widened and its volume has increased so that it has become what a British ecologist recently
called ‘an amazing rain of death’ upon the surface of the earth. Our attitude towards poisons
has undergone a subtle change. Once they were kept in containers marked with skull and
crossbones; the infrequent occasions of their use were marked with utmost care that they
should come in contact with the target and with nothing else. With the development of the
new organic insecticides and the abundance of surplus planes after the Second World War, all
this was forgotten. Although today’s poisons are more dangerous than any known before, they
have amazingly become something to be showered down indiscriminately from the skies. Not
only the target insect or plant, but anything—human or nonhuman—within range of the
chemical fallout may know the sinister touch of the poison. Not only forests and cultivated
fields are sprayed, but towns and cities as well.
A good many people now have misgivings about the aerial distribution of lethal chemicals over
millions of acres, and two mass-spraying campaigns undertaken in the late 1950s have done
much to increase these doubts. These were the campaigns against the gypsy moth in the
northeastern states and the fire ant in the South. Neither is a native insect but both have been
in this country for many years without creating a situation calling for desperate measures. Yet
drastic action was suddenly taken against them, under the end-justifies-the-means philosophy
that has too long directed the control divisions of our Department of Agriculture.
The gypsy moth program shows what a vast amount of damage can he done when reckless
large-scale treatment is substituted for local and moderate control. The campaign against the
fire ant is a prime example of a campaign based on gross exaggeration of the need for control,
blunderingly launched without scientific knowledge of the dosage of poison required to destroy
the target or of its effects on other life. Neither program has achieved its goal. . . .
The gypsy moth, a native of Europe, has been in the United States for nearly a hundred years. In
1869 a French scientist, Leopold Trouvelot, accidentally allowed a few of these moths to escape
from his laboratory in Medford, Massachusetts, where he was attempting to cross them with
silkworms. Little by little the gypsy moth has spread throughout New England. The primary
agent of its progressive spread is the wind; the larval, or caterpillar, stage is extremely light and
can be carried to considerable heights and over great distances. Another means is the shipment
of plants carrying the egg masses, the form in which the species exists over winter. The gypsy
moth, which in its larval stage attacks the foliage of oak trees and a few other hardwoods for a
few weeks each spring, now occurs in all the New England states. It also occurs sporadically in
New Jersey, where it was introduced in 1911 on a shipment of spruce trees from Holland, and
in Michigan, where its method of entry is not known. The New England hurricane of 1938
carried it into Pennsylvania and New York, but the Adirondacks have generally served as a
barrier to its westward advance, being forested with species not attractive to it.
The task of confining the gypsy moth to the northeastern corner of the country has been
accomplished by a variety of methods, and in the nearly one hundred years since its arrival on
this continent the fear that it would invade the great hardwood forests of the southern
Appalachians has not been justified. Thirteen parasites and predators were imported from
abroad and successfully established in New England. The Agriculture Department itself has
credited these importations with appreciably reducing the frequency and destructiveness of
gypsy moth outbreaks. This natural control, plus quarantine measures and local spraying,
achieved what the Department in 1955 described as ‘outstanding restriction of distribution and
damage’. Yet only a year after expressing satisfaction with the state of affairs, its Plant Pest
Control Division embarked on a program calling for the blanket spraying of several million acres
a year with the announced intention of eventually ‘eradicating’ the gypsy moth. (‘Eradication’
means the complete and final extinction or extermination of a species throughout its range. Yet
as successive programs have failed, the Department has found it necessary to speak of second
or third ‘eradications’ of the same species in the same area.)
The Department’s all-out chemical war on the gypsy moth began on an ambitious scale. In 1956
nearly a million acres were sprayed in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, and
New York. Many complaints of damage were made by people in the sprayed areas.
