DATE: Thursday, September 11, 1997          TAG: 9709110675

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LINDA McNATT, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: SUFFOLK                           LENGTH:   90 lines

COTTON FARMERS VS. BOLL WEEVILS FARMERS ARE WINNING; VIRGINIA - AND SUFFOLK - HOPE IT STAYS THAT WAY.

They're ugly critters with long noses and voracious appetites, apt to move into a neighborhood and take over. One mom can produce more than 200 young-uns in less than a month.

The critters are known, too, as excellent hitchhikers - covering long distances in no time.

But Virginia - where acres planted in cotton have increased from about 200 in 1976 to more than 100,000 last year - has put out the word: No home for you here, boll weevil.

In Suffolk alone, 14,540 acres were planted in cotton last year. Statewide, the plant amounted to about $58 million in farmers' sales in 1996.

To protect that increasingly important crop, bounty hunters comb cotton fields throughout the southeastern part of the state from July through November, searching for the insect capable of wiping out a whole crop in a couple of weeks. They check the plant, and they check special traps.

Finding a boll weevil puts $25 extra in your pocket, said Thomas R. Griffin of Griffin Agricultural Services Inc. in Holland.

To make sure boll weevel traps are checked, the Department of Agriculture will spray a few dead weevils with a special dye and put them in selected traps. If the hunter misses one of the planted vagrants, he is hit with a $300 fine.

Griffin, among 40 hunters working for Virginia's Boll Weevil Eradication Program, said, ``You get to be able to spot them, but we don't take chances. Even if it's the wrong size and something about it just isn't right, we still take it in.''

Virginia is serious about boll weevils, Griffin said with a chuckle, and well it should be.

Before the Civil War, cotton was the leading crop in the South, accounting for about $200 million of exports in 1854. The war brought that to an end, but cotton came back and reclaimed its crown.

Then, in 1892, the boll weevil - about a quarter of an inch long - invaded from Mexico.

By mid-century, the infestation was so bad that Virginia farmers simply stopped planting cotton, said William Philip Eggborn, program manager for the USDA's Division of Consumer Protection, office of plant and pest services

Boll weevils are nearly impossible to kill with chemicals because the females lay eggs inside the glistening, green bolls, which ripen just about now.

One female can lay about 200 eggs in her short life, and mama is likely to see that each of the eggs has its own home - planting one here, another there. If a cotton plant is blessed with 15 or 20 bolls, the female bores through the shell and lays one egg in each.

Even if the adults are killed, the cotton-fed young soon emerge.

When corn finally replaced cotton, the state acted quickly, Eggborn said. Since the fields could be decontaminated without fear of injuring the crop, the program to eradicate the insect began. The state assumed cotton would again be planted when the boll weevil was no longer a problem.

Today, the weevil has been essentially wiped out in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Its threat has been greatly reduced in East Tennessee and much of Mississippi. But it lives on in several other southern states.

The only answer, Eggborn said, is complete eradication.

The eradication program includes a quarantine restricting the movement of cotton harvesting equipment, seed and cotton trash - what's left of the plant after the cotton is picked.

Every Virginia farmer who grows cotton must participate. The farmers pay for it, based on cost. Last year, they paid $4.15 an acre, for a total of nearly $430,000. This year, it's $3.35 an acre. The government pays only for managing the program.

Boll weevil-attracting green florescent plastic traps are planted along roadsides, about two to an acre. They are equipped with small, plastic, sex-scented squares and another plastic square that kills entrapped weevils. Each trap, which costs about $20, is checked bi-weekly during the season.

The program works, Eggborn said.

In late August 1995, a boll weevil hunter near Emporia found one insect. Immediately, the traps were checked more often. Several hundred weevils showed up, possibly brought in on the clothing or vehicles of migrant workers.

Eggborn said that one field was plowed under, and surrounding fields were sprayed.

Closer checks continued on Emporia's cotton fields for a year, just as they were in Suffolk when a lone weevil was discovered in a 14-acre field last November.

The job, one boll weevil hunter said, is usually, ``hot and boring.'' But in Virginia, it's necessary. Without the weevil, said Eggborn, cotton is ``making some farmers some money.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

JOHN H. SHEALLY II/The Virginian-Pilot

Thomas R. Griffin of Griffin Agricultural Services checks a cotton

plant in a Holland field for boll weevils. At left is a weevil trap,

which lures them with sex scents then kills them.

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