé and Gilles Tran, Feedipedia: the datasheet on locust meal and locusts.
• Harinder P. S. Makkar and colleagues, Feedipedia: Locusts and grasshoppers as feed (Broadening Horizons No. 55, 2023).
• Rüdiger Hauck, Merck Veterinary Manual: Helminthiasis in Poultry (2024).
• Merck Veterinary Manual: Common Helminths of Poultry (table).
• Yuko Sato, Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry.
• Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains: Insect Lore.
• Maritta Perry Grau, University of Maryland Extension: They’re Coming! Cicadas, That Is (2021).
• Haven Miller and Laura Skillman, University of Kentucky: Cicadas Pose Little Concern for Animals and Their Owners (2004).
• Colorado State University Extension: Grasshopper Control in Gardens and Small Acreages.
• UF/IFAS Extension Indian River County: The Eastern Lubber Grasshopper (2023).
• Tiare Saracino and Norman C. Leppla, UF/IFAS EDIS: Eastern Lubber Grasshopper, Romalea microptera.
• UF/IFAS Gardening Solutions: Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers.
• Brah and colleagues: grasshopper meal in the diets of laying hens in Niger (Indian Journal of Animal Sciences, 2017).
• Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way.
• Wilmer Pacheco and colleagues, Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913, 2022).
• Cackle Hatchery: What to Feed Baby Chicks.
• Chicken Rise: Can Chickens Eat It? checker, our own tool, checked for locust and grasshopper, then for insects.

Sources checked October 29, 2026. I read the Niger laying-hen study as its abstract, not the full paper. The fresh-weight protein range and the per-hen treat math are mine, from these sources. So is the swarm arithmetic. The house rules on sprayed ground and young birds are my calls too. We aren’t vets. If a hen ate something that was sprayed or acts off, call a vet who sees poultry.

Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe