Agriculture Code

Agriculture Code
Author: Texas
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 1982
Genre: Agricultural laws and legislation
ISBN:

Boll Weevil Blues

Boll Weevil Blues
Author: James C. Giesen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2012-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226292851

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region’s chief cash crop—tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil’s lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region—those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.

Introduction to Integrated Pest Management

Introduction to Integrated Pest Management
Author: M.L. Flint
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1461592127

Integrated control of pests was practiced early in this century, well before anyone thought to call it "integrated control" or, still later, "integrated pest management" (IPM), which is the subject of this book by Mary Louise Flint and the late Robert van den Bosch. USDA entomologists W. D. Hunter and B. R. Coad recommended the same principles in 1923, for example, for the control of boll weevil on cotton in the United States. In that program, selected pest-tolerant varieties of cotton and residue destruction were the primary means of control, with insecticides consid ered supplementary and to be used only when a measured incidence of weevil damage occurred. Likewise, plant pathologists had also developed disease management programs incorporating varietal selection and cul tural procedures, along with minimal use of the early fungicides, such as Bordeaux mixture. These and other methods were practiced well before modern chemical control technology had developed. Use of chemical pesticides expanded greatly in this century, at first slowly and then, following the launching of DDT as a broadly successful insecticide, with rapidly increasing momentum. In 1979, the President's Council on Environmental Quality reported that production of synthetic organic pesticides had increased from less than half a million pounds in 1951 to about 1.4 billion pounds-or about 3000 times as much-in 1977.