Late boll weevil outbreak in Valley dashed hopes of record eradication year
Oct. 22—HARLINGEN — Drive through the Valley, and you can spot them everywhere, the lime green bottles used to trap cotton growers' biggest nemesis, the boll weevil.
A small army of inspectors in white pickups with the Boll Weevil Eradication Program logo on the doors checks the traps frequently, early detection being critical to controlling an outbreak.
Then a funny thing happened.
The traps were coming up empty.
"We worried about it, our numbers were so low this year up until Aug. 30, I believe we had 144 or 142 something like that all season and actually 88 of those weevils were captured In January, and that was before the crop was planted," said Lindy Patton, president and CEO of the Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation Inc.
"Every zone where we've eradicated, when you get the numbers this low, you're real nervous about what you're missing, what are you not seeing, what's going to jump up and bite you at the last minute," he added. "And sure enough, one field, and I'm not sure why weevils got in the field, they didn't go to the traps to get detected."
Patrick Burson, chief administrative officer for the foundation, said one field here in the Rio Grande Valley sent the numbers screaming higher.
"So far we've captured just a little bit over 4,000 weevils, to be exact 4,032, and that's actually a few more than we caught the year before," Burson said. "We captured 3,196 in '21. Things were looking really good throughout the year. We had the lowest numbers we've ever seen throughout the growing season until we got to September, and we had one single field that was about 62 acres that captured about 3,800 weevils."
"If you take the 180,000 acres that are planted in the Valley and you go and you look and say 'Wow, 62 acres produced more weevils than we caught all season in '21,' and that just shows you how fast this thing can go the other direction if you do have some kind of re-infestation of a field," he said.
In 2006 here in the Valley, foundation agents trapped 3.7 million weevils.
In 2018, the total was 96,000.
The late-season setback has not diminished the success of the foundation, which in one form or another, has been operating about 30 years.
The boll weevil, a damaging and costly insect pest to control, has been eradicated in practically the entire state.
The last remaining stronghold of the cotton boll weevil is in 10 counties here in the Valley, but the public-private partnership between the state and federal government and cotton growers is inarguably winning.
"The weevil feeds on the cotton and of course lays eggs in the square or the bolls, and those eggs hatch out and the grub feeds on it and does damage not only the yield, takes away pounds, but also the quality if the cotton. It stains the cotton," Patton said. "It's extremely devastating, or can be, to the cotton crop."
So far, the cotton boll weevil has been eradicated across most of the cotton belt in the United States and about 97 or 98 percent of Texas' cotton growing areas, too.
It just leaves the Valley and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which Patton praised for its own increasingly effective boll weevil eradication program.
Both Patton and Burson feel a bit like the prize was snatched away from them by the single, late-season field showing a boll weevil infestation that skewed the numbers higher.
They've also learned never to underestimate their opponent.
"It was a little disheartening when everybody, all our employees, the farmers we were meeting with down there, everybody was really excited because we were so far ahead of last year," Patton said. "If you look at it overall, the number of fields that didn't catch a weevil all year, we did make good progress. It's just that one little hotspot."
"Everybody jumped on it. The producer around there has gotten the cotton out, plowed it, and destroyed any habitat, so I think we're set up for trying to nail this one down next year, hopefully," he added. "I don't want to jinx it, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel."
