Goodbye Mr. Boll Weevil; You Gave Us Quite A Battle

         Oh, de boll weevil am a little black bug. 
         Come from Mexico, dey say,   
         Come all de way to Texas,    
         Jus' a-lookin' foh a place to stay,   
         Jus' a-lookin' foh a home,
         Jus' a-lookin' foh a home.             

Sunday's newspaper carried an article that the boll weevil will soon be non-existent in Louisiana and cotton production per acre will double.  I have not kept up with advances in agriculture and especially with the boll weevil battle for many years.  I think my last cotton crop was the summer between my sophomore and junior years at LSU, but I was a veteran of the fight against the boll weevil and the army worm. The pink bollworm was a later arrival.  The boll weevil forced many farmers to give up cotton and diversify to other crops, often to their betterment. At least one town in Georgia erected a statue to the weevil to recognize the gain made by switching away from cotton. 
It wasn't the weevil that forced my dad and many other small farmers out of growing cotton.  The federal government did this with an allotment program that reduced  cotton acres to a non-profitable amount and by paying farmers to plant pine trees instead.  In the 1930's Claiborne parish led all Louisiana in production of oil and gas and acres planted to cotton.  In 1950 two cotton gins operated in Homer; a few years later not one acre was planted to cotton.  Production of cotton went to the river parishes, later replaced by soy beans and then by corn for ethanol.  

We struggled against boll weevils but nothing we tried really worked.  To control army worms we dusted the cotton with a dangerous pesticide, calcium arsenate.  We had to bathe, put on clean clothes and dust the cotton plants at night, hopefully after dew had fallen and the moon was shining.  We then had to bathe again and dress in more clean clothes because we were dealing with a dangerous poison.