Conservationists became increasingly disturbed as the pattern of spraying huge areas began to
establish itself. When plans were announced for spraying 3 million acres in 1957 opposition
became even stronger. State and federal agriculture officials characteristically shrugged off
individual complaints as unimportant. The Long Island area included within the gypsy moth
spraying in 1957 consisted chiefly of heavily populated towns and suburbs and of some coastal
areas with bordering salt marsh. Nassau County, Long Island, is the most densely settled county
in New York apart from New York City itself. In what seems the height of absurdity, the ‘threat
of infestation of the New York City metropolitan area’ has been cited as an important
justification of the program. The gypsy moth is a forest insect, certainly not an inhabitant of
cities. Nor does it live in meadows, cultivated fields, gardens, or marshes. Nevertheless, the
planes hired by the United States Department of Agriculture and the New York Department of
Agriculture and Markets in 1957 showered down the prescribed DDT-in-fuel-oil with
impartiality. They sprayed truck gardens and dairy farms, fish ponds and salt marshes. They
sprayed the quarter-acre lots of suburbia, drenching a housewife making a desperate effort to
cover her garden before the roaring plane reached her, and showering insecticide over children
at play and commuters at railway stations. At Setauket a fine quarter horse drank from a trough
in a field which the planes had sprayed; ten hours later it was dead. Automobiles were spotted
with the oily mixture; flowers and shrubs were ruined. Birds, fish, crabs, and useful insects were
killed.
A group of Long Island citizens led by the world-famous ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy
had sought a court injunction to prevent the 1957 spraying. Denied a preliminary injunction,
the protesting citizens had to suffer the prescribed drenching with DDT, but thereafter
persisted in efforts to obtain a permanent injunction. But because the act had already been
performed the courts held that the petition for an injunction was ‘moot’. The case was carried
all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Justice William O. Douglas, strongly
dissenting from the decision not to review the case, held that ‘the alarms that many experts
and responsible officials have raised about the perils of DDT underline the public importance of
this case.’
The suit brought by the Long Island citizens at least served to focus public attention on the
growing trend to mass application of insecticides, and on the power and inclination of the
control agencies to disregard supposedly inviolate property rights of private citizens.
The contamination of milk and of farm produce in the course of the gypsy moth spraying came
as an unpleasant surprise to many people. What happened on the 200-acre Waller farm in
northern Westchester County, New York, was revealing. Mrs. Waller had specifically requested
Agriculture officials not to spray her property, because it would be impossible to avoid the
pastures in spraying the woodlands. She offered to have the land checked for gypsy moths and
to have any infestation destroyed by spot spraying. Although she was assured that no farms
would be sprayed, her property received two direct sprayings and, in addition, was twice
subjected to drifting spray. Milk samples taken from the Wallers’ purebred Guernsey cows 48
hours later contained DDT in the amount of 14 parts per million. Forage samples from fields
where the cows had grazed were of course contaminated also. Although the county Health
Department was notified, no instructions were given that the milk should not be marketed. This
situation is unfortunately typical of the lack of consumer protection that is all too common.
Although the Food and Drug Administration permits no residues of pesticides in milk, its
restrictions are not only inadequately policed but they apply solely to interstate shipments.
State and county officials are under no compulsion to follow the federal pesticides tolerances
unless local laws happen to conform—and they seldom do.
Truck gardeners also suffered. Some leaf crops were so burned and spotted as to be
unmarketable. Others carried heavy residues; a sample of peas analyzed at Cornell University’s
Agricultural Experiment Station contained 14 to 20 parts per million of DDT. The legal maximum
is 7 parts per million. Growers therefore had to sustain heavy losses or find themselves in the
position of selling produce carrying illegal residues. Some of them sought and collected
damages. As the aerial spraying of DDT increased, so did the number of suits filed in the courts.
