100-YEAR WAR: Legendary pest gone from Arkansas fields

— After more than a century of crawling across Arkansas cotton fields, the boll weevil, that storied symbol of agricultural woe, has been defeated.

For the first time since its arrival in the state in 1906, the long-snouted beetle, more formally known as Anthonomus grandis, hasn't turned up in a single field.

Thousands of traps - baited with the irresistible scent of an accommodating companion - set across the state's half-million acres of cotton have had no takers this year.

With that, and the expectation that the time largely has passed for any to appear this season, the leaders of the decades-long fight to eradicate the pest from the Cotton Belt have crossed Arkansas and three other states off their to-do lists.

"It's been a great adversary," said Danny Kiser, executive director of the Arkansas Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation.

The boll weevil, whose appetite for cotton buds cost farmers more than $20 billion in crop losses and pesticide costs since it first crossed the Rio Grande 117 years ago, is almost wiped out, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The nation's 9 million acres of cotton are as much as 98 percent weevil-free, according to the agency.

Now, after more than $200 million spent in Arkansas since 1997, farmers can spend more time worrying about other things.

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

"In this farming, you get rid of one pest and here comes something else," said Steve Otwell, who has about 1,200 acres planted in southeast Chicot County.

Otwell grows cotton not far from one of the last-known places where the weevil was sighted - last year near the Louisiana state line. Though he's had to spray his fields against weevil infestations occasionally during his 28-year farming career, he's now more concerned about the year's heavy rains and whether he can harvest before the first frost sets in. Then there's the stink bug, which can cause damage, though hardly to the extent of the weevil.

"For every plus," he said, "there's a minus."

The Department of Agriculture says the boll weevil showed up this season primarily in south Texas fields. Traps are also catching roughly half a dozen weevils a week in Louisiana. But, given those numbers, bug battlers are predicting victory there next year.

"They're making great progress, and we're happy for them," said Bill Grefenstette, national eradication coordinator for the USDA. "That'll clean up the Mid-South."

In addition to producing Arkansas' first weevil-free season in more than 100 years, the eradication effort has wiped out the bug this year for the first time in Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee. Efforts to wipe it out in northern Mexico are also working well, Grefenstette said.

Farmers might have other legitimate worries, Grefenstette allowed. But without weevil-eradication efforts, there'd not be much of a crop to fret over. During the worst times, he said, it wasn't uncommon for farmers to spray their fields up to 20 times in one season and still lose a third or more of their crop.

"The boll weevil in most parts of the Cotton Belt was the biggest bad boy," he said. "If you get that one out of there, it's a lot easier. It's not bliss, but it's a lot easier."

The boll weevil isn't losing out only in the fields.

In December, after more than 30 years in business, a San Diego-based restaurant chain closed its six Boll Weevil restaurants for good.And decades ago, a group of conservative congressional Democrats primarily from the South were called the Boll Weevils. The name had largely fallen out of use by the early 1990s, when a similar group of congressmen took on a new, more pet-sounding name: the Blue Dog Democrats.

Boll weevil eradication groups set up across the country will continue to monitor for the pest, which also has been held back by newer, weevil-resistant strains of cotton plants. And farmers will have to stay on the lookout, because the bug could always bounce back.

But where the bug is considered gone, the project has been significantly rolled back. The Arkansas foundation, for example, has been scaling back for the past few years and working on paying off its debt. Its staff, Kiser said, has dropped from a high of 300 to about 20 now.

Along the way, farmers' cotton yields - the best measure of whether farmers are making any or much money - have shot up. In the 10 years before the eradication effort began in 1997, cotton yields in Arkansas averaged about 730 pounds per acre. Since then, the average through 2008 was 900 pounds per acre, with yields every season after 2003 exceeding half a ton.

There are many reasons yields have increased, Kiser said. Fighting off the boll weevil - which cost farmers between $8 and $35 per acre in eradication-supporting fees, depending on location and year - helped ensure that improvements in farming techniques and plant quality didn't go to waste.

"The boll weevil has a history of taking away whatever yield potential you add," Kiser said.

Few people, if any, have shed any tears over the boll weevil's demise. But some hope to preserve its place in history and popular culture, which has been enough to get the critter into songs ranging from traditional blues tunes to numbers sung by Elvis Presley and written by Bob Dylan.

Another bug-named eatery, the roughly 20-year-old Boll Weevil Cafe & Sweetery, continues to feed patrons in a former cotton warehouse in Augusta, Ga. The town of Enterprise, Ala., which has the only known civic monument to the critter, continues to hold a yearly Boll Weevil Festival. The event has its own Facebook page, which offers that this year's event is scheduled for Oct. 24. There's a similar festival in Marshville, N.C.

And while its real-bug counterparts are now banished from the state's cotton fields, the University of Arkansas at Monticello isn't dropping its mascot - the Boll Weevil - anytime soon.

"That was probably the most ferocious animal that there was," Chancellor Jack Lassiter said. "We don't have plans to change it."

Front Section, Pages 1, 13 on 09/27/2009

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