Photo: Musk thistle. © 2020 Delena Norris-Tull
John Larsen “Lars” Baker, Fremont County, Wyoming, interview 2013
[Video interview conducted by Becky McMillen, transcribed by Dr. Delena Norris-Tull. Reviewed & Approved by Lars, July 25, 2020.]
[Mr. Baker worked as the Fremont County, Wyoming, Weed and Pest Supervisor for 38 years. He is now retired. Fremont is the sixth largest County in the United States. He has a degree in Wildlife Management and Conservation, from the University of Wyoming. While completing the degree, he was concerned that it did not give him the field work he had anticipated, but when he attained his job with the County, he realized that his degree program had provided him with an excellent preparation in Field Ecology. He also has a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the University of Wyoming]
"When I began this job, most Wyoming Weed and Pest Districts had one Supervisor and one Secretary. The number of staff has increased over the years. Prior to 1973, when the Wyoming Weed and Pest Control Act was passed, the Districts were not aligned with county boundaries. Rather, they were special improvement districts voted into existence by the landowners in an area associated with an irrigation project. Fremont County had four Districts up through the mid 1940s. The Inspector’s job was mainly enforcement: if the farmer/rancher was not taking care of their weeds, they got a ticket and had to go to court. This was not effective. The 1973 Act changed this role significantly.
Today, weed control is clearly a profession. Most Wyoming Weed and Pest Supervisors have a college degree, or two. You can’t just hire anybody to go out and spray weeds. The staff need to know a lot about the chemicals they are working with – you have to know the right chemical for the right time with the right weed. The Supervisor’s job is to train the farmers/ranchers. I have to listen to, and understand their concerns and help them address their concerns, even when not directly related to weed issues, before the farmer/rancher is ready to learn how to control weeds.
The County Weed and Pest Supervisor needs to be sure to hire an excellent bookkeeper. I was fortunate enough to realize I did not know how to manage a budget. I was able to hire a bookkeeper that eats and sleeps budgets, and isn’t afraid to tell me what I cannot do with government funds! I learned a lot about government accounting from Fay Johnson that helped me for many years after she retired.
Prior to 1973, weed control was funded out of the county general fund. Weed Districts had to compete for funds with the library, the County Fair, and the Sheriff. Now Districts are funded with a property tax levy of one mill countywide. As well funded as many counties are, the mill levies only generate part of the costs of weed control. The Supervisor and his Board of Directors figure out cost-sharing between the District and farmers/ranchers. In Fremont County, we have become the commercial applicator of choice for Federal agencies and the State of Wyoming because we can enter into intergovernmental agreements. Those agreements make up about half of our budget with profits being used to expand weed and pest control into other areas of the county. Mineral extraction pays much of the property taxes in Fremont County. We work with irrigation districts, which also receive property taxes collected on irrigated lands. Irrigation increases the growth of weeds.
Fremont County is 300 miles from the Northeast to the Southwest corner. Currently, we have 60,000 acres of Russian knapweed, mostly on abandoned alfalfa fields.
The first Federal Seed Law was enacted in 1928. This law designated that any seed sold had to be at least 97% pure (weed free). Unfortunately, because it’s quite easy to have seed that is 99% pure, the seed companies started putting trash into the seed, to decrease it to 97% pure. This allowed many weed species to be introduced.
The number of weeds today is about the same as when I started my job. The challenge is to get agreement between landowners, including many Native American landowners. Weed control has become a burden to farmers/ranchers. Many are leasing the land, and the leases are temporary and can be unpredictable. There is little incentive to make the investments that it takes to produce better crops into the future.
We have removed nutrients from the soil, over the decades of farming and ranching. So now much of our land is poor for farming. It is kind of like mining, using plants to extract the minerals.
Weeds are the direct result of how humans have disturbed the land. Native sagebrush range developed over thousands of years. Now that we have disturbed it, we cannot restore it simply by stopping irrigation. The problems we have today with cheatgrass are due to the fact that we have caused so much destruction to the ecological systems.
Wyoming farmers tried to grow dry-land wheat many years ago, but there was not enough rainfall for this to be successful. They plowed up native perennial grasses that had been there for many years. Today the climate is even drier. So now when we plant native grass seed, the same species that were there before, they often will not grow, because there is no longer enough rainfall.
Booth and Vogel conducted research and found that native plants today are becoming maladapted to current environmental conditions, due to climate change. [Refer to the chapter “Native Plants” for a description of their research.]
To be effective, I have had to learn to be a people manager. I have to convince a lot of people to work together to control weeds.
We have finally moved into a much more environmentally-based pest management. Much of what we do now is educating landowners/farmers/ranchers.
Fremont County is 20% private land, and about 50% is the Wind River Reservation. Most of that is held in trust by the Federal Government. The rest is State land and Federal lands like BLM and USFS.
Since the US Supreme Court decided that the Clean Water Act relates to pesticide/herbicide use, we now have a new challenge. We have to provide discharge data regularly to both the US EPA and to the Wyoming DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality), wherever we spray near waterways. That increases our record keeping significantly.
When I started in this job in 1975, we were not yet talking about biocontrol methods. We were very excited when we learned about this. We realized that weeds such as leafy spurge are not considered weeds in their natural habitats in Europe, because they have natural predators. Montana developed an insectary in Corvallis, to raise insects for biocontrol. By 1978, we had biocontrol insects to manage musk thistle. By 1990, we had our first beetles to control leafy spurge. The landowners were not excited about this at first. Finally, by 1995, biocontrol had shown its potential, and landowners finally were interested in it. One year, we were able to collect a lot of insects and re-distribute them where needed. The insects were very successful in reducing the weeds. The next year, we tried another collection day, but there were so few musk thistles left, that we could not collect enough insects for re-distribution. The musk thistle population had collapsed in one year, after 15 years of battling it! The credit goes to two species of beetles that attack the plant.
I still have musk thistle in prairie dog towns, due to the deep soil disturbance, and in pastures that have been over-grazed due to being treated like feedlots. But in most other locations, it is well managed by biological control agents.
I believe biocontrol works very well. We have some funds in our District for research on biocontrol of a number of weed species. We have learned that you do not have to eradicate a weed species. You just have to reduce the population enough to enable other plants to overcome the weeds. We still have musk thistle, but it’s no longer a problem. If you define a weed as a plant that interferes with management objectives, then Musk Thistle is not a weed anymore.
Unfortunately, it’s easier for landowners to understand chemicals than biocontrol. So it’s hard to get landowners to rely on biocontrol.
I believe biocontrol should be the first layer of technology for Integrated Pest Management. But biocontrol does not help with annual crops – with annual crops, you must get rid of the weeds immediately to preserve the yield. Just a few weeks of weed competition in the field will reduce the yield by 20% or more.
It’s challenging to get researchers to work on biocontrol. Many grants have a two-year time limit, or the researcher is working on a master’s degree and needs to get results within one-two years. Biocontrol takes longer than that. Also, biocontrol is not profitable, in the way that chemicals are. There’s no product to sell. A landowner can collect insects on their own land, to sell to other landowners, but within three years, they won’t have a profitable number of insects anymore, because the weed population will be depleted. Or the insects will be so wide spread that everyone has them and there is no longer a market. Biocontrol needs to be a public endeavor over many years. When you have the biocontrol insects established, you can work on restoring the natural ecology, planting native plants. The weeds never go completely away, but they are under control.
I have concerns about the lack of research on chemicals. We are not thinking about the non-target impacts of chemicals. Some chemicals, such as Tordon, kill all broadleaf species, including crops and native species. It also kills trees. Chemicals are a temporary treatment. The chemical may do the job for two-three years, but eventually the chemical dissipates in the soil, and the weeds return because we have not changed the environmental conditions that allowed the weeds to grow there in the first place. RoundUp-Ready corn is not going to work for very long.
Chemicals seem like an easy fix, but the environmental cost is too high. We don’t take into account the indirect costs, the environmental costs of spraying, the environmental cost of tractor tires, diesel fuel, the farmers’ exposure to the sun and to the chemicals. We have to change the environmental conditions to control weeds.
In the early days, if we wanted to know how a new product worked, we had to do our own local research. We tried it on a plot, and we recorded the results. Harold Alley, at the University of Wyoming, did some of the early research on chemicals. He was one of the first Weed Scientists in the United States. He was followed by many others like Steve Miller and Tom Whitson who worked so hard to improve weed control practice in Wyoming.
Chemicals do have a role in stopping a small weed population before it becomes an infestation. We can use it effectively for part of our Early Detection and Rapid Response program, to prevent the spread of a weed. The Nature Conservancy did some interesting research on controlling leafy spurge. They found that it is not effective to spray the inside of a patch of weeds, the most heavily infested lands where the most economic loss is. You have to map out the area, to find out where the weeds are, and you have to treat from the outside of a patch, to slow down the spread. You rarely have enough money to pay for enough chemicals to treat the entire patch, but if you treat the edges the first year, the second year you can treat closer to the center. Each year, you treat further toward the center. If you start in the middle and work out, the weeds continue to spread.
