August 8, 2000

Vehicle costs low in eradication effort

Cotton growers in the Permian Basin Boll Weevil Eradication Zone committed themselves in 1999 to eliminating the most consistent threat to their livelihood.

This commitment involves much planning, hard work and, of course, money. But growers in the region may not realize how the assessments they pay to fund the program are spent.

An analysis of the zone’s spending from the beginning of the program last year through June 2000 shows the bulk of the funds was spent on the treatments that will eliminate the weevil. For every dollar expended on eradication in the zone, almost 77 cents were spent on insecticide and aerial applications. Lots of vehicles and employees are needed to successfully run an eradication program, but surprisingly these items require a much smaller bite of the eradication dollar. Salaries and wages accounted for slightly more than 9 cents of every dollar, and vehicle expenses consumed a little more than 4 cents of each dollar spent.

The rest of the eradication dollar went for trapping supplies, 3 cents; equipment costs, 1 cent; interest, 4 cents; and rent and supplies, 2 cents.

Growers in the zone should be happy to discover they are not bearing these costs by themselves.

Although they paid $4.5 million dollars in 1999, state and federal funding has provided  $7.8 million toward the effort.

One of the largest expenses growers incur in producing a crop has always been the cost of pest control. But experience in other areas of the country has shown that a successful eradication program drastically reduces that expense, resulting in a higher quality crop at lower production costs.

Eradication costs for PB  Eradication zone (expressed in cents per dollar spent, rounded to the nearest cent)
Insecticide	53 cents
Aerial applications	24 cents
Wages	9 cents
Vehicles	4 cents
Trapping supplies	3 cents
Equipment	1 cent
Interest	4 cents
Rent, other expenses	2 cents