The idea that Ottoman officials intervened in any meaningful way to address the impact of natural disasters, from fire to famine, seems to contradict many of the received wisdoms about late imperial governance. Indeed, many European observers painted a picture of a negligent imperial state that did little or nothing to help populations suffering from a variety of problems, including famine, disease, extreme weather, and locusts. Accordingly, many contemporary scholars have argued that despite deteriorating conditions in the countryside and cities, the imperial state either ignored these problems or dealt with them in a desultory fashion. My findings, based on a combination of Ottoman and British archival sources, challenge such assumptions. In this paper I focus, in particular, on the outbreaks of locusts between 1860s and 1890s. Desert locusts ravaged agricultural crops and pastures, robbing people and animals of food crops and fodder. The problem was especially severe in the Ottoman East. Thousands of peasants fled from affected rural areas or left agricultural zones to seek refuge in cities. Hundreds of documents including urgent telegraphs sent by local officials attest to episodes of locust attacks across the region, from Diyarbekir to Mardin to Cezire. But these documents also tell the story of repeated efforts by the Ottoman administration to mitigate the damage caused by the insects. The government’s measures included putting a price on locust eggs [‘20 para per kıyye’ (1.128kg)] to encourage civilians to go into the fields; in other instances, the state employed soldiers to collect eggs from fields before they hatched. These policies suggest that despite infrastructural difficulties and limited resources the Ottoman government was concerned enough with the crises caused by agricultural pests to intervene directly in an attempt to protect agriculture and peasant livelihoods.