We have been mapping weeds now for 25 years. At first we did it manually. We had print-outs of the maps of the area, and we colored in the locations of the weeds and the land ownership. Now, of course, we can do all this with software programs on computers. Mapping has been very effective in demonstrating to State and Federal Agencies, such as the US Bureau of Reclamation, the extent of the infestations. The agencies take us much more seriously, when they see the mapping, and they provide us a lot more funds as a result.
The State Designated List of weeds is the official list. Recommendations come from the County Weed Districts. Since funds can only be used on Designated species, Districts have to justify any additions to the list. Districts can have some species that are included only in their District Declared list.
To become effective at this job, I had to learn a lot about farming and weeds. I had to be humble. The farmers/ranchers educated me. I learned from the farmers what cultivation techniques are effective. In some cases, farmers rotary-hoe a corn field twice to initially get rid of weeds. This is quite time-consuming, but is effective.
We have to use a variety of tools together, in an integrated program. Good farmers plan their crop rotations years in advance. You cannot plant corn in multiple years – or you will get too many weeds. You never plant sugar beets two years in a row to limit insect damage."
Ralph Urbigkeit, interviewed with Lars Baker 2013
[Mr. Urbigkeit was on the Fremont County Weed and Pest District Board for 20 years. He was President of the Wyoming Weed and Pest Council for three years, during the 1990s. He also served as a Wyoming State Legislator for one term. And he served as a Fremont County Commissioner. He is now deceased.]
Lars Baker: When the Wyoming Weed and Pest Control law was created in 1973, State Legislators were so concerned that the Weed and Pest Districts would force them to control their weeds, they put a limit on how much the Weed and Pest Districts could control. They limited it to one percent of the assessed value of the land. We discovered that the County was under-valuing agriculturral land, which gave the Weed and Pest Districts so much less ability to control weeds. About 1980, that part of the law got changed because it had been totally unworkable.
States around us have very aggressive regulatory powers to push people into controlling weeds. Here in Wyoming, we mostly have to jawbone landowners to death, to get them to control their weeds. I’m not sure that that doesn’t work just as good. I think we have a great law in Wyoming.
Ralph: I was on the Board when we hired Lars.
Lars: when I was hired in 1975, the Legislature wouldn’t allow the Weed and Pest District to spray weeds. The 1973 law said we were not supposed to compete with private enterprise. We could cost-share on the chemicals, but we weren’t supposed to cost-share on the cost of application. We couldn’t spray weeds if there was anybody else in the County who could do it.
We can’t use public funds to compete with private enterprise. This creates a problem in our County. We are getting more and more commercial applicators in our County all the time. Landowners of cropland hire their own spraying contractors. And on non-cropland, we subcontract out to commercial sprayers. The District staff use hose-dragging equipment to spray along fence lines and ditch banks, areas where there is no money to be made commercially.
When I was hired, I had to convince the Board that we needed to spray weeds. We started out with one truck. Then we decided to have one truck in Riverton and one in Lander. Gradually we built the equipment up.
When I came to work in 1975, I think the Weed and Pest District budget was about $200,000 a year. Now it’s $3.5 million a year. In Fremont County we’ve become a prime contractor for public agencies. So we spray for the Forest Service and the BLM and on State lands and highways. And because we are available, and have the equipment, and can do a good job, then we get the contract to do that. So we’ve got a business now, doing the stuff that nobody else will do.
We get a lot of resistance from ranchers now, who feel we are spraying and killing their feed. We’ve got a project spraying Russian knapweed on Crow Creek. And we have several ranchers who don’t want us to spray anymore.
Ralph: The landowners think, if it’s green, it’s feed for livestock.
Lars: And we can’t spray Russian knapweed for the Wyoming Game and Fish, around Lake Cameahwait, also known as Bass Lake, because they have a “put and take” pheasant operation. And Russian knapweed is cover for pheasants. Salt cedar also provides cover for pheasants. The State releases pheasants in the area, and the hunters come in and shoot them. The Game and Fish plans that the pheasants will all be killed within 24 hours of being released. Without the cover, the birds fly away from the hunt area.
So sometimes, our weed and pest programs conflict with other State programs.
One year, when the State Legislature was slashing funds, Ralph went to meet with them to get them to put money back in for treating leafy spurge. Ralph visited with the Governor about it. He showed up at the Governor’s house about 6 AM. The governor invited him in to have breakfast. Ralph was able to convince him.
