Photo: Kochia. © 2020 Delena Norris-Tull
Robert L. Jenn, Sheridan County, Wyoming, 2013 interview
[Video interview conducted by Becky McMillen, transcribed by Dr. Delena Norris-Tull. Reviewed & Approved by Robert, March 29, 2020.]
[Robert Jenn was the Sheridan County Weed and Pest District Supervisor. He retired in 2014.]
"I have been working for Sheridan County for 31 years. I’m 75 years old. I started as an Assistant Supervisor in March 1983. Bob Benjamin, the Supervisor, and I worked together as co-supervisors. I had some duties and he had others. We worked well together. Bob retired about three years ago. We saw a lot of changes over the years, some good and some not so good. We learned a lot, of course. When we started the job, we thought we knew it all, but we quickly found out that that wasn’t the case.
Back then, we had several programs. The main one for the District was to conquer leafy spurge. We haven’t found out how to do it yet. Dr. Harold Alley was one of the great mentors for the weed and pest program. We started out using Tordon at a gallon to the acre. The first two years we quickly found out that that did nothing but produce a new carpet of leafy spurge by the next year. So we cut back to a quart of Tordon per acre, mixed with some other chemicals, and that worked a lot better. The industry, along with us, hasn’t found a chemical that will really eradicate leafy spurge. We can control it for a couple of years at a time, but that’s about it.
We are coming to rely a lot on biocontrol. The insects that we use now are the flea beetles, and they seem to do well, if we have the cooperation of the landowner. We know that the insects work well in some applications. They like the south-facing slopes better, I guess because they’re warmer. But the insects need to be moved, because they will eat themselves out of house and home. If you don’t go and collect them every year, and move them to a different area, you’re going to lose them. And those insects are worth a lot of money. We purchased 1 million insects this last year, and we have been doing this for 20 years. We spent $80,000 on insects this year. We come to rely on them quite a bit, because they do work better than chemicals. I wouldn’t have said that 30 years ago.
When you release insects into an area, they’ll eat it down in a couple of years, and it won’t come back for 5 to 10 years. Whereas, if you use chemicals, you can only depend on it for a couple of years. I think that’s one of the biggest things that we found in the 30 years that I’ve been here.
Another program we started was building equipment for our cooperators. When I came here, we only had a couple of trucks and equipment that didn’t work too well. I’m kind of an amateur inventor. I thought about what we needed and developed different sprayer units. Dow Chemical brought a bunch of people From Nebraska out to see our operation in Sheridan. We had several of them contact us afterward to ask if they could have pictures of our equipment, so that they could use the same methods that we were using. If there’s some new equipment out there, I like to try it, to see if it works for us, and maybe try to improve it.
We’ve built equipment and sent it to Texas, Idaho, Washington, and Nebraska, because people have seen what we’ve made and liked it. Now we’ve put out enough equipment in the County that we don’t build much anymore. But then there are dealers that have come in, and decided that there was a market for the equipment, so that’s taking the burden off of us. So we don’t have to build so much equipment. It’s been a fun project. It’s time to let the dealers take over building equipment. When I first took over, there weren’t any dealers in Sheridan that handled that type of equipment.
You asked what is one of the most interesting things that has happened in my time here. We had an accident with a Gator side-by-side. It rolled over one and a half times and pinned the workers underneath it. One lady broke her collarbone. One inch the wrong way and we might have lost her. That’s the only real accident that we’ve had."
[Becky asked how many employees they have].
"We have four permanent full-time employees, and anywhere from 11 to 13 seasonal employees in the summer. When I retire, I hope the County will create co-supervisor positions with my two assistants. I think that will work well. We have so many programs now, that one Supervisor can’t handle all of them at one time. It’s easier to have split duties. It takes a load off, so that one person doesn’t have the full load. A couple of other Districts do that too. They work a little differently than we do; they work out of separate offices.
Bob Benjamin was a fun guy to work with. We taught each other a lot. I have more of a farming background, and he has more of a range background, so we worked well together. He knew one part of it, and I knew the other.
I have a degree in agriculture. Out of college, I was looking for a job in agriculture. I worked for a seed company in Kentucky. Coming from the West Coast, Washington and Alaska, we were not suited to the lifestyle in the Southeast. So we were looking for work in the West. A friend of mine said he had a job for me in Wyoming. We came out here; then this job came up and I applied for it."
[Becky asked what pests they have.]
"Back in 1986-1987, we had a big grasshopper program. We still have to treat for grasshoppers from time to time. The other pests we have are pocket gophers and prairie dogs. Now we have a mosquito program.