Among them were suits brought by beekeepers in several areas of New York State. Even before
the 1957 spraying, the beekeepers had suffered heavily from use of DDT in orchards. ‘Up to
1953 I had regarded as gospel everything that emanated from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture and the agricultural colleges,’ one of them remarked bitterly. But in May of that
year this man lost 800 colonies after the state had sprayed a large area. So widespread and
heavy was the loss that 14 other beekeepers joined him in suing the state for a quarter of a
million dollars in damages. Another beekeeper, whose 400 colonies were incidental targets of
the 1957 spray, reported that 100 per cent of the field force of bees (the workers out gathering
nectar and pollen for the hives) had been killed in forested areas and up to 50 per cent in
farming areas sprayed less intensively.
‘It is a very distressful thing,’ he wrote, ‘to walk into a yard in May and not hear a bee buzz.’
The gypsy moth programs were marked by many acts of irresponsibility. Because the spray
planes were paid by the gallon rather than by the acre there was no effort to be conservative,
and many properties were sprayed not once but several times. Contracts for aerial spraying
were in at least one case awarded to an out-of-state firm with no local address, which had not
complied with the legal requirement of registering with state officials for the purpose of
establishing legal responsibility. In this exceedingly slippery situation, citizens who suffered
direct financial loss from damage to apple orchards or bees discovered that there was no one to
sue. After the disastrous 1957 spraying the program was abruptly and drastically curtailed, with
vague statements about ‘evaluating’ previous work and testing alternative insecticides. Instead
of the 31⁄2 million acres sprayed in 1957, the treated areas fell to 1⁄2 million in 1958 and to about
100,000 acres in 1959, 1960, and 1961. During this interval, the control agencies must have
found news from Long Island disquieting. The gypsy moth had reappeared there in numbers.
The expensive spraying operation that had cost the Department dearly in public confidence and
good will—the operation that was intended to wipe out the gypsy moth for ever—had in reality
accomplished nothing at all. . . .
Meanwhile, the Department’s Plant Pest Control men had temporarily forgotten gypsy moths,
for they had been busy launching an even more ambitious program in the South. The word
‘eradication’ still came easily from the Department’s mimeograph machines; this time the press
releases were promising the eradication of the fire ant. The fire ant, an insect named for its
fiery sting, seems to have entered the United States from South America by way of the port of
Mobile, Alabama, where it was discovered shortly after the end of the First World War. By 1928
it had spread into the suburbs of Mobile and thereafter continued an invasion that has now
carried it into most of the southern states. During most of the forty-odd years since its arrival in
the United States the fire ant seems to have attracted little attention. The states where it was
most abundant considered it a nuisance, chiefly because it builds large nests or mounds a foot
or more high. These may hamper the operation of farm machinery. But only two states listed it
among their 20 most important insect pests, and these placed it near the bottom of the list. No
official or private concern seems to have been felt about the fire ant as a menace to crops or
livestock. With the development of chemicals of broad lethal powers, there came a sudden
change in the official attitude toward the fire ant. In 1957 the United States Department of
Agriculture launched one of the most remarkable publicity campaigns in its history. The fire ant
suddenly became the target of a barrage of government releases, motion pictures, and
government-inspired stories portraying it as a despoiler of southern agriculture and a killer of
birds, livestock, and man. A mighty campaign was announced, in which the federal government
in cooperation with the afflicted states would ultimately treat some 20,000,000 acres in nine
southern states. ‘United States pesticide makers appear to have tapped a sales bonanza in the
increasing numbers of broad-scale pest elimination programs conducted by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture,’ cheerfully reported one trade journal in 1958, as the fire ant
program got under way.
Never has any pesticide program been so thoroughly and deservedly damned by practically
everyone except the beneficiaries of this ‘sales bonanza’. It is an outstanding example of an ill-
conceived, badly executed, and thoroughly detrimental experiment in the mass control of
insects, an experiment so expensive in dollars, in destruction of animal life, and in loss of public
confidence in the Agriculture Department that it is incomprehensible that any funds should still
be devoted to it.
Congressional support of the project was initially won by representations that were later
discredited. The fire ant was pictured as a serious threat to southern agriculture through
destruction of crops and to wildlife because of attacks on the young of ground-nesting birds. Its
sting was said to make it a serious menace to human health. Just how sound were these claims?