Ralph went to Washington, DC, several times. At first, the Federal Agencies couldn’t get up to speed on weeds. They just didn’t understand it as a problem. Federal agencies move really slow.
It’s so different today. Now the BLM and the Forest Service have weed plans with line items in their budgets, and they’re always pushing money at us. Last year, our BLM office actually hired a guy whose primary job is weeds.
Ralph: We’d go to meet everybody in Washington, DC. At first, they wouldn’t touch the weeds.
Lars: Back then George Hittle was going to Washington, DC, frequently. About every other year, there was a Federal weed bill, but it took us a while to realize that there was a difference between a weed bill and getting something funded.
So we’d get the Federal Noxious Weed Act passed, which supposedly gives direction to Federal Agencies to take care of noxious weeds. But then, it would never get funded.
George was instrumental in getting the Special Weed Management Act passed in 1990.
When I went to college in the 1960s, weeds on rangeland were considered to be a symptom of mismanagement. The college professors believed there wasn’t any point in spraying. What you needed to do was to change the management. These guys at the college level simply were not in tune with species like Russian knapweed and spotted knapweed and leafy spurge. They were still focused on cropland weed issues on cultivated ground. Any weeds on rangeland were thought to be the result of mismanagement. They thought you managed weeds with rotational grazing, or fencing, or no grazing.
Just a couple years ago, we got a new vet in Riverton who called me up, all excited, to say, “Did you realize that Russian knapweed causes chewing disease in horses?” And I said, “Well, we’ve been trying to teach that for 30 years. But to tell you the truth, I don’t get any traction on it.” She said, “This year alone, I’ve treated five horses for chewing disease, and we had to put all of them down. And every one of them was being raised on Russian knapweed.” I said, “If you call down to Utah State University in Logan, and talk to the poisonous plants lab, they can tell you just how much Russian knapweed a horse has to eat before he gets sick.”
Ralph: Knapweed came into Fremont County from a farmer in Iowa or someplace, when I was a kid 80 or 90 years ago. The farmer liked to raise oats. So he brought oat seed into Fremont County, and he planted it all up and down Crow Creek. And it was full of knapweed. The whole west end of the County is knapweed.
When they built the irrigation system up here, they still used horse machinery, and so everywhere they camped with their horses, there is still a big patch of knapweed today. The hay was all full of knapweed.
Lars: 1928 was the first Federal Seed Law. It said seed had to be 97% weed free. There were 500 weed seeds in one sack. Many seeds that were in mixed bags of seeds didn’t grow, but a few of the plants were aligned with our climate.
I have a picture of a Russian knapweed research site in Turkey. And that country looks exactly like Fremont County. Turkey doesn’t call it Russian knapweed. The USDA plants database now calls it hardheads, and the scientific name is changed to Acroptilon repens. It used to be Centaurea repens.
In California they have records going back into the 1830s, that show alfalfa seed was brought in from Spain, and that’s where their yellow star thistle came from.
We have some new biocontrol agents on the ground on Russian knapweed in Fremont County that I think are going to be really effective. One of these agents has been in the field for five years now in Montana. The field that they put those test plots out in now has almost no knapweed in it. It will be another decade here before we know if we’ve got Russian knapweed on the run.
Ralph: We didn’t have knapweed here when I was a kid. We had whitetop. People would pull it up, and it would grow right back. I had a high school agriculture teacher in Lander that took us out to look at weeds. But no one else was paying any attention to weeds back then.
I don’t think the weeds are any worse today than they were 25 years ago. They are worse than they were 40 years ago.
Lars: RoundUp has made a huge difference. When I came here, the small grain fields were just full of Canada thistle. You hardly ever see that anymore, because you can spray the thistles out with RoundUp, and you can farm for two or three years without having to do anything else. I see RoundUp as a really significant improvement in weed control. And then, we’ve been pretty aggressive in Fremont County. We try to keep the weeds on the right-of-ways under control. And so, the irrigation ditch systems, and that type of thing, are pretty clean.
Ralph: The farmers themselves are doing a better job.
Lars: As people learn what it takes to produce a good crop, they get more interested in controlling weeds. In rangeland, it’s a tough sell. We’re trying to control small, incipient infestations before they take over the range.
When Ralph was President of the Wyoming Weed and Pest Council, that meant the Supervisor from his County was the Secretary. So I was the Secretary. That was a great learning experience for me.
Links to additional Wyoming County interviews:
John Larsen “Lars” Baker, Fremont County, Wyoming, interview 2013
[Video interview conducted by Becky McMillen, transcribed by Dr. Delena Norris-Tull. Reviewed & Approved by Lars, July 25, 2020.]
[Mr. Baker worked as the Fremont County, Wyoming, Weed and Pest Supervisor for 38 years. He is now retired. Fremont is the sixth largest County in the United States. He has a degree in Wildlife Management and Conservation, from the University of Wyoming. While completing the degree, he was concerned that it did not give him the field work he had anticipated, but when he attained his job with the County, he realized that his degree program had provided him with an excellent preparation in Field Ecology. He also has a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the University of Wyoming]
"When I began this job, most Wyoming Weed and Pest Districts had one Supervisor and one Secretary. The number of staff has increased over the years. Prior to 1973, when the Wyoming Weed and Pest Control Act was passed, the Districts were not aligned with county boundaries. Rather, they were special improvement districts voted into existence by the landowners in an area associated with an irrigation project. Fremont County had four Districts up through the mid 1940s. The Inspector’s job was mainly enforcement: if the farmer/rancher was not taking care of their weeds, they got a ticket and had to go to court. This was not effective. The 1973 Act changed this role significantly.
Today, weed control is clearly a profession. Most Wyoming Weed and Pest Supervisors have a college degree, or two. You can’t just hire anybody to go out and spray weeds. The staff need to know a lot about the chemicals they are working with – you have to know the right chemical for the right time with the right weed. The Supervisor’s job is to train the farmers/ranchers. I have to listen to, and understand their concerns and help them address their concerns, even when not directly related to weed issues, before the farmer/rancher is ready to learn how to control weeds.
The County Weed and Pest Supervisor needs to be sure to hire an excellent bookkeeper. I was fortunate enough to realize I did not know how to manage a budget. I was able to hire a bookkeeper that eats and sleeps budgets, and isn’t afraid to tell me what I cannot do with government funds! I learned a lot about government accounting from Fay Johnson that helped me for many years after she retired.
Prior to 1973, weed control was funded out of the county general fund. Weed Districts had to compete for funds with the library, the County Fair, and the Sheriff. Now Districts are funded with a property tax levy of one mill countywide. As well funded as many counties are, the mill levies only generate part of the costs of weed control. The Supervisor and his Board of Directors figure out cost-sharing between the District and farmers/ranchers. In Fremont County, we have become the commercial applicator of choice for Federal agencies and the State of Wyoming because we can enter into intergovernmental agreements. Those agreements make up about half of our budget with profits being used to expand weed and pest control into other areas of the county. Mineral extraction pays much of the property taxes in Fremont County. We work with irrigation districts, which also receive property taxes collected on irrigated lands. Irrigation increases the growth of weeds.
Fremont County is 300 miles from the Northeast to the Southwest corner. Currently, we have 60,000 acres of Russian knapweed, mostly on abandoned alfalfa fields.
The first Federal Seed Law was enacted in 1928. This law designated that any seed sold had to be at least 97% pure (weed free). Unfortunately, because it’s quite easy to have seed that is 99% pure, the seed companies started putting trash into the seed, to decrease it to 97% pure. This allowed many weed species to be introduced.
The number of weeds today is about the same as when I started my job. The challenge is to get agreement between landowners, including many Native American landowners. Weed control has become a burden to farmers/ranchers. Many are leasing the land, and the leases are temporary and can be unpredictable. There is little incentive to make the investments that it takes to produce better crops into the future.
We have removed nutrients from the soil, over the decades of farming and ranching. So now much of our land is poor for farming. It is kind of like mining, using plants to extract the minerals.
Weeds are the direct result of how humans have disturbed the land. Native sagebrush range developed over thousands of years. Now that we have disturbed it, we cannot restore it simply by stopping irrigation. The problems we have today with cheatgrass are due to the fact that we have caused so much destruction to the ecological systems.
Wyoming farmers tried to grow dry-land wheat many years ago, but there was not enough rainfall for this to be successful. They plowed up native perennial grasses that had been there for many years. Today the climate is even drier. So now when we plant native grass seed, the same species that were there before, they often will not grow, because there is no longer enough rainfall.
Booth and Vogel conducted research and found that native plants today are becoming maladapted to current environmental conditions, due to climate change. [Refer to the chapter “Native Plants” for a description of their research.]
To be effective, I have had to learn to be a people manager. I have to convince a lot of people to work together to control weeds.
We have finally moved into a much more environmentally-based pest management. Much of what we do now is educating landowners/farmers/ranchers.
Fremont County is 20% private land, and about 50% is the Wind River Reservation. Most of that is held in trust by the Federal Government. The rest is State land and Federal lands like BLM and USFS.
Since the US Supreme Court decided that the Clean Water Act relates to pesticide/herbicide use, we now have a new challenge. We have to provide discharge data regularly to both the US EPA and to the Wyoming DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality), wherever we spray near waterways. That increases our record keeping significantly.
When I started in this job in 1975, we were not yet talking about biocontrol methods. We were very excited when we learned about this. We realized that weeds such as leafy spurge are not considered weeds in their natural habitats in Europe, because they have natural predators. Montana developed an insectary in Corvallis, to raise insects for biocontrol. By 1978, we had biocontrol insects to manage musk thistle. By 1990, we had our first beetles to control leafy spurge. The landowners were not excited about this at first. Finally, by 1995, biocontrol had shown its potential, and landowners finally were interested in it. One year, we were able to collect a lot of insects and re-distribute them where needed. The insects were very successful in reducing the weeds. The next year, we tried another collection day, but there were so few musk thistles left, that we could not collect enough insects for re-distribution. The musk thistle population had collapsed in one year, after 15 years of battling it! The credit goes to two species of beetles that attack the plant.
I still have musk thistle in prairie dog towns, due to the deep soil disturbance, and in pastures that have been over-grazed due to being treated like feedlots. But in most other locations, it is well managed by biological control agents.
I believe biocontrol works very well. We have some funds in our District for research on biocontrol of a number of weed species. We have learned that you do not have to eradicate a weed species. You just have to reduce the population enough to enable other plants to overcome the weeds. We still have musk thistle, but it’s no longer a problem. If you define a weed as a plant that interferes with management objectives, then Musk Thistle is not a weed anymore.
Unfortunately, it’s easier for landowners to understand chemicals than biocontrol. So it’s hard to get landowners to rely on biocontrol.
I believe biocontrol should be the first layer of technology for Integrated Pest Management. But biocontrol does not help with annual crops – with annual crops, you must get rid of the weeds immediately to preserve the yield. Just a few weeks of weed competition in the field will reduce the yield by 20% or more.
It’s challenging to get researchers to work on biocontrol. Many grants have a two-year time limit, or the researcher is working on a master’s degree and needs to get results within one-two years. Biocontrol takes longer than that. Also, biocontrol is not profitable, in the way that chemicals are. There’s no product to sell. A landowner can collect insects on their own land, to sell to other landowners, but within three years, they won’t have a profitable number of insects anymore, because the weed population will be depleted. Or the insects will be so wide spread that everyone has them and there is no longer a market. Biocontrol needs to be a public endeavor over many years. When you have the biocontrol insects established, you can work on restoring the natural ecology, planting native plants. The weeds never go completely away, but they are under control.
I have concerns about the lack of research on chemicals. We are not thinking about the non-target impacts of chemicals. Some chemicals, such as Tordon, kill all broadleaf species, including crops and native species. It also kills trees. Chemicals are a temporary treatment. The chemical may do the job for two-three years, but eventually the chemical dissipates in the soil, and the weeds return because we have not changed the environmental conditions that allowed the weeds to grow there in the first place. RoundUp-Ready corn is not going to work for very long.
Chemicals seem like an easy fix, but the environmental cost is too high. We don’t take into account the indirect costs, the environmental costs of spraying, the environmental cost of tractor tires, diesel fuel, the farmers’ exposure to the sun and to the chemicals. We have to change the environmental conditions to control weeds.
In the early days, if we wanted to know how a new product worked, we had to do our own local research. We tried it on a plot, and we recorded the results. Harold Alley, at the University of Wyoming, did some of the early research on chemicals. He was one of the first Weed Scientists in the United States. He was followed by many others like Steve Miller and Tom Whitson who worked so hard to improve weed control practice in Wyoming.
Chemicals do have a role in stopping a small weed population before it becomes an infestation. We can use it effectively for part of our Early Detection and Rapid Response program, to prevent the spread of a weed. The Nature Conservancy did some interesting research on controlling leafy spurge. They found that it is not effective to spray the inside of a patch of weeds, the most heavily infested lands where the most economic loss is. You have to map out the area, to find out where the weeds are, and you have to treat from the outside of a patch, to slow down the spread. You rarely have enough money to pay for enough chemicals to treat the entire patch, but if you treat the edges the first year, the second year you can treat closer to the center. Each year, you treat further toward the center. If you start in the middle and work out, the weeds continue to spread.
