Cotton farmers face a formidable foe

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In Georgia alone, researchers expect to find it in about 40counties this year. It's steadily spread throughout the Southeast,afflicting farms in the Carolinas, Tennessee and Arkansas. Witheach farm it devastates, it's brought comparisons to the bollweevil, the beetle that lays eggs in the plant's boll and ruinsthem.
"You tend to exaggerate whatever is hot at the moment," said AlanYork, a weed science specialist at North Carolina State University."But having said that, this is a bear. It's resistant. It's veryprolific. It grows very fast. It's very competitive — andit's relatively hard to control to start with."
Farmers have indeed found a formidable foe in the palmer amaranth,which crowds out cotton plants with stalks that can grow eight feettall. For one thing, the plant is productive. Each female producesas many as 500,000 seedlings, meaning just one plant can birth anentire field.
Unlike other pests, pigweed can continue to grow an inch a day evenwithout water, making it particularly adept during the epic droughtgripping the region. It also thrives in hot weather, continuing togrow when temperatures top 90 degrees and other plants shut down.
"It's happy as it can be when other crops are suffering," saidYork. "It simply outcompetes other weeds."
Much of the pigweed plants were held at bay by cheap herbicidesdeployed by farmers from Virginia to California. But only the mostaggressive and expensive chemical treatments have worked againstthe resistant variety, and even those hardly manage to containthem.
Even handpicking isn't foolproof. The weed has the mind-bogglingtendency to grow back if the top is chopped off or if any point ofthe root is touching the ground.
"An old Mennonite farmer told me there's always going to be thornsand thistles," said Gordon Sutton, a 74-year-old who owns the Idealfarm where the new breed was first discovered. "You control onething, and another crops up. Crabgrass was our biggest nemesis foryears. And now it's pigweed."
There are no estimates yet on the scourge's economic impact, butscientists estimate untold thousands of acres of cotton —worth millions of dollars — have been plowed under. And Yorksaid it could cost $20 an acre to fend off much of the plant,costing the industry millions more.
Jay Griffin, 52, who owns a 700-acre farm in nearby Oglethorpe,said he's lost hundreds of acres of cotton totaling more than$150,000 to resistant pigweed since it first popped up on hisproperty five years ago.
"It's the worst I've ever seen. I've been doing this for 35 yearsand it's just as bad as the boll weevil," said Griffin. "You can'tplant cotton like we used to. It's resistant to just abouteverything. You can throw everything at it you want to, but youain't going to kill it."
To Culpepper, it's a frustrating — and sometimes hopeless— battle.
He quickly set up an experiment station in Ideal and seven otherplots throughout Georgia after the herbicide-resistant plantcropped up here. But even when fields are sprayed with 25 times thenormal amount of herbicide, there are still signs of pigweed pokingout.
With the next era of chemicals not likely to be commercially readyuntil 2013, Culpepper is focusing on teaching farmers about thethreat. At lectures to groups in 17 states, he sounds more like ahigh school health teacher than a weed specialist, telling them theonly proven method to stop the weed is prevention.
"This field started with one or two plants, and now it's across 500acres," said Culpepper, waving his hands over the field of pigweed."If a single pigweed plant is allowed to germinate, it can spread500,000 seeds across the land. The game is over."