Looking Back on Battling the Boll Weevil

Contributed by Kristi Krueger

The bug above is a boll weevil, an insect that feeds on and lays eggs in the bolls of cotton plants, ruining the fiber.  A document newly available online from the North Carolina State University Entomology Department records reports that by the early 1980s, the bugs had done over $12 billion in damage in the U.S., including North Carolina.  This led to the Boll Weevil Eradication Program, an effort to curb the bugs’ destruction that began in northeast North Carolina and Virginia and grew to cover the rest of North Carolina and South Carolina.  These records were digitized as part of the Cultivating a Revolution digitization project.

This document also provides an explanation of how the program got up and running.  Ridding a large area of a pest takes cooperation.  Farmers passed referendums at different stages of the program to ensure compliance with and funding for the control measures.  It is interesting to note that the initial referendum to bring the rest of North Carolina and South Carolina into the program failed to pass but did so when the issue came to a vote the second time, after a bad year of boll weevils.

The concerted effort paid off.  While boll weevils still exist, they are virtually gone in the state, and have been since the late 1980s.

To get a sense of the impact boll weevils had on cotton farming not long before the eradication program began, watch a 1972 video of an interview between reporter Ray Wilkinson and Tom Richie of Hercules Incorporated, a manufacturer of insecticides.

For more information on the biology of boll weevils and controlling them, there is a presentation available from the NC Cooperative Extension “Cotton Insect Corner,” by Jack Bacheler of the NC State Department of Entomology.

And for more information on the continued efforts to keep the boll weevil from returning to North Carolina, see this resource from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.