Statesboro — The boll weevil — the snaggletoothed cotton-killer that burrowed its way into the South's economy and lore — is dead and gone from Georgia, virtually every farm east of the Mississippi River and 94 percent of the entire country.

The pernicious pest's demise is a remarkable agricultural and scientific achievement. But it didn't come easy. Or cheap.

Hyosub Shin/AJC (ENLARGE)

Now, the pest is gone from Georgia and 94 percent eradicated nationwide, and Cole Hendrix of Statesboro's Hendrix Farms is growing strong.

Associated Press (ENLARGE)

Georgia cotton was easy pickings for the boll weevil until the 1980s, when effective eradication was developed.

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In the 1980s, the weevil had flattened Georgia's cotton industry as yields hit record lows. To fight back, dollar-tight farmers voted in 1986 to tax themselves — a stiff $35 an acre — to rid fields of weevils. It worked, and record crops followed within a decade.

Today, Georgia farmers boast of five years free of the quarter-inch long, dun-colored beetle that insinuated itself into the plant's boll, laid eggs and watched offspring scissor through — and ruin — it. Cotton is again the state's top crop, worth a half-billion dollars.

"Definitely, the boll weevil was a bad boy," said Kevin Hendrix, a fourth-generation farmer harvesting cotton outside this east Georgia town. "We're sure glad he's gone."

But the weevil's century-long rampage across the South took a heavy toll on farmers, taxpayers, the environment and a rural way of life that withstood decades of heartache and upheaval.

Contempt bred familiarity. The seemingly invincible weevil inspired awe, even a smidgen of respect as it tunneled deep into the 20th century American psyche.

Leadbelly, the blues great, sang that "these boll weevils, they will rob you of a home." Boll Weevils is the nickname for the University of Arkansas-Monticello mens' sports teams.

Georgia, Texas and California each claim a Boll Weevil Restaurant. Conservative Southern Democrats in Congress have been likened to the unsavory beetles.

In Enterprise, Ala., the South's most famous memorial to the blasted weevil stands. In 1919, as the bug decimated cotton fields, enterprising townsfolk realized their community needed to diversify its economy. So they erected the Boll Weevil Monument "in profound appreciation of the Boll Weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity."

Louie Perry will have none of this cotton-picking nostalgia. The fourth-generation farmer from Moultrie attended a cotton conference in Texas 25 years ago where talk centered on the weaselly weevil.

"A guy from Texas got up and said he had 10,000 acres of cotton and found a handful of boll weevils," Perry, 68, related. "A guy from Mississippi got up and said he had 8,000 acres of cotton and was getting concerned that he found two boll weevils in his trap. I got up and said, 'Well, I feel sort of like a hound dog in a dog show. I've got 250 acres of cotton and before I left home this morning we emptied a boll weevil trap and counted 780-something weevils. We finally just poured it out and quit counting.' "

Scent of success

Sex, though, ultimately saved Georgia cotton. Decades of pesticide spraying barely dented the weevil's appetite. But a marriage of chemistry (pesticides) and biology (pheromones) finally bested the little bugger.

Federal and university researchers discovered the pheromone, or scent, that weevils give off when they want to make whoopee. The horny beetles are then lured into bright-green traps filled with insecticide that encircle fields.

In 1986, Georgia's 2,800 cotton growers agreed via referendum to tax themselves to rid the state of weevils via the traps. Taxpayers covered 30 percent of eradication costs.

A decade later, Georgia produced 2 million bales – its largest yield since 1919. Revenues topped a record $720 million. Today, the statewide eradication programs costs farmers only $2.50 per acre, down from $35, to kill weevils.

"It's an inexpensive and effective way to control" the bug, said Bill Grefenstette, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's top weevil eradicator. "Growers' cost of producing the crop drops dramatically when they're not spraying every week. And we've taken tons of fairly hot pesticides out of the whole production scheme."

Southern crossing

The weevil crossed the border from Mexico into Texas in 1892. It hurdled the Mississippi River in 1908, hell-bent on the bountiful cotton fields of Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas. Cotton production in Georgia, for example, reached a record 2.9 million bales in 1911.

E.L. Worsham, the state's entomologist, published a bulletin in 1914 "to sound a warning to the cotton growers of Georgia [that] the dreaded enemy of cotton, the Mexican Cotton Boll Weevil" was within two miles of the border. It was too late.

On August 25, 1915, near Thomasville, Anthonomus grandis was found. By the first killing frost in mid-November, Worsham reported, the weevil had traveled to 40 counties. In 1923, cotton production in Georgia plummeted to 600,000 bales. No state suffered as much.

Folks said the boll weevil made them forget the Depression. Woody Guthrie, in his version of "Boll Weevil Blues," rhapsodized on the bug ruining a farmer's livelihood:

"Boll Weevil said to the farmer, I'll stay right in your field.

"When I get through with your Cadillac, you'll really wheel and deal.

"And I'll git your home, I'll git your home."

Small farmers quit the fields for the cities. Hundreds of thousands of black sharecroppers migrated to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. While cotton remained Georgia's top crop in the 1940s, peanuts, corn and hogs now filled fields and bellies. Meanwhile, production shifted to California.

Owners paid field hands in the South a penny per dead weevil. Pesticides, though, gave the farmer a fighting chance in the 1930s and '40s. James Agee described in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," his literary paean to Alabama sharecroppers, how farmers "mix arsenic with a sorry grade of flour and dust the plants ... and the dew makes a paste of it that won't blow off."

Hundreds of millions of tons of calcium arsenate, lead arsenate, sulfur, lime and other insecticides and fungicides were sprayed by hand or by air across Southern cotton fields over the ensuing decades, according to a 1996 University of Georgia report. And that was before DDT began working its toxic magic on the bugs, streams, rivers and wildlife.

Perry recalls spraying fields 25 times a season. Hendrix, the Statesboro-area farmer, said sometimes it didn't matter how much you sprayed.

"The older folks would run 'em out of the field into the woods and the next day they'd come right back," said Hendrix who farms 15,000 acres with his father and two brothers. "They couldn't make cotton no more."

In 1983, only 112,000 bales were harvested. Cotton was all but dead in Georgia.

A decade later, with the new pheromone weapon, cotton was again king in Georgia. Georgia declared the weevil "an economically insignificant pest" in 1994, said Georgia Cotton Commission executive director Richey Seaton, and held a mock funeral to celebrate its passing.

It wasn't until 2002, though, that the USDA officially declared the bug eradicated in Georgia. Five years without weevils is cause for celebration.

"We expect Georgia to be weevil-free forever," said the USDA's Grefenstette, adding that pockets of western Tennessee, northeast Arkansas and the bootheel of Missouri aren't as fortunate. He anticipates nationwide eradication by 2010.

"If we can go a whole season without picking up anything, it's time to dance."

— Staff researcher Richard Hallman contributed to this article.