The statements made by Department witnesses seeking appropriations were not in accord with
those contained in key publications of the Agriculture Department. The 1957 bulletin Insecticide
Recommendations...for the Control of Insects Attacking Crops and Livestock did not so much as
mention the fire ant—an extraordinary omission if the Department believes its own
propaganda. Moreover, its encyclopedic Yearbook for 1952, which was devoted to insects,
contained only one short paragraph on the fire ant out of its half-million words of text. Against
the Department’s undocumented claim that the fire ant destroys crops and attacks livestock is
the careful study of the Agricultural Experiment Station in the state that has had the most
intimate experience with this insect, Alabama. According to Alabama scientists, ‘damage to
plants in general is rare.’ Dr. F. S. Arant, an entomologist at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute
and in 1961 president of the Entomological Society of America, states that his department ‘has
not received a single report of damage to plants by ants in the past five years...No damage to
livestock has been observed.’ These men, who have actually observed the ants in the field and
in the laboratory, say that the fire ants feed chiefly on a variety of other insects, many of them
considered harmful to man’s interests. Fire ants have been observed picking larvae of the boll
weevil off cotton. Their mound-building activities serve a useful purpose in aerating and
draining the soil. The Alabama studies have been substantiated by investigations at the
Mississippi State University, and are far more impressive than the Agriculture Department’s
evidence, apparently based either on conversations with farmers, who may easily mistake one
ant for another, or on old research. Some entomologists believe that the ant’s food habits have
changed as it has become more abundant, so that observations made several decades ago have
little value now. The claim that the ant is a menace to health and life also bears considerable
modification. The Agriculture Department sponsored a propaganda movie (to gain support for
its program) in which horror scenes were built around the fire ant’s sting. Admittedly this is
painful and one is well advised to avoid being stung, just as one ordinarily avoids the sting of
wasp or bee. Severe reactions may occasionally occur in sensitive individuals, and medical
literature records one death possibly, though not definitely, attributable to fire ant venom. In
contrast to this, the Office of Vital Statistics records 33 deaths in 1959 alone from the sting of
bees and wasps. Yet no one seems to have proposed ‘eradicating’ these insects. Again, local
evidence is most convincing. Although the fire ant has inhabited Alabama for 40 years and is
most heavily concentrated there, the Alabama State Health Officer declares that ‘there has
never been recorded in Alabama a human death resulting from the bites of imported fire ants,’
and considers the medical cases resulting from the bites of fire ants ‘incidental’. Ant mounds on
lawns or playgrounds may create a situation where children are likely to be stung, but this is
hardly an excuse for drenching millions of acres with poisons. These situations can easily be
handled by individual treatment of the mounds.
Damage to game birds was also alleged, without supporting evidence. Certainly a man well
qualified to speak on this issue is the leader of the Wildlife Research Unit at Auburn, Alabama,
Dr. Maurice F. Baker, who has had many years’ experience in the area. But Dr. Baker’s opinion
is directly opposite to the claims of the Agriculture Department. He declares: ‘In south Alabama
and northwest Florida we are able to have excellent hunting and bobwhite populations
coexistent with heavy populations of the imported fire ant...in the almost 40 years that south
Alabama has had the fire ant, game populations have shown a steady and very substantial
increase. Certainly, if the imported fire ant were a serious menace to wildlife, these conditions
could not exist.’ What would happen to wildlife as a result of the insecticide used against the
ants was another matter. The chemicals to be used were dieldrin and heptachlor, both
relatively new. There was little experience of field use for either, and no one knew what their
effects would be on wild birds, fishes, or mammals when applied on a massive scale. It was
known, however, that both poisons were many times more toxic than DDT, which had been
used by that time for approximately a decade, and had killed some birds and many fish even at
a rate of 1 pound per acre. And the dosage of dieldrin and heptachlor was heavier—2 pounds to
the acre under most conditions, or 3 pounds of dieldrin if the white-fringed beetle was also to
be controlled. In terms of their effects on birds, the prescribed use of heptachlor would be
equivalent to 20 pounds of DDT to the acre, that of dieldrin to 120 pounds!
Urgent protests were made by most of the state conservation departments, by national
conservation agencies, and by ecologists and even by some entomologists, calling upon the
then Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Benson, to delay the program at least until some research
had been done to determine the effects of heptachlor and dieldrin on wild and domestic
animals and to find the minimum amount that would control the ants. The protests were
ignored and the program was launched in 1958. A million acres were treated the first year. It
was clear that any research would be in the nature of a post mortem.
As the program continued, facts began to accumulate from studies made by biologists of state
and federal wildlife agencies and several universities. The studies revealed losses running all the
way up to complete destruction of wildlife on some of the treated areas. Poultry, livestock, and
pets were also killed. The Agriculture Department brushed away all evidence of damage as
exaggerated and misleading.
The facts, however, continue to accumulate. In Hardin County, Texas, for example, opossums,
armadillos, and an abundant raccoon population virtually disappeared after the chemical was
laid down. Even the second autumn after treatment these animals were scarce. The few
raccoons then found in the area carried residues of the chemical in their tissues. Dead birds
found in the treated areas had absorbed or swallowed the poisons used against the fire ants, a
fact clearly shown by chemical analysis of their tissues. (The only bird surviving in any numbers
was the house sparrow, which in other areas too has given some evidence that it may be
relatively immune.) On a tract in Alabama treated in 1959 half of the birds were killed. Species
that live on the ground or frequent low vegetation suffered 100 per cent mortality. Even a
year after treatment, a spring die-off of songbirds occurred and much good nesting territory lay
silent and unoccupied. In Texas, dead blackbirds, dickcissels, and meadowlarks were found at
the nests, and many nests were deserted. When specimens of dead birds from Texas, Louisiana,
Alabama, Georgia, and Florida were sent to the Fish and Wildlife Service for analysis, more than
90 per cent were found to contain residues of dieldrin or a form of heptachlor, in amounts up
to 38 parts per million.
Woodcocks, which winter in Louisiana but breed in the North, now carry the taint of the fire ant
poisons in their bodies. The source of this contamination is clear. Woodcocks feed heavily on
earthworms, which they probe for with their long bills. Surviving worms in Louisiana were
found to have as much as 20 parts per million of heptachlor in their tissues 6 to 10 months after
treatment of the area. A year later they had up to 10 parts per million. The consequences of the
sublethal poisoning of the woodcock are now seen in a marked decline in the proportion of
young birds to adults, first observed in the season after fire ant treatments began. Some of the
most upsetting news for southern sportsmen concerned the bobwhite quail. This bird, a ground
nester and forager, was all but eliminated on treated areas. In Alabama, for example, biologists
of the Alabama Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit conducted a preliminary census of the quail
population in a 3600-acre area that was scheduled for treatment. Thirteen resident coveys—
121 quail—ranged over the area. Two weeks after treatment only dead quail could be found. All
specimens sent to the Fish and Wildlife Service for analysis were found to contain insecticides
in amounts sufficient to cause their death. The Alabama findings were duplicated in Texas,
where a 2500-acre area treated with heptachlor lost all of its quail. Along with the quail went
90 per cent of the songbirds. Again, analysis revealed the presence of heptachlor in the tissues
of dead birds.