We have been mapping weeds now for 25 years. At first we did it manually. We had print-outs of the maps of the area, and we colored in the locations of the weeds and the land ownership. Now, of course, we can do all this with software programs on computers. Mapping has been very effective in demonstrating to State and Federal Agencies, such as the US Bureau of Reclamation, the extent of the infestations. The agencies take us much more seriously, when they see the mapping, and they provide us a lot more funds as a result.
The State Designated List of weeds is the official list. Recommendations come from the County Weed Districts. Since funds can only be used on Designated species, Districts have to justify any additions to the list. Districts can have some species that are included only in their District Declared list.
To become effective at this job, I had to learn a lot about farming and weeds. I had to be humble. The farmers/ranchers educated me. I learned from the farmers what cultivation techniques are effective. In some cases, farmers rotary-hoe a corn field twice to initially get rid of weeds. This is quite time-consuming, but is effective.
We have to use a variety of tools together, in an integrated program. Good farmers plan their crop rotations years in advance. You cannot plant corn in multiple years – or you will get too many weeds. You never plant sugar beets two years in a row to limit insect damage."
Ralph Urbigkeit, interviewed with Lars Baker 2013
[Mr. Urbigkeit was on the Fremont County Weed and Pest District Board for 20 years. He was President of the Wyoming Weed and Pest Council for three years, during the 1990s. He also served as a Wyoming State Legislator for one term. And he served as a Fremont County Commissioner. He is now deceased.]
Lars Baker: When the Wyoming Weed and Pest Control law was created in 1973, State Legislators were so concerned that the Weed and Pest Districts would force them to control their weeds, they put a limit on how much the Weed and Pest Districts could control. They limited it to one percent of the assessed value of the land. We discovered that the County was under-valuing agriculturral land, which gave the Weed and Pest Districts so much less ability to control weeds. About 1980, that part of the law got changed because it had been totally unworkable.
States around us have very aggressive regulatory powers to push people into controlling weeds. Here in Wyoming, we mostly have to jawbone landowners to death, to get them to control their weeds. I’m not sure that that doesn’t work just as good. I think we have a great law in Wyoming.
Ralph: I was on the Board when we hired Lars.
Lars: when I was hired in 1975, the Legislature wouldn’t allow the Weed and Pest District to spray weeds. The 1973 law said we were not supposed to compete with private enterprise. We could cost-share on the chemicals, but we weren’t supposed to cost-share on the cost of application. We couldn’t spray weeds if there was anybody else in the County who could do it.
We can’t use public funds to compete with private enterprise. This creates a problem in our County. We are getting more and more commercial applicators in our County all the time. Landowners of cropland hire their own spraying contractors. And on non-cropland, we subcontract out to commercial sprayers. The District staff use hose-dragging equipment to spray along fence lines and ditch banks, areas where there is no money to be made commercially.
When I was hired, I had to convince the Board that we needed to spray weeds. We started out with one truck. Then we decided to have one truck in Riverton and one in Lander. Gradually we built the equipment up.
When I came to work in 1975, I think the Weed and Pest District budget was about $200,000 a year. Now it’s $3.5 million a year. In Fremont County we’ve become a prime contractor for public agencies. So we spray for the Forest Service and the BLM and on State lands and highways. And because we are available, and have the equipment, and can do a good job, then we get the contract to do that. So we’ve got a business now, doing the stuff that nobody else will do.
We get a lot of resistance from ranchers now, who feel we are spraying and killing their feed. We’ve got a project spraying Russian knapweed on Crow Creek. And we have several ranchers who don’t want us to spray anymore.
Ralph: The landowners think, if it’s green, it’s feed for livestock.
Lars: And we can’t spray Russian knapweed for the Wyoming Game and Fish, around Lake Cameahwait, also known as Bass Lake, because they have a “put and take” pheasant operation. And Russian knapweed is cover for pheasants. Salt cedar also provides cover for pheasants. The State releases pheasants in the area, and the hunters come in and shoot them. The Game and Fish plans that the pheasants will all be killed within 24 hours of being released. Without the cover, the birds fly away from the hunt area.
So sometimes, our weed and pest programs conflict with other State programs.
One year, when the State Legislature was slashing funds, Ralph went to meet with them to get them to put money back in for treating leafy spurge. Ralph visited with the Governor about it. He showed up at the Governor’s house about 6 AM. The governor invited him in to have breakfast. Ralph was able to convince him.
Ralph went to Washington, DC, several times. At first, the Federal Agencies couldn’t get up to speed on weeds. They just didn’t understand it as a problem. Federal agencies move really slow.
It’s so different today. Now the BLM and the Forest Service have weed plans with line items in their budgets, and they’re always pushing money at us. Last year, our BLM office actually hired a guy whose primary job is weeds.
Ralph: We’d go to meet everybody in Washington, DC. At first, they wouldn’t touch the weeds.
Lars: Back then George Hittle was going to Washington, DC, frequently. About every other year, there was a Federal weed bill, but it took us a while to realize that there was a difference between a weed bill and getting something funded.
So we’d get the Federal Noxious Weed Act passed, which supposedly gives direction to Federal Agencies to take care of noxious weeds. But then, it would never get funded.
George was instrumental in getting the Special Weed Management Act passed in 1990.
When I went to college in the 1960s, weeds on rangeland were considered to be a symptom of mismanagement. The college professors believed there wasn’t any point in spraying. What you needed to do was to change the management. These guys at the college level simply were not in tune with species like Russian knapweed and spotted knapweed and leafy spurge. They were still focused on cropland weed issues on cultivated ground. Any weeds on rangeland were thought to be the result of mismanagement. They thought you managed weeds with rotational grazing, or fencing, or no grazing.
Just a couple years ago, we got a new vet in Riverton who called me up, all excited, to say, “Did you realize that Russian knapweed causes chewing disease in horses?” And I said, “Well, we’ve been trying to teach that for 30 years. But to tell you the truth, I don’t get any traction on it.” She said, “This year alone, I’ve treated five horses for chewing disease, and we had to put all of them down. And every one of them was being raised on Russian knapweed.” I said, “If you call down to Utah State University in Logan, and talk to the poisonous plants lab, they can tell you just how much Russian knapweed a horse has to eat before he gets sick.”
Ralph: Knapweed came into Fremont County from a farmer in Iowa or someplace, when I was a kid 80 or 90 years ago. The farmer liked to raise oats. So he brought oat seed into Fremont County, and he planted it all up and down Crow Creek. And it was full of knapweed. The whole west end of the County is knapweed.
When they built the irrigation system up here, they still used horse machinery, and so everywhere they camped with their horses, there is still a big patch of knapweed today. The hay was all full of knapweed.
Lars: 1928 was the first Federal Seed Law. It said seed had to be 97% weed free. There were 500 weed seeds in one sack. Many seeds that were in mixed bags of seeds didn’t grow, but a few of the plants were aligned with our climate.
I have a picture of a Russian knapweed research site in Turkey. And that country looks exactly like Fremont County. Turkey doesn’t call it Russian knapweed. The USDA plants database now calls it hardheads, and the scientific name is changed to Acroptilon repens. It used to be Centaurea repens.
In California they have records going back into the 1830s, that show alfalfa seed was brought in from Spain, and that’s where their yellow star thistle came from.
We have some new biocontrol agents on the ground on Russian knapweed in Fremont County that I think are going to be really effective. One of these agents has been in the field for five years now in Montana. The field that they put those test plots out in now has almost no knapweed in it. It will be another decade here before we know if we’ve got Russian knapweed on the run.
Ralph: We didn’t have knapweed here when I was a kid. We had whitetop. People would pull it up, and it would grow right back. I had a high school agriculture teacher in Lander that took us out to look at weeds. But no one else was paying any attention to weeds back then.
I don’t think the weeds are any worse today than they were 25 years ago. They are worse than they were 40 years ago.
Lars: RoundUp has made a huge difference. When I came here, the small grain fields were just full of Canada thistle. You hardly ever see that anymore, because you can spray the thistles out with RoundUp, and you can farm for two or three years without having to do anything else. I see RoundUp as a really significant improvement in weed control. And then, we’ve been pretty aggressive in Fremont County. We try to keep the weeds on the right-of-ways under control. And so, the irrigation ditch systems, and that type of thing, are pretty clean.
Ralph: The farmers themselves are doing a better job.
Lars: As people learn what it takes to produce a good crop, they get more interested in controlling weeds. In rangeland, it’s a tough sell. We’re trying to control small, incipient infestations before they take over the range.
When Ralph was President of the Wyoming Weed and Pest Council, that meant the Supervisor from his County was the Secretary. So I was the Secretary. That was a great learning experience for me.
Links to additional Wyoming County interviews: