Truemors
It brought immense suffering to thousands of Southern families, already struggling to eke out a meager living from the war-ravaged landscape of the post-Civil War South.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />Yet, the series of innovations developed to control and eventually eradicate it brought immense scientific and economic benefits to the South.
It was the boll weevil, one of the most destructive agricultural pests in human history.
“We really don’t know of any other agricultural pest that has had the impact of the boll weevil,” says Dr. Ron Smith, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System entomologist and <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Auburn University emeritus professor of entomology.
“There are a lot of historians who feel that when you look at the religion, politics, law and art of the South, the boll weevil may have exerted a greater influence on all of these things than any factor except the Civil War.”
Whatever the case, the legacy of this tiny insect will likely command a prominent place in histories of the South for decades, if not centuries, to come, says Smith, who discussed the history and eradication of this virulent cotton pest at the Capital City Kiwanis Club in Montgomery, Alabama, today.
Smith recently completed a publication for the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station covering the history of boll weevil eradication in the state from 1910 to 2007.
The fact that Smith carries around a Lucite block of preserved weevils speaks volumes about science’s ultimate triumph over this voracious cotton pest. Except for Lucite blocks and a handful of specimens Smith has preserved in deep freeze, there are few weevils to speak of anywhere in the region — a far cry from most of the last century.
The weevil entered the United States from Mexico in 1892. In less than thirty years, Southern farms were reeling from its effects.
“Everywhere it occurred, it was devastating to the economy, causing poverty and numerous changes in the way people lived — in their culture and definitely in agriculture,” Smith says.
An Alabama farmer traveling through a time portal from, say, 1917 to the present day likely would find the insect’s absence in Southern cotton fields as astounding as jet planes and cell phones. In 1917, the first year the weevil was detected throughout the state, cotton planting declined by more than a million acres from previous years.
In 1955, it was estimated that the boll weevil’s nationwide impact had caused an average annual loss to cotton of $200 million. Yearly economic losses associated with the weevil in Alabama totaled between $20 and $40 million for more than 80 years.
Even so, farmers were not willing to give up on a crop that had served their families for generations, and continue planting it as their primary cash crop, Smith says.
Out of desperation, farmers experimented with many different methods to control the pests, but none of them proved effective.
“They would pinch them off infested cotton squares. They would try to drown them in kerosene, kill them in carbolic acid and even burn their fields to eliminate weevils the next year,” Smith says, adding that all proved futile.
Mechanical efforts failed; so did federally sponsored quarantine efforts.
Smith’s grandfather even paid his son a nickel for every gallon syrup bucket he could fill with weevil-infested fruit that had fallen between the cotton rows.
“My dad, age 9 at the time, would fill up those buckets, get paid his nickels and then empty the contents into the family’s wood-burning stove,” Smith recalls.
A few cultural practices were developed to minimize the weevil’s impact, such as getting the cotton bear fruit sooner, before the pests were able to gain a sufficient toehold, and destroying cotton in the fall before the weevils could build up food reserves for the winter.
All of these produced only limited effects.
But an emerging cadre of scientists and educators at Southern land-grant universities began working on solutions, many of which are still felt today in ways their creators never imagined, Smith says.
These included diversified agriculture, the development of the Cooperative Extension concept, the rise of entomological science in throughout the South and a host of advances in all facets of agricultural science, some of which have had lasting influences on other scientific disciplines and technologies.
But most important of all, from the standpoint of cotton farmers, was the effective elimination of the boll weevil from Southern cotton fields, a achievement that, in turn, has resulted in lower insecticide uses and significant changes in the cotton insect spectrum, Smith says.
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