We have quite a bit of federal land, National Forests and BLM. But most of our acreage is private. Other counties have more federal land. The boom and bust economy, caused by energy exploration, causes you to have years with plenty of money, and years when your budget drops way down, and you have to scramble to keep programs in place. That’s a problem we probably should’ve thought more about, when we started more programs when we had more money. Because you have to carry the programs on. One of the things I’ve learned with weed control is that persistence pays off. When you don’t have the budget to do it, your programs suffer, and you lose all the ground that you gained in the good years. For the energy companies in our County, we do provide chemicals on a cost-share basis, but they have to hire a private contractor to manage their weeds and pests. We don’t like to compete with private enterprise if we don’t have to. If there is not someone, a private contractor, to do the work for the company, then we will step in and try to do the work.
The BLM would rather contract with us than with a private contractor. When they use private contractors, the BLM has to oversee all the work. They don’t have to do that when we do the work.
One of the problems I see for the weeds and pests in the future, at least in Sheridan County, is that we have a lot of subdivisions now, and you have a lot of people moving in from other parts of the country, who don’t have the same backgrounds. They don’t understand agriculture, and they don’t understand why we need to use chemicals or other methods to control the weeds, rather than leaving it to nature. In an agricultural community that doesn’t work. The more weeds there are, the less feed there is for cattle, or the weeds choke out the crops. I’m not saying it’s bad to have folks move in from other places, with new thoughts and ideas, but they need to understand that we are a rural agricultural community. We need to do certain things. It’s hard for them to understand that we have to fly over to put the larvicide down that keeps the mosquito population down. We’ve had some bad cases of West Nile fever. 99.9% of people in the county appreciate what we do to keep West Nile virus down. We try to educate those that don’t understand why we do it. We use only a biological chemical that is a naturally occurring bacteria. Sometimes it’s hard to get people to change their minds about the importance of doing this.
Dr. Harold Alley, Dr. Tom Whitson, Lars Baker, Larry Justesen, and Bob Parsons were all people I looked up to. They helped me greatly when I had questions. Tom Whitson took Dr. Alley’s place as extension weed specialist at the University of Wyoming. He was a very intelligent person and had a good way of communicating. He would break it down to your level, so you could understand it. He had a lot of influence on a lot of our weed programs. He and I worked together testing the wet-blade mower, which was like a bush-hog, to distribute the chemical at the same time that it cut plants down to stubs. It was an expensive machine and didn’t work too well on land with too many steep hills. We tested it out on several different areas and on several different plants such as leafy spurge, sagebrush and anything that we can use it on. It works really well on level ground. Tom taught us a lot about weed control."
[Note: Sagebrush is a native shrub that is a critical species in the high-altitude environments in the West. For many years, ranchers tried to remove it to allow perennial grasses to grow for livestock forage. Now the BLM and the Forest Service are trying to restore sagebrush habitat, as it is critical habitat for the Greater Sage Grouse and provides food for other wildlife species.]
"If we have a problem, the University of Wyoming people come out and try to help us. We teach them what we learn works well on large acreages. They do some of their research on small acreages, but sometimes what works there doesn’t work on large acreages.
When we first started using insects, we put out caterpillars on leafy spurge. I thought, there’s no way they will be able to control that plant on thousands of acres. We tried various insects, most of which didn’t work, until we came up with using the leafy spurge flea beetle. They are less than the size of a match-head. After a couple of years, the leafy spurge is gone. With the chemicals, we can knock it back and hold it, until we can get enough insects out there to do the work for us.
We found we could use chemicals to knock back thick patches of leafy spurge. When the plants came back up, they were weakened and thinned out. The bugs need sunlight. So then we can put the bugs in there, and they’re successful. You can’t put the bugs out and spray at the same time, because the bugs need something to eat and some place to lay their eggs. But you can spray chemicals after the insects have laid eggs, when the eggs are dormant.
A couple of years after you put out the first bugs, you’ll see a patch of leafy spurge just black with insects. And where it was just thick with leafy spurge previously, you’ll see a few plants here and a few plants there. And you think, gee, did that small amount of bugs we put out do all that work? And after years of spraying, and it hadn’t done anything except knock it back, and then it comes back up just as bad as it was before. It really gives you a boost and you think that the insects are allowing us to accomplish something now. Whereas before we were just spinning our wheels.
We put out some insects we purchased for Canada thistle. Where we put them out, they did really good. But we couldn’t figure out how to capture those insects to move them to a new location. The person we bought them from won’t tell us how he captures them, because it’s his livelihood. They are expensive, about $1.10 a bug, and of course you’re talking about thousands of bugs at a time.
