BollWeevil_IPMandTPM_James_Reggie_AustinTX_15October2003_Reel2256.wav

Reggie James [00:00:00] There was a proposal for Texas to start an eradication program for boll weevils.

Reggie James [00:00:06] And this whole eradication idea was based on this raging debate in academia that goes back 30 or more years and actually it goes back to a fight at A&M where integrated pest management was developed.

Reggie James [00:00:24] And integrated pest management is a pest control technique and it developed really as an economic tool to determine that level where the cost of the additional use of pesticides was exceeded by, the - let me phrase that a different way - it was to try to find the level of pesticide use that was optimum. You could accept a certain amount of pest damage. And that if you used more pesticides, you know, you saved a little more crop, but you didn't save any more money because you were already producing as much as you needed to produce.

Reggie James [00:01:10] And there were other ideas about, well, maybe if we rotated crops, we could break some of the pests' cycle. Maybe if we did a couple of other mechanical things, we could lower the cost of pesticides because pesticides are fairly, you know, they can be very expensive. But the goal was not to improve environmental protection or to reduce pesticide use because it might harm people later. The goal was to reduce the farmer's cost of pesticide use. Who cares how you get there, that that's a that's a good thing. So but at the same time, so these these practices were being developed at Texas A&M.

Reggie James [00:01:50] But at the same time, there was this other philosophy called TPM,Total Pest Management. Only in academia, can you have a war between these two philosophies. But the Total Pest Management philosophy was that you could totally eliminate a pest and that you would have an increase in the cost of pest management temporarily while you were, I mean, it's engaged in war on a species and they felt that they knew enough about ecology and enough about the species, that they figured that they could break the reproduction cycle in a specific species if they developed a tight enough and aggressive enough attack.

Reggie James [00:02:33] And this idea kind of comes out of some of the disease control methods. And we really had eradicated a couple of diseases. You know, smallpox is gone now. Well, if you don't count people creating it in laboratories so that they can fight other people with it, it's gone. And there are some other diseases that we had wiped out, using this kind of an approach.

Reggie James [00:02:57] Well, the difference there is that you're talking microorganisms and not insects. And the variables, the higher the lifeform that you that you are dealing with, the more variables you have to deal with. So it's very hard to just on paper figure out, OK, if, if boll weevils have this kind of characteristics and have these types of behaviors, if we apply this pesticide at exactly the right time and we get everybody to do it all at the same time, like, you know, count down, everybody spray right now that we could kill an entire generation of them. So TPM is based on that idea. And in theory, it probably really would work in practice. It's never worked before.

Reggie James [00:03:42] And we had an experience in Texas earlier on, probably in the late 70s, early 80s, with a eradication program for fire ants, where that was the same idea. We're gonna nuke all the fire ants at the same time. And what they wound up doing was, being, spreading fire ants across the entire state, and increasing the population exponentially. Well, the reason the fire ant eradication program didn't work was that they really didn't understand the biology of fire ants.

Reggie James [00:04:20] And, you know, not not to make the story too long, but the reason was that fire ants behave differently than any other kind of ant for the most part. Most ants have one queen, no more than two. And they're the, the reproduction, that's how they reproduce. The queen lays the eggs and fire ants have multiple queens up to three or four hundred queens per per mound. If you disrupt a fire ant mound, their response to that is to disperse their queens and each queen can start a new colony. So when they tried the eradication program on fire ants, they disrupted every mound of fire ants in the state and they wound up with like a 300-fold increase in the fire ant population, which put population pressure on the fire ants so they had to spread out. So it was, you couldn't have created a bigger disaster.

Reggie James [00:05:21] So with this experience, and knowing how disastrous this approach could be, they wanted to launch the boll weevil eradication program. So we got involved with this one, as did a few other environmental groups: Texas Center for Policy Studies got involved; Sierra Club did. And our concern was this interim period of the eradication program involves increasing the use of pesticides. And the pesticide of choice was malathion, an organophosphate, and it's got relatively low mammalian toxicity. So from that perspective, maybe it's not the worst. I mean, there are far worse pesticides. It's a bad one, though. But the reason that it's was used, it's got pretty good knock-down power for a program like this where you're trying to really disrupt one generation. But the other advantage is that it's really, really cheap. So they were going to do aerial spraying, ground spraying every kind of spraying, time when it was done.

Reggie James [00:06:24] The law that got passed on that we killed the first Session that it was proposed and we killed it on the basis of arguing the fire ant thing and arguing that you know, this is just not a very well-thought out program, there's no way you can eradicate them. You're going to increase pesticide use. And we also argued this was just based on theory. And it's, we had found a treatise that was done by a professor years before that argued that if you tried to do this massive knock-down, that you'd have this thing called secondary pest infestations. And what that basically meant was you're targeting your attack on the boll weevil. But when you go to kill the boll weevil, you're going to kill the predator insects that control all these other pests other than the boll weevil. And there are lots of different pests that typically never reach the stage that they cause big economic harm. And some people bought it, bought the argument, but most people didn't. They said, "Oh, yeah, that's just science fiction. That's not going to really happen." But enough farmers bought that argument that half, about half of the ag community, the cotton-producing community opposed the boll weevil bill.

Reggie James [00:07:47] Well, as it turned out, that wasn't why they opposed it at all. It was the assessment, because the the eradication program required that farmers pay into this assessment and it was a mandatory assessment. And you also, the State Department of Ag, or whoever contracted with them got the ability to enter onto their property to apply pesticides. And being the good libertarians that they are, a lot of these farmers thought , Not. You know, you're not going to have people entering my property without my permission and I'm not paying another tax." So it was a very anti-tax situation.

Reggie James [00:08:26] Now, I had some concerns about trying to take advantage of of that because the one part of the eradication program that I liked was the part where the ag community, as a community, in a region had to work together to develop a plan for pest control. Now, if you forget the eradication part of this, that we're going to nuke an entire species out of existence, that's not a bad idea. Because a lot of what increases the cost of pest control is that everybody individually is doing pest control on their property without regard to what's happening on the property next to them. If you wanted to have a good integrated pest control management system, it wouldn't be designed just for Farmer Jones' plot. It would be designed for the entire Concho Valley area with a plan that knows what the migration of the pest is, what the population of pest predators might be, so that you can, if predators are increasing their population because the pest populations high, you probably don't want to spray at that time or you want to use something that's specific to the pest and won't harm the predator, because you'll get really good natural pest control and maybe you've got a plant other things in those areas that encourage the pet predator population to increase.

Reggie James [00:09:52] I mean, it's a very intricate thing, but that there are some scientific answers to it that are good for everybody. So that was one aspect of the program that we liked. And so we got some amendments. The next time the bill was proposed, we got some amendments put in that actually turned out to have language that was totally contrary to an eradication program. We had, we got put into the law that they had to use integrated pest management. And one of the guys, one of the scientists, at A&M, says, "Tthis is ludicrous. This is a total pest management program. The total pest management and integrated pest management are totally opposite things. And yet you're gonna put language in here that says you have to use integrated pest management.".

Reggie James [00:10:30] But it flew. We got some protections for beekeepers put into the law. We let the beekeepers know that they were gonna be doing indiscriminant spraying that was going to wipe out their livelihood. And Representative Cruze, who's the representative from Williamson County, who is one of the, you know, movers and shakers over there now with sponsored an amendment into the bill to protect the beekeepers. Well, we were able to get the beekeeper provision written wide enough so that it protected other people, too. So there were a lot of opportunities in there. But the end of that story is that the bill passed and it set up this whole program to eradicate the boll weevil, had some safeguards in there, some things that were pretty innovative safeguards.

Speaker [00:11:22] But what happened the first year after the program was put into effect was this doomsday scenario that we had brought up about secondary pest infestations. It really happened. I mean, it was one of those instances where we, you know, they always accuse us of being Chicken Little, that the sky was going to fall. And we had made this argument for something that almost was science fiction. But it really did happen. They did the sprays in the valley and in the San Angelo area, and they had the worst secondary pest infestation almost in history. It wiped out the cotton crop. It cost the farmers tons of money.