30 Years Ago / Excerpts from the February 1979 Issue

USDA Entomologist Has Identified More Than 500 Insect Species in Beet Field — “How many different insect species are present in an average sugarbeet field on an average summer day? Ten? Fifty? A hundred?

“If your guess is somewhere in this neighborhood, you’re way off the mark, according to Dr. Carl Blicken-staff, USDA entomologist, Kimberly, Idaho. As part of a four-year survey, he has found and identified more than 500 different insect species from sugarbeet fields.

“ ‘The overwhelming majority of these insects,’ Dr. Blickenstaff says, ‘are of no consequence, being neither harmful nor beneficial as far as crop production is concerned.’ But a handful are of huge consequence, specifically the sugarbeet root maggot. It was this insect in particular that Dr. Blickenstaff’s study was designed to learn more about.

“The study involved nine sugarbeet fields each year, scattered through south central Idaho . . . . As one purpose of the study was to determine the effect of pesticides on insect populations, Dr. Blickenstaff treated portions of each field with the systemic pesticide, Temik aldicarb. . . .

“ ‘Of the 500-plus insect species in the fields,’ he relates, ‘we found 50 species that could be termed common and numerous. . . . Because we had treated and untreated plots in each field, we had the opportunity to study how Temik affected each of these 50 species. One interesting finding was that the pesticide treatment didn’t completely eliminate any insect species. It affected the population of quite a few species, but it didn’t eliminate any species.’ ”

Sugarbeet Growers Experiment With No Hand Labor Production — “The number of sugarbeet producers who grew all or part of their crop without the hand thinning or weeding usually done my migrant workers increased from 15 percent in 1977 to 64 percent in 1978.

“According to a survey conducted by University of Minnesota and North Dakota State University specialists, the number of acres without hand labor totaled only 14 percent in the 1978 crop year. [However, the responding growers] reported they would increase that acreage to about 30 percent in 1979.

“ ‘The figures seem to indicate that a high percentage of growers are experimenting,’ says sugarbeet specialist Alan Dexter. ‘They are trying to replace hand labor with chemical and cultural weed control and mechanical thinning. Currently, most hand labor is supplied by migrant workers and local teenagers.

“ ‘Increased government regulations and programs for migrant swill do more than any other single factor to eliminate the use of hand labor in sugarbeets,’ Dexter explains. The growing cost of hand labor, along with low sugar prices, also prompts growers to cut down on this major input.”

Here’s Holly’s Newest ‘Fieldman’ — “Holly Sugar Corporation now boasts of hiring what is believed to be the only female agriculturist in the domestic sugarbeet industry.

“She is Jodie Hart, who became a member of the Hereford, Texas, factory agricultural staff on Jan. 15. Prior to joining Holy she had been only of only two women employed full-time by the Soil Conservation Service in Hereford with responsibility for a 13-county area. She has worked for the SCS Hereford office since Aug. 9, 1977, following graduation from West Texas State University. . . .

“ ‘If a girl’s going into some type of work that is customarily done by men, she definitely needs a good sense of humor, a good outlook on everything, and it sure doesn’t hurt to be willing to work extra hard,’ [Hart] said of her experience with the SCS.”

‘Ode to a Rusty Relic’ (By Carl Decker) — “On almost every old farmstead that has operated for fifty or more years, there is a cemetery. There are no graves or markers, no flowers, no granite-engraved epitaphs . . . just stark metal corpses . . . jumbled, mangled, dismembered . . . slowly and irresistibly rusting their way back into the earth.

“Worn out relics of farming-past, unceremoniously heaped in neglected corners, screened by windblown tumbleweeds and dry stalks of last year’s sunflowers. Iron wheels and wooden tongues, hand levers, cogs and gears, weird shapes and devices of unknown purpose.

“Mutely silent, yet how fervently they speak to one who walked the furrows, pulled the levers, rode the hard steel seat, or proudly watched the complicated mechanisms lift and top a sugarbeet, reap and bundle fat sheaves of wheat, plant or cultivate, or simply gouge guiding rills for irrigation water.

“Rough, crude, some ingeniously hand-fashioned from scrap and borrowed parts; but in its day each gave its master dutiful service, helped him perform more work, manage more acres, produce more foodstuff in less time and with less labor.

“Here, side by side, lie generations of progress, successive steps in man’s eternal quest for better, more efficient means to induce nature’s providence and feed multiplying humankind.

“Rest in peace, old iron-wrought monuments. Hold high your rust-bound arms. Remind us of your day’s accomplishments, lest we too proudly boast, forgetting that except for you we now could not be where we are — and more of us might hunger.”