Any insects you use are only useful if you can then capture them and move them yourself, because your budget won’t allow you to purchase them year after year. We used insects on Dalmatian toadflax. We didn’t have that much of it. We couldn’t collect and move the insects either, but the the bugs wiped out most of the Dalmatian toadflax we had. Anytime you can use a naturally occurring agent to control your weeds, that’s a good thing. You’re not putting anything foreign into the environment. You have to use chemicals also, but you want to minimize that as much as you can. And chemicals are expensive.
When I started, I wish I’d known more about the insects. And I wish I’d known more about psychology, or I was more of an educator, so that I could help people understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. That would’ve made things a little easier. But easy isn’t always the way to go either.
Lars Baker tried to get us interested in biocontrol several years before we finally got into it. I’m not from Missouri, but you got to show me that it works. I had to see it, before I could appreciate what insects can do. Lars was the driving force in biocontrol for our state. I appreciate and will miss him.
The County Districts share successes and failures, and we work together really well. Probably better than most groups. We all have a common goal.
There’s still a long way to go. The technology is coming on really fast, like GPS systems, for monitoring where you sprayed. Technology is the wave of the future. Young people have to step in, who are more in tune with technology.
Always look forward. You need to look backward to see what successes there were. But you need to look forward too. Embrace new ideas. That’s how you move forward. I think there are a lot of new things coming, new insects, new equipment. You have to keep up with the times. A Model-T doesn’t work on the highway today.
We haven’t talked about personalities. Archie Lauer always had some humor to inject into anything. He was a sincere person, a very friendly, understanding person. He was a wonderful guy. Stan McNamee was around for a long time. He was just the heart and soul of the agricultural community. He was there to help anybody, and he could make you understand what you were doing right or wrong. Allen Mooney was a funny person. He’s a wise person. Fred Lamie was a Supervisor for Teton County. He was very smart, somebody that knows ways to show people how they were right or wrong. He helped us out in Sheridan County when we first started mosquito control in the city of Sheridan. We don’t spray chemicals for mosquitoes anymore. But he helped people understand why we were doing that at the time.
There were some great people I’ve worked with."
Links to the Wyoming County interviews:
Robert L. Jenn, Sheridan County, Wyoming, 2013 interview
[Video interview conducted by Becky McMillen, transcribed by Dr. Delena Norris-Tull. Reviewed & Approved by Robert, March 29, 2020.]
[Robert Jenn was the Sheridan County Weed and Pest District Supervisor. He retired in 2014.]
"I have been working for Sheridan County for 31 years. I’m 75 years old. I started as an Assistant Supervisor in March 1983. Bob Benjamin, the Supervisor, and I worked together as co-supervisors. I had some duties and he had others. We worked well together. Bob retired about three years ago. We saw a lot of changes over the years, some good and some not so good. We learned a lot, of course. When we started the job, we thought we knew it all, but we quickly found out that that wasn’t the case.
Back then, we had several programs. The main one for the District was to conquer leafy spurge. We haven’t found out how to do it yet. Dr. Harold Alley was one of the great mentors for the weed and pest program. We started out using Tordon at a gallon to the acre. The first two years we quickly found out that that did nothing but produce a new carpet of leafy spurge by the next year. So we cut back to a quart of Tordon per acre, mixed with some other chemicals, and that worked a lot better. The industry, along with us, hasn’t found a chemical that will really eradicate leafy spurge. We can control it for a couple of years at a time, but that’s about it.
We are coming to rely a lot on biocontrol. The insects that we use now are the flea beetles, and they seem to do well, if we have the cooperation of the landowner. We know that the insects work well in some applications. They like the south-facing slopes better, I guess because they’re warmer. But the insects need to be moved, because they will eat themselves out of house and home. If you don’t go and collect them every year, and move them to a different area, you’re going to lose them. And those insects are worth a lot of money. We purchased 1 million insects this last year, and we have been doing this for 20 years. We spent $80,000 on insects this year. We come to rely on them quite a bit, because they do work better than chemicals. I wouldn’t have said that 30 years ago.
When you release insects into an area, they’ll eat it down in a couple of years, and it won’t come back for 5 to 10 years. Whereas, if you use chemicals, you can only depend on it for a couple of years. I think that’s one of the biggest things that we found in the 30 years that I’ve been here.
