Boll Weevil Eradication in the United States through 1999 (review)

Southeastern Geographer Vol. XXXXII, No. 2, November 2002, pp. 3 1 1 -3 1 6 REVIEWS Boll Weevil Eradication in the United States through 1999. Willard A. Dickerson, Anthony L. Brashear, James T. Brumley, Frank L. Carter, William J. Grefenstette, F. Aubrey Harris, and Philip B. Haney, editors. The Cotton Foundation Reference Book Series, Number Six. Memphis, TN: The Cotton Foundation Publisher, 2001. 627 and xlii pp., maps, graphs, photographs, references, appendices. $25.00 cloth (ISBN 0-939809-06-0). John Fraser Hart This massive volume is an essential reference work for anyone interested in the geography of the rural South. It tells, often in repetitious and mind-numbing detail, the heroic tale of the largest and most comprehensive insect management program ever undertaken. The incredibly complex task of eradicating the boll weevil from a large portion of its range has required the intense long-term efforts of thousands of individuals and remarkably close collaboration at local, state, and national levels. The achievement of this task has been little short of a miracle! The boll weevil has been the most destructive agricultural pest in U.S. history, even though it is hard for us today to understand just how truly devastating it really was. In some areas it reduced cotton production by as much as 90%, and over the years it has cost farmers a total of more than $100 billion (in 1999 dollars) in crop losses and control costs. In its wake it left wrecked lives and fortunes, depreciated land values, abandoned cotton gins and oil mills, and failed banks, railroads, and other businesses. Cotton farmers first noticed the boll weevil in the lower Rio Grande valley of southern Texas in 1892. Thence it winged its way inexorably across the countryside at a steady rate of about fifty miles a year until 1922, when it had infested the entire Cotton Belt. It had few natural enemies, no effective biological control, and was remarkably prolific; as late as 1975 an isolated cotton plot in west Texas counted 1 0,000 new boll weevils per acre per week. Some people said that the boll weevil was a plague sent by God, and only the Almighty could get rid of it. The first human control measures were cultural practices such as selecting early-maturing varieties of cotton, planting and harvesting as early as possible, and burning the stalks and trash in which weevils might overwinter. The necessity of on-farm demonstrations of such practices led directly to the appointment of the first county agent in 1906 and to the creation ofthe Cooperative Extension Service ofthe U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1914. Dr. Hart is Professor ofGeography, University ofMinnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455. 312REVIEWS The chemical control era began around 1920. The cotton farmer's weapon of choice in the early days was dusting with calcium arsenate, which was not replaced by synthetic insecticides until around 1945. By the mid-1950s cotton growers were spending $200 to $300 million a year for chemicals, but many still lost more than 5% of their crop to weevils, and heavy chemical applications often led to outbreaks of other pests by destroying the beneficial parasites and predators that controlled them. Furthermore, boll weevils were beginning to show signs that they had developed resistance to some insecticides, and the body politic was becoming increasingly sensitive to the possible adverse human health and environmental effects of agricultural chemicals. Visionary leaders of the National Cotton Council, such as Robert Coker of Hartsville, South Carolina, realized that the only hope of cotton growers was complete eradication ofthe boll weevil. Fortunately, scientific help was on the way. In 1959 James Brazzel and Dale Newsom made the supremely important discovery that boll weevils enter a state of diapause (hibernation) during the winter, and spraying with malathion, at a rate of 10 to 16 ounces per acre every five to seven days during this diapause, killed 99%. The last remaining few could be caught in traps baited with grandlure, a pheromone (sex attractant) that scientists had synthesized at the national Boll Weevil Research Laboratory in Starkville, Mississippi. Perhaps surprisingly, the traps become increasingly effective as the weevil population decreases. In 1968 Brazzel showed that...