TIFTON — The Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation of Georgia officially opened its new headquarters in Tifton with a ribbon cutting on Feb. 18.

Executive Director Alan Lowman welcomed attendees to the ceremony, which was held at the new facility located at 353 Oakridge Church Road.

Among those attending the ceremony were Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Gary Black, Representative Tom McCall, chairman of the Georgia House of Representatives Agriculture and Consumer Affairs, and Representative Clay Pirkle, who’s district includes part of Tift County.

“It feels like it’s been a long road to get to Tifton,” Lowman said.

He said that the Tift County Development Authority, Dr. Joe Lewis, Assistant Dean of The University of Georgia Tifton Campus, Dr. Joe West and Dr. Philip Roberts, Taylor Sills from the Georgia Cotton Commission and Tyron Spearman for helping make the move to Tift County possible.

The Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation of Georgia is a non-profit organization which was incorporated for the purpose of implementing and administering a boll weevil eradication, suppression and containment program in the established eradication zones within the State of Georgia where eradication efforts were to be undertaken.

The boll weevil

The boll weevil, scientific name “Anthonomus grandis,” prior to the eradication efforts, was the main pest of cotton.

“The boll weevil is a one-trick pony,” Lowman said. “It can only reproduce on cotton. It may feed on peanuts or other green succulent plants but it only lays eggs in cotton squares.”

Each cotton boll is supposed to have four cotton balls, but when a boll weevil lays eggs, it ruins that ball, which right away cuts production of that boll by 25 percent, according to Lowman.

“The egg inside that square is in a protected environment,” he said. “Predatory insects cannot get to it. Chemicals will not get to it. So it’s just in a safe little cocoon. It hatches in a few days, three or four days depending on the temperature. It will eat for five or six days, again depending on the temperature. Then it will go into a pupa or cocoon stage and it’ll stay in that for maybe about seven to 10 days. Than it will hatch and eat its way out and feed for a while, then it’s ready to reproduce.”

Lowman said that the reproductive cycle is very quick, so that one boll weevil can end up producing billions of offspring in a growing season, which can completely devastate a crop.

Eradication

The insect first appeared in Georgia in 1914 and almost put cotton farmers out of business before eradication efforts stepped into high gear in 1987.

Rep. McCall said he remembered the early days of the eradication efforts.

“Back then we didn’t count boll weevils in the trap,” he said. “We just poured them out and measured, there was so many. They’d fill the traps up and still be on the outside still trying to get in to the pheromones. To be able to get rid of a whole species of an insect is kind of amazing. But I think it was the best thing that ever happened to the cotton program.”

Lowman said that before 87, there were only about 150,000 acres of cotton under cultivation.

“In 2019 the latest numbers that we have available is 1.4 million acres of cotton in the state,” he said. “If it were not for boll weevil eradication I submit to you that South Georgia and rural Georgia would look nothing like it looks today. When you think of the impact from the fertilizer dealers, the equipment dealers, the gins, the warehouses, trucking, all the stuff that cotton trickles down and touches, as well as the clothes we wear and what they cost. If it wasn’t for eradicating the boll weevil, it would be a totally different world.”

The eradication efforts in Georgia were successful due to the intense trapping and pesticide treatments of fields.

“I remember going to the funeral for the boll weevil,” Agriculture Commissioner Black said. “That was the nastiest thing I ever saw, that thing laying in a casket…I’m glad he’s dead. He’s still dead here, and we want to keep him that way.”

Black said that it was important to make sure programs like the Boll Weevil Eradication Program still receive the funding and partnerships they need to keep doing their work.

The Georgia Program went into post-eradication stage in 1994. The Georgia Boll Weevil Program is funded 100% by the Georgia cotton producers. The current function and duties of the program are to place traps on cotton fields to continue to monitor for boll weevils since the United States is not completely eradicated.

One way the Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation keeps track of possible insect issues is through trap monitoring.

“We basically monitor to make sure there’s no reintroduction,” Lowman said. “It does not mind hitchhiking. Trucks, people, anything you can ride on, it doesn’t have a problem with it. The other thing is it’s a relatively strong flyer. They’ve been documented to fly 150 miles.”

Since boll weevils are still a major concern in Mexico and the southern parts of Texas, monitoring is important to prevent another infestation.

Those green traps contain pheromones that lure in the boll weevils and allow for tracking of any insects.

“The lures and the traps are the essential parts of our process,” Lowman said. “They are the fundamental part to trapping the boll weevil, estimating the population and determining where we need to spray and what progress we make.”

“You know the definition of an oxymoron is the phrase, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” Rep. Pirkle said. “The boll weevil eradication program is the best money that has ever been spent in agriculture particularly in cotton.”

Lowman wants to make sure that the previous problems with the pest are not forgotten and that his people are able to continue to do their work unhindered.

“The while idea behind trapping and monitoring is we’ve got to be able to get the cotton fields,” he said. “People don’t respect property rights, so they create problems and then when we try to come in we’ve got a lot of gates and restrictions restricting our access and that slows things down. Our only goal is to get to the cotton, put a trap on the cotton, and get back to it to maintain the trap. We don’t care about the deer. We don’t care about the quail population. Those are great and we love then, but that’s not anything we want to impact on the farm. We just want to check the traps on the cotton.”