Another program we started was building equipment for our cooperators. When I came here, we only had a couple of trucks and equipment that didn’t work too well. I’m kind of an amateur inventor. I thought about what we needed and developed different sprayer units. Dow Chemical brought a bunch of people From Nebraska out to see our operation in Sheridan. We had several of them contact us afterward to ask if they could have pictures of our equipment, so that they could use the same methods that we were using. If there’s some new equipment out there, I like to try it, to see if it works for us, and maybe try to improve it.
We’ve built equipment and sent it to Texas, Idaho, Washington, and Nebraska, because people have seen what we’ve made and liked it. Now we’ve put out enough equipment in the County that we don’t build much anymore. But then there are dealers that have come in, and decided that there was a market for the equipment, so that’s taking the burden off of us. So we don’t have to build so much equipment. It’s been a fun project. It’s time to let the dealers take over building equipment. When I first took over, there weren’t any dealers in Sheridan that handled that type of equipment.
You asked what is one of the most interesting things that has happened in my time here. We had an accident with a Gator side-by-side. It rolled over one and a half times and pinned the workers underneath it. One lady broke her collarbone. One inch the wrong way and we might have lost her. That’s the only real accident that we’ve had."
[Becky asked how many employees they have].
"We have four permanent full-time employees, and anywhere from 11 to 13 seasonal employees in the summer. When I retire, I hope the County will create co-supervisor positions with my two assistants. I think that will work well. We have so many programs now, that one Supervisor can’t handle all of them at one time. It’s easier to have split duties. It takes a load off, so that one person doesn’t have the full load. A couple of other Districts do that too. They work a little differently than we do; they work out of separate offices.
Bob Benjamin was a fun guy to work with. We taught each other a lot. I have more of a farming background, and he has more of a range background, so we worked well together. He knew one part of it, and I knew the other.
I have a degree in agriculture. Out of college, I was looking for a job in agriculture. I worked for a seed company in Kentucky. Coming from the West Coast, Washington and Alaska, we were not suited to the lifestyle in the Southeast. So we were looking for work in the West. A friend of mine said he had a job for me in Wyoming. We came out here; then this job came up and I applied for it."
[Becky asked what pests they have.]
"Back in 1986-1987, we had a big grasshopper program. We still have to treat for grasshoppers from time to time. The other pests we have are pocket gophers and prairie dogs. Now we have a mosquito program.
We have quite a bit of federal land, National Forests and BLM. But most of our acreage is private. Other counties have more federal land. The boom and bust economy, caused by energy exploration, causes you to have years with plenty of money, and years when your budget drops way down, and you have to scramble to keep programs in place. That’s a problem we probably should’ve thought more about, when we started more programs when we had more money. Because you have to carry the programs on. One of the things I’ve learned with weed control is that persistence pays off. When you don’t have the budget to do it, your programs suffer, and you lose all the ground that you gained in the good years. For the energy companies in our County, we do provide chemicals on a cost-share basis, but they have to hire a private contractor to manage their weeds and pests. We don’t like to compete with private enterprise if we don’t have to. If there is not someone, a private contractor, to do the work for the company, then we will step in and try to do the work.
The BLM would rather contract with us than with a private contractor. When they use private contractors, the BLM has to oversee all the work. They don’t have to do that when we do the work.
One of the problems I see for the weeds and pests in the future, at least in Sheridan County, is that we have a lot of subdivisions now, and you have a lot of people moving in from other parts of the country, who don’t have the same backgrounds. They don’t understand agriculture, and they don’t understand why we need to use chemicals or other methods to control the weeds, rather than leaving it to nature. In an agricultural community that doesn’t work. The more weeds there are, the less feed there is for cattle, or the weeds choke out the crops. I’m not saying it’s bad to have folks move in from other places, with new thoughts and ideas, but they need to understand that we are a rural agricultural community. We need to do certain things. It’s hard for them to understand that we have to fly over to put the larvicide down that keeps the mosquito population down. We’ve had some bad cases of West Nile fever. 99.9% of people in the county appreciate what we do to keep West Nile virus down. We try to educate those that don’t understand why we do it. We use only a biological chemical that is a naturally occurring bacteria. Sometimes it’s hard to get people to change their minds about the importance of doing this.
Dr. Harold Alley, Dr. Tom Whitson, Lars Baker, Larry Justesen, and Bob Parsons were all people I looked up to. They helped me greatly when I had questions. Tom Whitson took Dr. Alley’s place as extension weed specialist at the University of Wyoming. He was a very intelligent person and had a good way of communicating. He would break it down to your level, so you could understand it. He had a lot of influence on a lot of our weed programs. He and I worked together testing the wet-blade mower, which was like a bush-hog, to distribute the chemical at the same time that it cut plants down to stubs. It was an expensive machine and didn’t work too well on land with too many steep hills. We tested it out on several different areas and on several different plants such as leafy spurge, sagebrush and anything that we can use it on. It works really well on level ground. Tom taught us a lot about weed control."