In addition to quail, wild turkeys were seriously reduced by the fire ant program. Although 80
turkeys had been counted on an area in Wilcox County, Alabama, before heptachlor was
applied, none could be found the summer after treatment—none, that is, except a clutch of
unhatched eggs and one dead poult. The wild turkeys may have suffered the same fate as their
domestic brethren, for turkeys on farms in the area treated with chemicals also produced few
young. Few eggs hatched and almost no young survived. This did not happen on nearby
untreated areas. The fate of the turkeys was by no means unique. One of the most widely
known and respected wildlife biologists in the country, Dr. Clarence Cottam, called on some of
the farmers whose property had been treated. Besides remarking that ‘all the little tree birds’
seemed to have disappeared after the land had been treated, most of these people reported
losses of livestock, poultry, and household pets. One man was ‘irate against the control
workers,’ Dr. Cottam reported, ‘as he said he buried or otherwise disposed of 19 carcasses of
his cows that had been killed by the poison and he knew of three or four additional cows that
died as a result of the same treatment. Calves died that had been given only milk since birth.’
The people Dr. Cottam interviewed were puzzled by what had happened in the months
following the treatment of their land. One woman told him she had set several hens after the
surrounding land had been covered with poison, ‘and for reasons she did not understand very
few young were hatched or survived.’ Another farmer ‘raises hogs and for fully nine months
after the broadcast of poisons, he could raise no young pigs. The litters were born dead or they
died after birth.’ A similar report came from another, who said that out of 37 litters that might
have numbered as many as 250 young, only 31 little pigs survived. This man had also been quite
unable to raise chickens since the land was poisoned. The Department of Agriculture has
consistently denied livestock losses related to the fire ant program. However, a veterinarian in
Bainbridge, Georgia, Dr. Otis L. Poitevint, who was called upon to treat many of the affected
animals, has summarized his reasons for attributing the deaths to the insecticide as follows.
Within a period of two weeks to several months after the fire ant poison was applied, cattle,
goats, horses, chickens, and birds and other wildlife began to suffer an often fatal disease of the
nervous system. It affected only animals that had access to contaminated food or water.
Stabled animals were not affected. The condition was seen only in areas treated for fire ants.
Laboratory tests for disease were negative. The symptoms observed by Dr. Poitevint and other
veterinarians were those described in authoritative texts as indicating poisoning by dieldrin or
heptachlor.
Dr. Poitevint also described an interesting case of a two-month-old calf that showed symptoms
of poisoning by heptachlor. The animal was subjected to exhaustive laboratory tests. The only
significant finding was the discovery of 79 parts per million of heptachlor in its fat. But it was
five months since the poison had been applied. Did the calf get it directly from grazing or
indirectly from its mother’s milk or even before birth? ‘If from the milk,’ asked Dr. Poitevint,
‘why were not special precautions taken to protect our children who drank milk from local
dairies?’ Dr. Poitevint’s report brings up a significant problem about the contamination of milk.
The area included in the fire ant program is predominantly fields and croplands. What about
the dairy cattle that graze on these lands? In treated fields the grasses will inevitably carry
residues of heptachlor in one of its forms, and if the residues are eaten by the cows the poison
will appear in the milk. This direct transmission into milk had been demonstrated
experimentally for heptachlor in 1955, long before the control program was undertaken, and
was later reported for dieldrin, also used in the fire ant program.
The Department of Agriculture’s annual publications now list heptachlor and dieldrin among
the chemicals that make forage plants unsuitable for feeding to dairy animals or animals being
finished for slaughter, yet the control divisions of the Department promote programs that
spread heptachlor and dieldrin over substantial areas of grazing land in the South. Who is
safeguarding the consumer to see that no residues of dieldrin or heptachlor are appearing in
milk? The United States Department of Agriculture would doubtless answer that it has advised
farmers to keep milk cows out of treated pastures for 30 to 90 days. Given the small size of
many of the farms and the largescale nature of the program—much of the chemical applied by
planes—it is extremely doubtful that this recommendation was followed or could be. Nor is the
prescribed period adequate in view of the persistent nature of the residues.
The Food and Drug Administration, although frowning on the presence of any pesticide
residues in milk, has little authority in this situation. In most of the states included in the fire
ant program the dairy industry is small and its products do not cross state lines. Protection of
the milk supply endangered by a federal program is therefore left to the states themselves.
Inquiries addressed to the health officers or other appropriate officials of Alabama, Louisiana,
and Texas in 1959 revealed that no tests had been made and that it simply was not known
whether the milk was contaminated with pesticides or not.
Meanwhile, after rather than before the control program was launched, some research into the
peculiar nature of heptachlor was done. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
someone looked up the research already published, since the basic fact that brought about
belated action by the federal government had been discovered several years before, and
should have influenced the initial handling of the program. This is the fact that heptachlor, after
a short period in the tissues of animals or plants or in the soil, assumes a considerably more
toxic form known as heptachlor epoxide. The epoxide is popularly described as ‘an oxidation
product’ produced by weathering. The fact that this transformation could occur had been
known since 1952, when the Food and Drug Administration discovered that female rats, fed 30
parts per million of heptachlor, had stored 165 parts per million of the more poisonous epoxide
only 2 weeks later. These facts were allowed to come out of the obscurity of biological
literature in 1959, when the Food and Drug Administration took action which had the effect of
banning any residues of heptachlor or its epoxide on food. This ruling put at least a temporary
damper on the program; although the Agriculture Department continued to press for its annual
appropriations for fire ant control, local agricultural agents became increasingly reluctant to
advise farmers to use chemicals which would probably result in their crops being legally
unmarketable.
In short, the Department of Agriculture embarked on its program without even elementary
investigation of what was already known about the chemical to be used—or if it investigated, it
ignored the findings. It must also have failed to do preliminary research to discover the
minimum amount of the chemical that would accomplish its purpose. After three years of
heavy dosages, it abruptly reduced the rate of application of heptachlor from 2 pounds to 11⁄4
pounds per acre in 1959; later on to 1⁄2 pound per acre, applied in two treatments of 1⁄4 pound
each, 3 to 6 months apart. An official of the Department explained that ‘an aggressive methods
improvement program’ showed the lower rate to be effective. Had this information been
acquired before the program was launched, a vast amount of damage could have been avoided
and the taxpayers could have been saved a great deal of money. In 1959, perhaps in an attempt
to offset the growing dissatisfaction with the program, the Agriculture Department offered the
chemicals free to Texas landowners who would sign a release absolving federal, state, and local
governments of responsibility for damage. In the same year the State of Alabama, alarmed and
angry at the damage done by the chemicals, refused to appropriate any further funds for the
project. One of its officials characterized the whole program as ‘ill advised, hastily conceived,
poorly planned, and a glaring example of riding roughshod over the responsibilities of other
public and private agencies’. Despite the lack of state funds, federal money continued to trickle
into Alabama, and in 1961 the legislature was again persuaded to make a small appropriation.
Meanwhile, farmers in Louisiana showed growing reluctance to sign up for the project as it
became evident that use of chemicals against the fire ant was causing an upsurge of insects
destructive to sugarcane. Moreover, the program was obviously accomplishing nothing. Its
dismal state was tersely summarized in the spring of 1962 by the director of entomology
research at Louisiana State University Agricultural Experiment Station, Dr. L. D. Newsom: ‘The
imported fire ant “eradication” program which has been conducted by state and federal
agencies is thus far a failure. There are more infested acres in Louisiana now than when the
program began.’
A swing to more sane and conservative methods seems to have begun. Florida, reporting that
‘there are more fire ants in Florida now than there were when the program started,’ announced
it was abandoning any idea of a broad eradication program and would instead concentrate on
local control. Effective and inexpensive methods of local control have been known for years.
The mound-building habit of the fire ant makes the chemical treatment of individual mounds a
simple matter. Cost of such treatment is about one dollar per acre. For situations where
mounds are numerous and mechanized methods are desirable, a cultivator which first levels
and then applies chemical directly to the mounds has been developed by Mississippi’s
Agricultural Experiment Station. The method gives 90 to 95 per cent control of the ants. Its cost
is only $0.23 per acre. The Agriculture Department’s mass control program, on the other hand,
cost about $3.50 per acre—the most expensive, the most damaging, and the least effective
program of all.
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