Indeed, many of the Southern workers were former cotton sharecroppers, hard hit by low prices, the boll weevil, and the western movement of American cotton production to the factory farms of Texas.

Using the gene described herein, it is possible to transform plants using techniques known by specialists in the field for the expression of the endotoxin active against the boll weevil.

It is worth remembering that Ned Cobb stuck it out through sharecropping and boll weevils and all God s dangers and even the arrival of tractors.

Valdosta was once the center of long-staple cotton growing in the United States until the boll weevil finally killed the crop in 1917 and agriculture turned to tobacco and pine trees.

When the boll weevil began to ravage the Southern cotton crop in the early 1900s, government extension programs were mobilized to spread advice to farmers on how to combat the weevil and save their crops.