The USDA Barberry Eradication Program and the Growth of Applied Biology in the Early Twentieth Century

Paul Peterson
Department of Entomology, Soils, and Plant Sciences, Clemson University

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     Last modified: June 15, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 11:00 AM in ROZH 108
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Abstract
Plant Pathology/Ag Sciences Session

Begun in 1918, the Barberry Eradication Program was a cooperative federal and state endeavor initiated in thirteen states to eradicate common barberry, the alternate host of stem rust (Puccinia graminis), from the major areas of small grains production in the United States. In the early decades of the 1900s, stem rust epidemics were common in the north central states, thwarting successful production of small grain crops. The unprecedented losses of wheat due to the 1916 epidemic at the height of World War I provided an impetus for action. Aware that the common barberry, once planted as an ornamental bush throughout the north central U.S., was responsible for initiating local, devastating stem rust epidemics of small grains, leaders of the eradication movement successfully argued for the total removal of the bush. Plant pathologists were the vanguard of this movement for a national barberry eradication campaign. A newly defined discipline in the late nineteenth century, plant pathology aspired for national recognition in the early decades of the 1900s as a scientific discipline that could solve both practical problems for American agriculture and provide fundamental contributions to biology. Leaders like E.C. Stakman at the University of Minnesota, a national authority on cereal diseases and collaborator with the United States Department of Agriculture’s Office of Cereal Investigations, forged a role for his nascent discipline in the eradication effort through a carefully crafted organization, administration, and operational agenda that bridged the USDA, state governments, land-grant colleges, agricultural experiment stations, and industry. What followed was one of the most massive undertakings to remove an invasive plant species in the history of the United States and one of earliest attempts to eliminate a pathogen through eradication of its alternate host. Although histories exist of earlier efforts to use biological organisms to manage pests or more recent practices of the use of synthetic chemistry as insecticides, the eradication of barberry as an early, novel approach to disease control has been entirely ignored. The establishment of the Barberry Eradication Program also provides an excellent case study to examine the similarly overlooked role of applied biology in the early twentieth-century American experience. Characteristic of the Progressive Era, it represents the intersection of the expansionist roles of government, agriculture, science, education, and industry in harnessing the nation’s resources to “improve” the lives of its citizens. The Barberry Eradication Program also places plant pathology and its supporting institutions like the USDA squarely in the mainstream of biology’s activist role in the Era.

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
The science of starvation: Anton de Bary and potato late blight
Ergot: Transition from a feared poison to a valued component of the material medica in the early 19th century