Kinston--The boll weevil is here. Seven prominent planters, each from a different district, here to attend a session of the Kiwanis club to which they had been invited, declared the infestation of this part of North Carolina was complete. It was not last year. Doubters among the agriculturists who speculated as to whether it would arrive in full force this year have had their doubts dispelled.
Countless individuals of the insect army are garrisoned in scores of fields from here to the South Carolina line. It will be weeks before the cotton crop gets fairly under way.
“It will have about as much of a chance as the proverbial snowball in the country where the thermometers bust, unless something is done about it,” one manager of hundreds of acres asserted.
The cotton growers told the clubmen that weevils were “laying around their kitchens,” pitching on fences and in foliage, crawling and creeping here and there, “all cocked and primed for destruction.”
“Waiting to see” will cost the cotton farmers of this section thousands of dollars this year, one planter declared. Agricultural experts for two years past have prophesied that 1923 would witness completion of the weevil’s investment of this outpost of the belt.
From page 5 of the Roanoke Beacon, Plymouth, N.C., March 13, 1923
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