[Note: Sagebrush is a native shrub that is a critical species in the high-altitude environments in the West. For many years, ranchers tried to remove it to allow perennial grasses to grow for livestock forage. Now the BLM and the Forest Service are trying to restore sagebrush habitat, as it is critical habitat for the Greater Sage Grouse and provides food for other wildlife species.]
"If we have a problem, the University of Wyoming people come out and try to help us. We teach them what we learn works well on large acreages. They do some of their research on small acreages, but sometimes what works there doesn’t work on large acreages.
When we first started using insects, we put out caterpillars on leafy spurge. I thought, there’s no way they will be able to control that plant on thousands of acres. We tried various insects, most of which didn’t work, until we came up with using the leafy spurge flea beetle. They are less than the size of a match-head. After a couple of years, the leafy spurge is gone. With the chemicals, we can knock it back and hold it, until we can get enough insects out there to do the work for us.
We found we could use chemicals to knock back thick patches of leafy spurge. When the plants came back up, they were weakened and thinned out. The bugs need sunlight. So then we can put the bugs in there, and they’re successful. You can’t put the bugs out and spray at the same time, because the bugs need something to eat and some place to lay their eggs. But you can spray chemicals after the insects have laid eggs, when the eggs are dormant.
A couple of years after you put out the first bugs, you’ll see a patch of leafy spurge just black with insects. And where it was just thick with leafy spurge previously, you’ll see a few plants here and a few plants there. And you think, gee, did that small amount of bugs we put out do all that work? And after years of spraying, and it hadn’t done anything except knock it back, and then it comes back up just as bad as it was before. It really gives you a boost and you think that the insects are allowing us to accomplish something now. Whereas before we were just spinning our wheels.
We put out some insects we purchased for Canada thistle. Where we put them out, they did really good. But we couldn’t figure out how to capture those insects to move them to a new location. The person we bought them from won’t tell us how he captures them, because it’s his livelihood. They are expensive, about $1.10 a bug, and of course you’re talking about thousands of bugs at a time.
Any insects you use are only useful if you can then capture them and move them yourself, because your budget won’t allow you to purchase them year after year. We used insects on Dalmatian toadflax. We didn’t have that much of it. We couldn’t collect and move the insects either, but the the bugs wiped out most of the Dalmatian toadflax we had. Anytime you can use a naturally occurring agent to control your weeds, that’s a good thing. You’re not putting anything foreign into the environment. You have to use chemicals also, but you want to minimize that as much as you can. And chemicals are expensive.
When I started, I wish I’d known more about the insects. And I wish I’d known more about psychology, or I was more of an educator, so that I could help people understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. That would’ve made things a little easier. But easy isn’t always the way to go either.
Lars Baker tried to get us interested in biocontrol several years before we finally got into it. I’m not from Missouri, but you got to show me that it works. I had to see it, before I could appreciate what insects can do. Lars was the driving force in biocontrol for our state. I appreciate and will miss him.
The County Districts share successes and failures, and we work together really well. Probably better than most groups. We all have a common goal.
There’s still a long way to go. The technology is coming on really fast, like GPS systems, for monitoring where you sprayed. Technology is the wave of the future. Young people have to step in, who are more in tune with technology.
Always look forward. You need to look backward to see what successes there were. But you need to look forward too. Embrace new ideas. That’s how you move forward. I think there are a lot of new things coming, new insects, new equipment. You have to keep up with the times. A Model-T doesn’t work on the highway today.
We haven’t talked about personalities. Archie Lauer always had some humor to inject into anything. He was a sincere person, a very friendly, understanding person. He was a wonderful guy. Stan McNamee was around for a long time. He was just the heart and soul of the agricultural community. He was there to help anybody, and he could make you understand what you were doing right or wrong. Allen Mooney was a funny person. He’s a wise person. Fred Lamie was a Supervisor for Teton County. He was very smart, somebody that knows ways to show people how they were right or wrong. He helped us out in Sheridan County when we first started mosquito control in the city of Sheridan. We don’t spray chemicals for mosquitoes anymore. But he helped people understand why we were doing that at the time.
There were some great people I’ve worked with."
Links to the Wyoming County interviews: