Photo: Sagebrush habitat south of Pinedale, Wyoming. © 2017 Delena Norris-Tull
Robert Parsons, Park County Weed & Pest Supervisor, Wyoming, interview 2013
[Video interview conducted by Becky McMillen, transcribed by Dr. Delena Norris-Tull. Reviewed & approved by Robert, Oct. 2, 2020.]
[Bob Parsons had been the Park County Weed and Pest Control Supervisor since 1977. He had recently retired when he was interviewed.]
"I’m Bob Parsons. I started in this position 37 years ago. I have a four year degree, from the University of Wyoming, in vocational agriculture. I taught school for three years. That’s what brought me to the Powell area. I’ve always said those three years were the longest decade of my life. [Laughs.] It just wasn’t the career that I wanted. So I decided to quit teaching, and this job opened up, and I applied for it and got it.
I was the first County Supervisor to come into that position with a college education. Probably I approached it differently than others, because I came into it with an education, and with a background in working with people. Everybody who held the position before me was a weed sprayer operator.
It was fun. It was a great experience. I had some great mentors. Starting in, I had it better than a lot of Supervisors, probably because I had great mentors.
Park County has always been known as a really clean county. Tom Lynn was the individual that was the Supervisor just before me. He was a go-getter. He had been there for quite a while.
We also are one of the oldest Weed Districts in the State. Consequently, we have had a weed program since 1938. But we never had any really big infestations that got away from us. It seemed like we were always ahead of the ball. And that was what I really liked about the legacy, that people like Tom, and Alvah Elledge and those people, had left for me. So when I came in, it wasn’t a case of having a big infestation of leafy spurge that I had to figure out a way to get on top of. And then it was even fortunate, because my Board didn’t feel that I necessarily needed to be on the end of a hose to be a Weed and Pest Supervisor. That as a Supervisor, that what I was supposed to be doing was supervising.
So we actually didn’t own any spray rigs until 2010. So for most of my most active career, we did not run our own spray rigs. We hired it done by contract applicators. It just so happened that Tom Lynn was a contract applicator after he quit being a Supervisor. And so I was able to hire him. So I had not only the experience he had on the end of a hose, but I also had the experience that he had had working with people as a Supervisor. So it was a great way to start out.
I’ve always felt, too, that when I started out, most Supervisors were like Tom Lynn. They were good workers, and had great work ethics, and they had sprayed a lot of weeds. I came into the program, and I had education. I knew what the weeds were, I knew a lot about how weeds grew, and how plants grew, and I had a lot of that information. But to actually be on the end of a hose, I didn’t have a lot of that experience, other than that I started doing some (weed spraying) so I could learn, and so I would appreciate a bit more what the crews were doing.
But the real point was, most of the other Supervisors in the State also didn’t have an education, Lars Baker being an exception. But most of them were spray rig operators. In 1973, the law changed and said that every County had to have a Weed and Pest Supervisor. So what happened was, the County would take whoever was running their spray crews, and give them the title of Supervisor.
They were great guys. When I came in, I was the new kid on the block, 27 or 28 years old. When I started this career, it was still a case of having a different background than what they had."
[Becky asked: Did George Hittle hire you?]
"George was the State Weed and Pest Coordinator. He doesn’t really have anything to do with hiring at the County level. That’s one thing unique about Wyoming; every County is run by its own Board. The State really has no say other than having the guidelines and the law about what our qualifications have to be, to be hired as a Supervisor. The State has nothing to do with hiring of the Supervisor. By the time I came on board, from 1973 on, the entire County was included in the Weed and Pest District. Back in 1938, we had a Weed District in Meeteetse, we had a Weed District in Cody, and we had a Weed District in Powell. So we had Districts all over the County. By the time I came on board, they all had been combined into one Weed and Pest District."
[Becky said: Talk about what it was like in Park County in 1938.]
"Park County is a big County. It’s about third or fourth largest in the State. So it’s a huge area. And in order to go out and do weed control, so for example, if you were going to go out and control a patch of Canada thistle, it wasn’t like it is now, where you can go out and spray at 5 to 10 mph, with a 30-foot boom, and zip-zip-zip, you’re done. Most of it was hand control.
A lot of this was before pesticides, or what pesticides we had were very limited. So the Weed District would go out and plow the land. And the laws were very enforceable. I’ve read in the old minutes where the District would go in and condemn a place, and they would actually tell the farmer they could not harvest a crop. The Weed and Pest District would take it over, and actually clean and plow that area, and plow those patches under continually, for over a year, before they would give it back to the farmer, then, and let the farmer go ahead and start to grow crops on it.
In that big of an area, it was hard to get around in back then. I’ve even seen pictures of some horse drawn spray rigs, somewhere back in our past history."
[Becky asked: There was some Counties that were resistant to controlling weeds. Why was Park County different?]
"We had some progressive individuals. Alvah Elledge is considered the father of the Wyoming Weed and Pest Districts. The thing about Alvah was that he saw that noxious weeds were going to reduce crops, they were going to spread to other places. We had a clean County, let’s keep it that way. And he was phenomenal in his efforts to put it together. I think he was in the Cody Weed District when he started. But as soon as they combined the Park County Districts, he took the lead. He was a Supervisor for a lot of years. Then when he retired, he actually then went on the Board, and served as a Board Member. I got to meet him a couple times before he passed away. He knew what he was doing; he knew what was good for the area, and he was willing to do what it took. It’s the kind of legacy that I followed. It made my job so easy.
From the 1930s to just prior to 1973, as a Weed District, the Board could establish that there was a weed problem, and they had some procedures to go through. If the Board said the weeds were going to spread to the detriment of others, they could go in then, and do the weed control work, calculate the bill, and put the bill onto the tax roll, and the farmer had to pay that bill when he paid his taxes. So the Board had a lot of power. In 1973, the law did change so that we went to due process, and we could no longer force control that way. We could still force control. But we couldn’t just do the work and put the money on the tax roll. The biggest thing we had going for us was that the farmers were policing themselves. We were being called by the farmers saying, 'My neighbor is not taking care of weeds.'
Before the 1973 law, a number of the Counties had quarantines, and it was a quarantine that you could not harvest the crop until it was inspected and released by the Weed and Pest District. In 1973, when they changed the law, you lost the ability to carry out quarantines. So what happened in my District, we operated for about three years without a quarantine. The growers came to the Weed and Pest District, and said, 'What do we have to do to get that quarantine back in place?' We said there was a procedure for this, and we would do it. The growers said, 'I don’t want the quarantine to keep my neighbors in place. If I don’t have that carrot out in front of me, that I’ve got to take care of my weeds, then I’m apt to be a little less responsible with my place.'
George Hittle was instrumental in changing the Weed Law to restore the quarantines, in about 1977. But it’s optional. Park County is one of the few Counties to have a districtwide quarantine. What that basically does say is that no crop can be harvested off the land it was grown on, and moved through a public facility. It cannot be sold, or moved anywhere other than within the land itself, unless it’s been inspected and released by the Park County Weed and Pest District. The law also says that no agricultural products can be moved into, within, or out of the County, unless inspected."
[Becky asked about the Teton County quarantine.]
"Teton County has an import quarantine only.
Almost 50% of Park County is Federal land, mostly Forest Service and BLM, with a little bit of Bureau of Reclamation land. The private land is basically confined to a couple of river valleys, which are farm ground. And then the areas above the irrigation areas, up to the forest, are ranches. Park County would be a desert, without irrigation. We have Buffalo Bill reservoir, that has an irrigation system on the Shoshone River. That runs all the way from above Cody, all the way down to the Big Horn County line. All of our headwaters come out of Yellowstone.
I’ve never met a guilty farmer [Laughs]. If you go to a farmer and say, 'You’ve got weeds,' they’ll say, 'Yes, I do, but that’s because my neighbor has weeds.' If you go to the neighbor and say, 'You’ve got weeds,' he’ll say, 'Yes, I do, but they came off the irrigation ditch.' OK, so then you go talk to the Irrigation District, and you say, 'You’ve got weeds,' and they’ll say, 'Yes, I do, but they came off the Forest Service.' You go talk to the Forest Service, and you say, 'You’ve got weeds,' and they’ll say, 'Yes, I do, but it came out of Yellowstone National Park.' You go to Yellowstone National Park, and you say, 'You’ve got weeds,' and they’ll say, 'Yes, we do, but it came from those farmers hauling products up from their private land to bring their livestock and feed up here.' I’ve never talked to anybody that I go to and say, 'You’ve got weeds,' and he’d say, 'You know, I do, and I had them last year, and I didn’t take care of them. I should have. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have them this year.' I’ve never had that happen." [Laughs].
[Becky said: Talk about the challenges you’ve faced.]
"Because we do have so much Federal land around us, that was one of the first things that I focused on when I first started working with my Board. The Board Members really found fault with the Federal Agencies. They didn’t feel like the Federal Agencies were doing their part, and for the most part they weren’t. And working with the Federal Agencies is one place where my Board supported me 100%. Anything I wanted to do, and anything I could show that was doing a good job encouraging the Federal Agencies, the Board was behind me on that.
I started working locally with the Forest Service and the BLM, saying, 'You guys have got weed problems. It’s public lands, let’s take care of them. What can we, as a County Weed and Pest District, do to help,' and basically they said, 'Well, if we could get the money, we would do some work.' So I did a lot of working with them, helping them write, educating them, so that they could go through the process of requesting more Federal funds.
Over the years, as the Wyoming Weed and Pest Districts became involved with going back to Washington, DC, for educational purposes, and worked with Federal Agencies in DC, that trickled down, and started to show up down here. My Board sent me back to Washington, DC. I think I went back over 10 or 12 times to meet with people clear up to the Secretaries of the Forest Service, just trying to educate them that, 'Yes, we need the money. These are the programs we’re running. This is what we’re requiring of our private sector, and yet, as Federal landowners, you guys own 50% of the land in my County, and you’re not doing anything.' And we had some great guys, too, and I know that it was money, it was not lack of interest on the part of the Forest Service. There was no money back then, it just wasn’t important.
George Hittle was excellent at working with the Federal Agencies because he was not gun shy of them at all. They hated to see him come around because he was going to tell them how it was. He got a lot of things going. He really did a great job for us.
Where I really put a lot of emphasis in my first years was to start working with Federal Agencies. It ended up, when they finally did get money, they said, 'We’ve got money now, but we really don’t have the expertise.' So then they subcontracted with me. Now, within the last five or six years, we have had as much as $150,000 in contract funds from the Forest Service, the BLM, and the Bureau of Reclamation, that they would contract with us, to do their weed control work for them.
With our contracts with the Forest Service, we’ve added horseback crews. They pack in and are there for a week at a time. They use spray units that are powered by carbon dioxide canisters. Once we finally got them established, with Federal Agency contracts, the Federal Agencies have done a good job of keeping those funds. Are they spending as much as the private sector? No, but they’ve got a lot more headaches to overcome. But they’re doing their part. We had started to lose the battle on Federal lands because of lack of funds. But we’ve turned it around. We had thought about suing the Federal Government to get the funding, but we didn’t know if our State laws were strong enough. So we went the route of education. And we’ve seen it turn around. I know that nationwide, we’re losing ground on Federal lands, but I’d say that in the State of Wyoming, we’re not losing ground on our Federal lands. We’re gaining ground, for the most part.
When I first came here, the big weed on Forest Service and BLM land was musk thistle. It was just everywhere. We got on top of it. The Federal Agencies did help funding biocontrol programs. We still have musk thistle, but we don’t have the acres and acres of musk thistle that we had back in the 1970s and 1980s.
As we started to get more funding in from the Federal Agencies, when I talk to a farmer or rancher, that gave me... If they said the weeds were coming in with the water, I knew it wasn’t getting through the reservoir, because the weeds would have settled out. So I worked with the Irrigation District, I’d say, look at your ditch banks, the disturbed ground, weeds are growing like crazy. We then started the same thing as with the Federal Agencies. We took them on educational tours. One of the chemical companies, Dow, they put together a 3- to 4-day bus tour, that went up through Montana. I brought some of the Irrigation District employees on that tour. And they came up and saw some of the areas in Montana where the weeds had gotten out of control, especially things like spotted knapweed, leafy spurge. We went back home, and I’d say, 'This is the one little patch of leafy spurge that we’ve got in Park County, and see how close it is to your irrigation ditch. It could show up in your irrigation ditch. And here is a patch of spotted knapweed.' And they took the bull by the horns. And, for the most part now, every Irrigation District In Park County, and there’s seven or eight of them, have got some kind of a strong weed budget. In fact, the Irrigation Districts down near the lower part of the County, have maybe as much as $100,000 a year for weed control along the canals and laterals."
[Becky said: Talk about biocontrol.]
"The first thing we had to do was educate those of us that were going to be introducing a biocontrol program. When you use chemicals, eradication is a possibility.
When you use biocontrol, then you have to accept the fact that you’re always going to have those weeds. The idea is not to eradicate them. The idea is to get on top of them. So the first thing we had to do was accept the fact that we couldn’t use biocontrol for a 2-acre patch of weeds. If we had a 2-acre patch of weeds, we would still have to use other methods. The second thing is accepting the fact, when you gave up the fight, and you have to have use biocontrol, you need to have a lot more education. And then, there weren’t that many agents [insects] out there. There still aren’t as many as we’d like to see.
When they introduced Rhinocyllus conicus, for musk thistle control, we would take off in the summer for three or four days. I would take my trailer. Our child was just a baby at the time. And that was our family’s summer vacation. We’d go up to Bozeman with my trailer and park there. And we’d go out all day long and cut musk thistle, and shake it into a bag, to get the bugs to fall into the bag. And then you’d take the insects, and you’d have to lay them out on a mat and separate them. And my wife just hated that. She said, 'The only ones that are getting any good out of this are the people in Bozeman. You’re cutting all their weeds for them. And you’re taking all these bugs home, and nobody’s coming down to cut your weeds.' And I said, 'Well, maybe someday we’ll have so many bugs, and people will come down and cut our weeds.' [Laughs.] I thought it was a lot of fun.
Actually weed control has been a family thing. It was the only way we could do anything together, because in the summers, there were no vacations for me. And so, with the biocontrol program, I’ve gone to a couple meetings, and my family has gone with me. My daughter and son have both worked in weed and pest control over the summers. I was excited about biocontrol when I first heard about it. I guess I had bigger, grander ideas. I had to be educated. I thought, we’ll go out and put out some insects, and in two years, we’re going to see a reduction. But we didn’t see anything happen for about 10 years. Fortunately, those insects did work, and they did work fast. Probably within 10 to 15 years, we could say, that was successful. It did what it was supposed to do."
[Note: Refer to the interview with Gale Lamb, Sweetwater County, who also found that when using biocontrol agents in high elevation Counties in Wyoming, it took more years, in order to see results, than others have experienced at lower elevations.]
"Patience was the thing we had to learn. You can’t go out and put out insects, and the next morning get up, and see the plants wilted, like you can with herbicides. When we hired Josh Shorb, our Assistant [Josh became the District Supervisor when Bob retired], that was one of the things he came to us with. He actually had worked with the University of Wyoming with biocontrol. With what we had been doing, we were doing the easy stuff. When Josh came on board, he took on everything. He knew the insects, he could remember the names of them, which to me, it was just a beetle. He knew the scientific names and knew what was available, where to get them, the people to talk to. Our biocontrol program is very effective now. I would say it’s one of the better ones in the State. Some things, like leafy spurge, we don’t have enough leafy spurge to sustain biocontrol and that’s a blessing. I always feel like, when we go to biocontrol, it’s sort of like we’re saying, well, we’ve lost that battle, because we can’t do it with herbicides, with management, with hand labor, whatever."
[Becky asked: What are some changes in the pesticides and herbicides?]
"Herbicides are becoming much more specific. When I started, we had 2,4-D and Tordon, and, if it was a broadleaf, those two products would kill it. So, it was fine for a while. But after a while the varieties of weeds that were susceptible to 2,4-D and Tordon, you killed them off. And the varieties that weren’t, had a niche that they filled in."
[Note: Refer to the chapter on herbicides and the problems of plant-resistance to herbicides.]
"Now you have products that maybe only work on a half dozen of the noxious weeds that we have. You have to weigh all the factors. Where are they going to use it? Is it in a pasture, along a fence row? Is it cropland, non-cropland. All those things now come into play. You have to be a lot more educated on what the products will do, then you used to have to be. When we only had 2,4-D and Tordon, it was pretty simple.
Of course, every new product that came out was the new silver bullet. When Tordon came out, just before I started, I was told that I was not going to have a job in a year or two, because now we had Tordon. Then when RoundUp came out, 'Oh, this is the product that is going to end all of our problems.'
Then when Curtail came out, clopyralid, and they allowed it in the United States, England had had it for a while, but, 'Oh, this is finally the product. It works as good as Tordon, but it doesn’t have the longevity. So this is going to be the product.' So now, whenever a new product comes out, I say, 'Well, this is just another bullet for the gun. But the gun’s got a lot of chambers in it, that’s got to be filled yet.'"
[Becky asked: What do you wish you had known in those first years on the job?]
"Probably the biggest thing I wish I’d known is how much subdivisions were going to effect our Weed and Pest Program. Park County is one of those Counties that’s a nice County to live in. Everybody wants their 1, 2, or 3 acres of land, and, for a while, if you wanted to subdivide a piece of land, you’d just subdivide it, it’s done. It was almost always those first subdivided lands that were the poorest farm ground. They had done work on it, so the ground had been disturbed, which left an openIng for the weeds to come in. People who were buying those lands wanted to buy 2 or 3 acres, they wanted to put in a quarter-acre lawn, put in their house, stick a fence around it, and that was going to be their little piece of heaven. And the weeds just exploded. As Weed and Pest Districts, in general, we just were not prepared for that. We worked with agriculture. We didn’t work with small acreage landowners.
And so our recommendations, and our power of telling landowners they couldn’t harvest the crops if they didn’t take care of their weeds, didn’t have anything to do with these people. They didn’t have a crop. The other thing is, we were used to selling 15 to 20 gallons of 2,4-D to an individual farmer. And here we had individuals coming in, and even 2 ½ gallons of 2,4-D would last them four or five years. So it was a totally different mindset for us. And the vast number of them was unexpected.
When I started, I could talk to two farmers in a day, and we’d talk about weed control on 500 to 600 acres. If I were to try to talk to enough landowners on subdivided lands, it would take me a year to cover that much acreage. The other thing was, I had to start at Ground Zero, because the farmers had some kind of a background. They understood. A lot of homeowners had never had this kind of a weed problem. They had dandelions when they lived in town and they could dig them up. When they moved to the country, if they thought they could just dig up the weeds, well, if you dig up Canada thistle, you just encourage it to grow thicker and heavier. If they even would do it. Plus they were now dealing with 2 or 3 acres, compared to just a quarter-acre when they lived in town. It was ridiculous.
So what happened was, you’d have to go talk to them. And the other thing was, we worked during the daylight hours. You’d go to the subdivision, you’d knock on the door, and nobody was home. Or it was just the wife who was home, and you’d start talking about weed control, and she’d say, 'Well, you really need to talk to my husband.' But he wouldn’t be home till night. So then you’d have to call a meeting.
One of the hardest things for me was to make the conversion over, from working one-on-one with farmers, to some kind of program that would work with subdivision people. And it had to be mass training. You couldn’t do it one-on-one. We wanted to get them educated and work with them in mass numbers. But nobody wants to go to a meeting.
So consequently, back in 2005, when we hired what we called our Subdivision Assistant, and we now call our Education Assistant, we hired Mary. She was phenomenal with education. She had excitement for it. So we have come a long way. We have subdivisions, we have private homeowners, that do know weed control now.
When I was hired, the Board was spraying weeds along County roads, State highways, and that was their program. They didn’t want to spend money for supervision, for administration. Administration had to be kept at a minimum. The dollars went on the ground. I’m not saying that’s all bad. But there was never any consideration of me hiring an assistant. During the summer months, I could hire a part-time person. But you never could get any consistency with that.
So, it wasn’t until 2000 that I hired my first full-time Assistant, when we hired Josh. So when he came on board, that kind of broke the ice. Plus the Board changed a little bit. So then in 2005, they allowed me to hire Mary, my second Assistant. They also allowed me to hire my first full-time Office Administrator. And in 2010, then we hired another Assistant. That was because in 2010 we were moving back to doing our own weed spraying. We were no longer contracting. So we hired Jake.
In the summer we may have 12 part-time people. The horseback spray crew is our only crew that is still fully contracted. They are seasonal. We hire a firm that is responsible for their employees. They do a good job of hiring the right people. I think they hire people that work year-round with horses, such as guiding during hunting season. They also hire sprayers for Fremont County."
[Becky asked: What are some of your favorite memories from the Weed and Pest events?]
"When we first started, in the late 70s and early 80s, it was a good-old-boys club. Everybody worked hard, worked all summer long, we didn’t spend a lot of time with families. And, near the end of spraying season, a lot of us would get together. We called it our fall seminar. It was two days of relaxing, sharing horror stories, staying up till all hours of the night, playing poker, falling to sleep in a tent or under a tree. You really got to know the guys. They all had great work ethics. It was a unique club. Great guys, great stories. That was a special relationship that we had. You could call on them anytime. My wife once said that, 'You know, I can travel anywhere in the State, and I don’t have to worry about car trouble. If I have car trouble or bad weather, I know you’ve got somebody to call.'
I see the same camaraderie between the younger Supervisors. We don’t do the same things at the Fall Conferences, but that relationship still exists.
The people that I worked with, Earl Lucas and Rick Johnson and those guys that were in my area, we’d drive to meetings together. We’d spend four or five hours together in a vehicle, talking to them about how they ran their programs, and bantering back-and-forth about who’s way was the right way. Those are great memories.
Back then, the chemical companies had a lot more money, so they didn’t have to spread their salesmen so thin. So we knew the salesmen personally. Rather than now, where the salesmen work with the distributors, and the distributors work with us, back then, we got to work one-on-one with the chemical sales people. And there were some great people there, Guy Haggard, Larry Liptack, they were just fun to be around. To be able to call the chemical representative from Billings or Denver, and have them come down and maybe spend the whole day with you, because of one customer, that was a real one-on-one education.
Back then, everything was one-on-one. Our relationships with farmers was one-on-one. The chemical company relationship was one-on-one. Our relationships between each other was one-on-one. Yes, we’d go to meetings. But the way we really learned the stuff was to go down to the bar and sit and visit afterwards, or pick somebody up when you were traveling across the State. You got to know them. You got to know their families. It was just a great time.
The Weed and Pest Conferences back in those days were just fun, with the McNamee brothers singing and playing. And once we had women Supervisors, there was a lot of dancing!
That’s a big change, the number of women that are now in the program. I was a Supervisor for 5 to 10 years before we had any women Supervisors or Assistant Supervisors. Now almost every District has at least one woman. I’d hate to think about running my County without Mary there. It did change the way we did things. The Fall Conference calmed down a bit. But it was still fun times.
I’ve seen some changes in the make-up of my Board. Some members have been there 20+ years. That consistency is important. Today, 50% percent of our meetings have all members present. In the past, it was hard to get a quorum. The Board Members are farmers or ranchers or from the private sector. They all show up, and they’re involved, and they know our programs. And they’re behind you 100%. When I talk about my mentors, a lot were the people who’ve been on my Board. It was a great career.
I can remember as a teacher waking up in the morning and dreading going to work. As a County Weed and Pest Supervisor, I never had that feeling. Even in the worst circumstances, I still got up in the morning, looking forward to going to work. My wife will tell you I was definitely married to the job. I was at work in the morning at 6:30. If I was home by 5:30, it was pretty surprising. Once we got computers, and I had to teach myself software, I’d spend many a night, weekends, at work, learning the software. I just love the work. The only reason I’m retiring is because I can’t offer as much as I used to.
A few years ago, someone asked me when I was going to retire. I said, 'My perfect life would be to have worked the day before I died.' My wife heard that, and she went ballistic! [Laughs.] So we had a talk about what we’d do if I retired. And so we recently started traveling, and now I’m ready to retire because I’m ready to do other things. This was a great profession."
[Becky asked: What advice do you have to pass on?]
"I think everybody should have to work at a job that they don’t like, so they can really appreciate a job like this. I just don’t ever talk to Weed and Pest people that say, 'I’m looking for another job.' Every one of them love their jobs. And it’s great. You work with people, and the people that you work with are great.
The nature of the work requires a certain caliber, a certain type of person, that makes them great to work with."
[Becky asked: What advice do you have for Josh?]
"I think there’s a happy medium between people my generation and my work experience and the younger generation. If I have to do something, it’s 'Aim, aim, aim. OK, Fire.' But there are those that are, 'Fire, Aim.' You have to find that happy medium. Make sure you’re aiming at the right thing, then, 'OK. Fire.'
You do need to move at a pace, because you’re working with people. Some things are irreversible.
I’m very fortunate to have worked with Josh for 10 years,. I’ve learned a lot from him. You have to learn from the people who went before you. I think this sharing of our legacy is important. Don’t pass up a chance to become better educated. Don’t pass up a chance to work with your fellow colleagues."
[Becky asked: What are the biggest challenges for Weed and Pest Supervisors?]
"Continued expansion of educating people in subdivisions. Working with small acreage landowners.
The Federal Government may not always provide enough funding. Keep working with them.
Enjoy the time you get to spend with farmers and ranchers."
Links to the other Wyoming County interviews:
Robert Parsons, Park County Weed & Pest Supervisor, Wyoming, interview 2013
[Video interview conducted by Becky McMillen, transcribed by Dr. Delena Norris-Tull. Reviewed & approved by Robert, Oct. 2, 2020.]
[Bob Parsons had been the Park County Weed and Pest Control Supervisor since 1977. He had recently retired when he was interviewed.]
"I’m Bob Parsons. I started in this position 37 years ago. I have a four year degree, from the University of Wyoming, in vocational agriculture. I taught school for three years. That’s what brought me to the Powell area. I’ve always said those three years were the longest decade of my life. [Laughs.] It just wasn’t the career that I wanted. So I decided to quit teaching, and this job opened up, and I applied for it and got it.
I was the first County Supervisor to come into that position with a college education. Probably I approached it differently than others, because I came into it with an education, and with a background in working with people. Everybody who held the position before me was a weed sprayer operator.
It was fun. It was a great experience. I had some great mentors. Starting in, I had it better than a lot of Supervisors, probably because I had great mentors.
Park County has always been known as a really clean county. Tom Lynn was the individual that was the Supervisor just before me. He was a go-getter. He had been there for quite a while.
We also are one of the oldest Weed Districts in the State. Consequently, we have had a weed program since 1938. But we never had any really big infestations that got away from us. It seemed like we were always ahead of the ball. And that was what I really liked about the legacy, that people like Tom, and Alvah Elledge and those people, had left for me. So when I came in, it wasn’t a case of having a big infestation of leafy spurge that I had to figure out a way to get on top of. And then it was even fortunate, because my Board didn’t feel that I necessarily needed to be on the end of a hose to be a Weed and Pest Supervisor. That as a Supervisor, that what I was supposed to be doing was supervising.
So we actually didn’t own any spray rigs until 2010. So for most of my most active career, we did not run our own spray rigs. We hired it done by contract applicators. It just so happened that Tom Lynn was a contract applicator after he quit being a Supervisor. And so I was able to hire him. So I had not only the experience he had on the end of a hose, but I also had the experience that he had had working with people as a Supervisor. So it was a great way to start out.
I’ve always felt, too, that when I started out, most Supervisors were like Tom Lynn. They were good workers, and had great work ethics, and they had sprayed a lot of weeds. I came into the program, and I had education. I knew what the weeds were, I knew a lot about how weeds grew, and how plants grew, and I had a lot of that information. But to actually be on the end of a hose, I didn’t have a lot of that experience, other than that I started doing some (weed spraying) so I could learn, and so I would appreciate a bit more what the crews were doing.
But the real point was, most of the other Supervisors in the State also didn’t have an education, Lars Baker being an exception. But most of them were spray rig operators. In 1973, the law changed and said that every County had to have a Weed and Pest Supervisor. So what happened was, the County would take whoever was running their spray crews, and give them the title of Supervisor.
They were great guys. When I came in, I was the new kid on the block, 27 or 28 years old. When I started this career, it was still a case of having a different background than what they had."
[Becky asked: Did George Hittle hire you?]
"George was the State Weed and Pest Coordinator. He doesn’t really have anything to do with hiring at the County level. That’s one thing unique about Wyoming; every County is run by its own Board. The State really has no say other than having the guidelines and the law about what our qualifications have to be, to be hired as a Supervisor. The State has nothing to do with hiring of the Supervisor. By the time I came on board, from 1973 on, the entire County was included in the Weed and Pest District. Back in 1938, we had a Weed District in Meeteetse, we had a Weed District in Cody, and we had a Weed District in Powell. So we had Districts all over the County. By the time I came on board, they all had been combined into one Weed and Pest District."
[Becky said: Talk about what it was like in Park County in 1938.]
"Park County is a big County. It’s about third or fourth largest in the State. So it’s a huge area. And in order to go out and do weed control, so for example, if you were going to go out and control a patch of Canada thistle, it wasn’t like it is now, where you can go out and spray at 5 to 10 mph, with a 30-foot boom, and zip-zip-zip, you’re done. Most of it was hand control.
A lot of this was before pesticides, or what pesticides we had were very limited. So the Weed District would go out and plow the land. And the laws were very enforceable. I’ve read in the old minutes where the District would go in and condemn a place, and they would actually tell the farmer they could not harvest a crop. The Weed and Pest District would take it over, and actually clean and plow that area, and plow those patches under continually, for over a year, before they would give it back to the farmer, then, and let the farmer go ahead and start to grow crops on it.
In that big of an area, it was hard to get around in back then. I’ve even seen pictures of some horse drawn spray rigs, somewhere back in our past history."
[Becky asked: There was some Counties that were resistant to controlling weeds. Why was Park County different?]
"We had some progressive individuals. Alvah Elledge is considered the father of the Wyoming Weed and Pest Districts. The thing about Alvah was that he saw that noxious weeds were going to reduce crops, they were going to spread to other places. We had a clean County, let’s keep it that way. And he was phenomenal in his efforts to put it together. I think he was in the Cody Weed District when he started. But as soon as they combined the Park County Districts, he took the lead. He was a Supervisor for a lot of years. Then when he retired, he actually then went on the Board, and served as a Board Member. I got to meet him a couple times before he passed away. He knew what he was doing; he knew what was good for the area, and he was willing to do what it took. It’s the kind of legacy that I followed. It made my job so easy.
From the 1930s to just prior to 1973, as a Weed District, the Board could establish that there was a weed problem, and they had some procedures to go through. If the Board said the weeds were going to spread to the detriment of others, they could go in then, and do the weed control work, calculate the bill, and put the bill onto the tax roll, and the farmer had to pay that bill when he paid his taxes. So the Board had a lot of power. In 1973, the law did change so that we went to due process, and we could no longer force control that way. We could still force control. But we couldn’t just do the work and put the money on the tax roll. The biggest thing we had going for us was that the farmers were policing themselves. We were being called by the farmers saying, 'My neighbor is not taking care of weeds.'
Before the 1973 law, a number of the Counties had quarantines, and it was a quarantine that you could not harvest the crop until it was inspected and released by the Weed and Pest District. In 1973, when they changed the law, you lost the ability to carry out quarantines. So what happened in my District, we operated for about three years without a quarantine. The growers came to the Weed and Pest District, and said, 'What do we have to do to get that quarantine back in place?' We said there was a procedure for this, and we would do it. The growers said, 'I don’t want the quarantine to keep my neighbors in place. If I don’t have that carrot out in front of me, that I’ve got to take care of my weeds, then I’m apt to be a little less responsible with my place.'
George Hittle was instrumental in changing the Weed Law to restore the quarantines, in about 1977. But it’s optional. Park County is one of the few Counties to have a districtwide quarantine. What that basically does say is that no crop can be harvested off the land it was grown on, and moved through a public facility. It cannot be sold, or moved anywhere other than within the land itself, unless it’s been inspected and released by the Park County Weed and Pest District. The law also says that no agricultural products can be moved into, within, or out of the County, unless inspected."
[Becky asked about the Teton County quarantine.]
"Teton County has an import quarantine only.
Almost 50% of Park County is Federal land, mostly Forest Service and BLM, with a little bit of Bureau of Reclamation land. The private land is basically confined to a couple of river valleys, which are farm ground. And then the areas above the irrigation areas, up to the forest, are ranches. Park County would be a desert, without irrigation. We have Buffalo Bill reservoir, that has an irrigation system on the Shoshone River. That runs all the way from above Cody, all the way down to the Big Horn County line. All of our headwaters come out of Yellowstone.
I’ve never met a guilty farmer [Laughs]. If you go to a farmer and say, 'You’ve got weeds,' they’ll say, 'Yes, I do, but that’s because my neighbor has weeds.' If you go to the neighbor and say, 'You’ve got weeds,' he’ll say, 'Yes, I do, but they came off the irrigation ditch.' OK, so then you go talk to the Irrigation District, and you say, 'You’ve got weeds,' and they’ll say, 'Yes, I do, but they came off the Forest Service.' You go talk to the Forest Service, and you say, 'You’ve got weeds,' and they’ll say, 'Yes, I do, but it came out of Yellowstone National Park.' You go to Yellowstone National Park, and you say, 'You’ve got weeds,' and they’ll say, 'Yes, we do, but it came from those farmers hauling products up from their private land to bring their livestock and feed up here.' I’ve never talked to anybody that I go to and say, 'You’ve got weeds,' and he’d say, 'You know, I do, and I had them last year, and I didn’t take care of them. I should have. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have them this year.' I’ve never had that happen." [Laughs].
[Becky said: Talk about the challenges you’ve faced.]
"Because we do have so much Federal land around us, that was one of the first things that I focused on when I first started working with my Board. The Board Members really found fault with the Federal Agencies. They didn’t feel like the Federal Agencies were doing their part, and for the most part they weren’t. And working with the Federal Agencies is one place where my Board supported me 100%. Anything I wanted to do, and anything I could show that was doing a good job encouraging the Federal Agencies, the Board was behind me on that.
I started working locally with the Forest Service and the BLM, saying, 'You guys have got weed problems. It’s public lands, let’s take care of them. What can we, as a County Weed and Pest District, do to help,' and basically they said, 'Well, if we could get the money, we would do some work.' So I did a lot of working with them, helping them write, educating them, so that they could go through the process of requesting more Federal funds.
Over the years, as the Wyoming Weed and Pest Districts became involved with going back to Washington, DC, for educational purposes, and worked with Federal Agencies in DC, that trickled down, and started to show up down here. My Board sent me back to Washington, DC. I think I went back over 10 or 12 times to meet with people clear up to the Secretaries of the Forest Service, just trying to educate them that, 'Yes, we need the money. These are the programs we’re running. This is what we’re requiring of our private sector, and yet, as Federal landowners, you guys own 50% of the land in my County, and you’re not doing anything.' And we had some great guys, too, and I know that it was money, it was not lack of interest on the part of the Forest Service. There was no money back then, it just wasn’t important.
George Hittle was excellent at working with the Federal Agencies because he was not gun shy of them at all. They hated to see him come around because he was going to tell them how it was. He got a lot of things going. He really did a great job for us.
Where I really put a lot of emphasis in my first years was to start working with Federal Agencies. It ended up, when they finally did get money, they said, 'We’ve got money now, but we really don’t have the expertise.' So then they subcontracted with me. Now, within the last five or six years, we have had as much as $150,000 in contract funds from the Forest Service, the BLM, and the Bureau of Reclamation, that they would contract with us, to do their weed control work for them.
With our contracts with the Forest Service, we’ve added horseback crews. They pack in and are there for a week at a time. They use spray units that are powered by carbon dioxide canisters. Once we finally got them established, with Federal Agency contracts, the Federal Agencies have done a good job of keeping those funds. Are they spending as much as the private sector? No, but they’ve got a lot more headaches to overcome. But they’re doing their part. We had started to lose the battle on Federal lands because of lack of funds. But we’ve turned it around. We had thought about suing the Federal Government to get the funding, but we didn’t know if our State laws were strong enough. So we went the route of education. And we’ve seen it turn around. I know that nationwide, we’re losing ground on Federal lands, but I’d say that in the State of Wyoming, we’re not losing ground on our Federal lands. We’re gaining ground, for the most part.
When I first came here, the big weed on Forest Service and BLM land was musk thistle. It was just everywhere. We got on top of it. The Federal Agencies did help funding biocontrol programs. We still have musk thistle, but we don’t have the acres and acres of musk thistle that we had back in the 1970s and 1980s.
As we started to get more funding in from the Federal Agencies, when I talk to a farmer or rancher, that gave me... If they said the weeds were coming in with the water, I knew it wasn’t getting through the reservoir, because the weeds would have settled out. So I worked with the Irrigation District, I’d say, look at your ditch banks, the disturbed ground, weeds are growing like crazy. We then started the same thing as with the Federal Agencies. We took them on educational tours. One of the chemical companies, Dow, they put together a 3- to 4-day bus tour, that went up through Montana. I brought some of the Irrigation District employees on that tour. And they came up and saw some of the areas in Montana where the weeds had gotten out of control, especially things like spotted knapweed, leafy spurge. We went back home, and I’d say, 'This is the one little patch of leafy spurge that we’ve got in Park County, and see how close it is to your irrigation ditch. It could show up in your irrigation ditch. And here is a patch of spotted knapweed.' And they took the bull by the horns. And, for the most part now, every Irrigation District In Park County, and there’s seven or eight of them, have got some kind of a strong weed budget. In fact, the Irrigation Districts down near the lower part of the County, have maybe as much as $100,000 a year for weed control along the canals and laterals."
[Becky said: Talk about biocontrol.]
"The first thing we had to do was educate those of us that were going to be introducing a biocontrol program. When you use chemicals, eradication is a possibility.
When you use biocontrol, then you have to accept the fact that you’re always going to have those weeds. The idea is not to eradicate them. The idea is to get on top of them. So the first thing we had to do was accept the fact that we couldn’t use biocontrol for a 2-acre patch of weeds. If we had a 2-acre patch of weeds, we would still have to use other methods. The second thing is accepting the fact, when you gave up the fight, and you have to have use biocontrol, you need to have a lot more education. And then, there weren’t that many agents [insects] out there. There still aren’t as many as we’d like to see.
When they introduced Rhinocyllus conicus, for musk thistle control, we would take off in the summer for three or four days. I would take my trailer. Our child was just a baby at the time. And that was our family’s summer vacation. We’d go up to Bozeman with my trailer and park there. And we’d go out all day long and cut musk thistle, and shake it into a bag, to get the bugs to fall into the bag. And then you’d take the insects, and you’d have to lay them out on a mat and separate them. And my wife just hated that. She said, 'The only ones that are getting any good out of this are the people in Bozeman. You’re cutting all their weeds for them. And you’re taking all these bugs home, and nobody’s coming down to cut your weeds.' And I said, 'Well, maybe someday we’ll have so many bugs, and people will come down and cut our weeds.' [Laughs.] I thought it was a lot of fun.
Actually weed control has been a family thing. It was the only way we could do anything together, because in the summers, there were no vacations for me. And so, with the biocontrol program, I’ve gone to a couple meetings, and my family has gone with me. My daughter and son have both worked in weed and pest control over the summers. I was excited about biocontrol when I first heard about it. I guess I had bigger, grander ideas. I had to be educated. I thought, we’ll go out and put out some insects, and in two years, we’re going to see a reduction. But we didn’t see anything happen for about 10 years. Fortunately, those insects did work, and they did work fast. Probably within 10 to 15 years, we could say, that was successful. It did what it was supposed to do."
[Note: Refer to the interview with Gale Lamb, Sweetwater County, who also found that when using biocontrol agents in high elevation Counties in Wyoming, it took more years, in order to see results, than others have experienced at lower elevations.]
"Patience was the thing we had to learn. You can’t go out and put out insects, and the next morning get up, and see the plants wilted, like you can with herbicides. When we hired Josh Shorb, our Assistant [Josh became the District Supervisor when Bob retired], that was one of the things he came to us with. He actually had worked with the University of Wyoming with biocontrol. With what we had been doing, we were doing the easy stuff. When Josh came on board, he took on everything. He knew the insects, he could remember the names of them, which to me, it was just a beetle. He knew the scientific names and knew what was available, where to get them, the people to talk to. Our biocontrol program is very effective now. I would say it’s one of the better ones in the State. Some things, like leafy spurge, we don’t have enough leafy spurge to sustain biocontrol and that’s a blessing. I always feel like, when we go to biocontrol, it’s sort of like we’re saying, well, we’ve lost that battle, because we can’t do it with herbicides, with management, with hand labor, whatever."
[Becky asked: What are some changes in the pesticides and herbicides?]
"Herbicides are becoming much more specific. When I started, we had 2,4-D and Tordon, and, if it was a broadleaf, those two products would kill it. So, it was fine for a while. But after a while the varieties of weeds that were susceptible to 2,4-D and Tordon, you killed them off. And the varieties that weren’t, had a niche that they filled in."
[Note: Refer to the chapter on herbicides and the problems of plant-resistance to herbicides.]
"Now you have products that maybe only work on a half dozen of the noxious weeds that we have. You have to weigh all the factors. Where are they going to use it? Is it in a pasture, along a fence row? Is it cropland, non-cropland. All those things now come into play. You have to be a lot more educated on what the products will do, then you used to have to be. When we only had 2,4-D and Tordon, it was pretty simple.
Of course, every new product that came out was the new silver bullet. When Tordon came out, just before I started, I was told that I was not going to have a job in a year or two, because now we had Tordon. Then when RoundUp came out, 'Oh, this is the product that is going to end all of our problems.'
Then when Curtail came out, clopyralid, and they allowed it in the United States, England had had it for a while, but, 'Oh, this is finally the product. It works as good as Tordon, but it doesn’t have the longevity. So this is going to be the product.' So now, whenever a new product comes out, I say, 'Well, this is just another bullet for the gun. But the gun’s got a lot of chambers in it, that’s got to be filled yet.'"
[Becky asked: What do you wish you had known in those first years on the job?]
"Probably the biggest thing I wish I’d known is how much subdivisions were going to effect our Weed and Pest Program. Park County is one of those Counties that’s a nice County to live in. Everybody wants their 1, 2, or 3 acres of land, and, for a while, if you wanted to subdivide a piece of land, you’d just subdivide it, it’s done. It was almost always those first subdivided lands that were the poorest farm ground. They had done work on it, so the ground had been disturbed, which left an openIng for the weeds to come in. People who were buying those lands wanted to buy 2 or 3 acres, they wanted to put in a quarter-acre lawn, put in their house, stick a fence around it, and that was going to be their little piece of heaven. And the weeds just exploded. As Weed and Pest Districts, in general, we just were not prepared for that. We worked with agriculture. We didn’t work with small acreage landowners.
And so our recommendations, and our power of telling landowners they couldn’t harvest the crops if they didn’t take care of their weeds, didn’t have anything to do with these people. They didn’t have a crop. The other thing is, we were used to selling 15 to 20 gallons of 2,4-D to an individual farmer. And here we had individuals coming in, and even 2 ½ gallons of 2,4-D would last them four or five years. So it was a totally different mindset for us. And the vast number of them was unexpected.
When I started, I could talk to two farmers in a day, and we’d talk about weed control on 500 to 600 acres. If I were to try to talk to enough landowners on subdivided lands, it would take me a year to cover that much acreage. The other thing was, I had to start at Ground Zero, because the farmers had some kind of a background. They understood. A lot of homeowners had never had this kind of a weed problem. They had dandelions when they lived in town and they could dig them up. When they moved to the country, if they thought they could just dig up the weeds, well, if you dig up Canada thistle, you just encourage it to grow thicker and heavier. If they even would do it. Plus they were now dealing with 2 or 3 acres, compared to just a quarter-acre when they lived in town. It was ridiculous.
So what happened was, you’d have to go talk to them. And the other thing was, we worked during the daylight hours. You’d go to the subdivision, you’d knock on the door, and nobody was home. Or it was just the wife who was home, and you’d start talking about weed control, and she’d say, 'Well, you really need to talk to my husband.' But he wouldn’t be home till night. So then you’d have to call a meeting.
One of the hardest things for me was to make the conversion over, from working one-on-one with farmers, to some kind of program that would work with subdivision people. And it had to be mass training. You couldn’t do it one-on-one. We wanted to get them educated and work with them in mass numbers. But nobody wants to go to a meeting.
So consequently, back in 2005, when we hired what we called our Subdivision Assistant, and we now call our Education Assistant, we hired Mary. She was phenomenal with education. She had excitement for it. So we have come a long way. We have subdivisions, we have private homeowners, that do know weed control now.
When I was hired, the Board was spraying weeds along County roads, State highways, and that was their program. They didn’t want to spend money for supervision, for administration. Administration had to be kept at a minimum. The dollars went on the ground. I’m not saying that’s all bad. But there was never any consideration of me hiring an assistant. During the summer months, I could hire a part-time person. But you never could get any consistency with that.
So, it wasn’t until 2000 that I hired my first full-time Assistant, when we hired Josh. So when he came on board, that kind of broke the ice. Plus the Board changed a little bit. So then in 2005, they allowed me to hire Mary, my second Assistant. They also allowed me to hire my first full-time Office Administrator. And in 2010, then we hired another Assistant. That was because in 2010 we were moving back to doing our own weed spraying. We were no longer contracting. So we hired Jake.
In the summer we may have 12 part-time people. The horseback spray crew is our only crew that is still fully contracted. They are seasonal. We hire a firm that is responsible for their employees. They do a good job of hiring the right people. I think they hire people that work year-round with horses, such as guiding during hunting season. They also hire sprayers for Fremont County."
[Becky asked: What are some of your favorite memories from the Weed and Pest events?]
"When we first started, in the late 70s and early 80s, it was a good-old-boys club. Everybody worked hard, worked all summer long, we didn’t spend a lot of time with families. And, near the end of spraying season, a lot of us would get together. We called it our fall seminar. It was two days of relaxing, sharing horror stories, staying up till all hours of the night, playing poker, falling to sleep in a tent or under a tree. You really got to know the guys. They all had great work ethics. It was a unique club. Great guys, great stories. That was a special relationship that we had. You could call on them anytime. My wife once said that, 'You know, I can travel anywhere in the State, and I don’t have to worry about car trouble. If I have car trouble or bad weather, I know you’ve got somebody to call.'
I see the same camaraderie between the younger Supervisors. We don’t do the same things at the Fall Conferences, but that relationship still exists.
The people that I worked with, Earl Lucas and Rick Johnson and those guys that were in my area, we’d drive to meetings together. We’d spend four or five hours together in a vehicle, talking to them about how they ran their programs, and bantering back-and-forth about who’s way was the right way. Those are great memories.
Back then, the chemical companies had a lot more money, so they didn’t have to spread their salesmen so thin. So we knew the salesmen personally. Rather than now, where the salesmen work with the distributors, and the distributors work with us, back then, we got to work one-on-one with the chemical sales people. And there were some great people there, Guy Haggard, Larry Liptack, they were just fun to be around. To be able to call the chemical representative from Billings or Denver, and have them come down and maybe spend the whole day with you, because of one customer, that was a real one-on-one education.
Back then, everything was one-on-one. Our relationships with farmers was one-on-one. The chemical company relationship was one-on-one. Our relationships between each other was one-on-one. Yes, we’d go to meetings. But the way we really learned the stuff was to go down to the bar and sit and visit afterwards, or pick somebody up when you were traveling across the State. You got to know them. You got to know their families. It was just a great time.
The Weed and Pest Conferences back in those days were just fun, with the McNamee brothers singing and playing. And once we had women Supervisors, there was a lot of dancing!
That’s a big change, the number of women that are now in the program. I was a Supervisor for 5 to 10 years before we had any women Supervisors or Assistant Supervisors. Now almost every District has at least one woman. I’d hate to think about running my County without Mary there. It did change the way we did things. The Fall Conference calmed down a bit. But it was still fun times.
I’ve seen some changes in the make-up of my Board. Some members have been there 20+ years. That consistency is important. Today, 50% percent of our meetings have all members present. In the past, it was hard to get a quorum. The Board Members are farmers or ranchers or from the private sector. They all show up, and they’re involved, and they know our programs. And they’re behind you 100%. When I talk about my mentors, a lot were the people who’ve been on my Board. It was a great career.
I can remember as a teacher waking up in the morning and dreading going to work. As a County Weed and Pest Supervisor, I never had that feeling. Even in the worst circumstances, I still got up in the morning, looking forward to going to work. My wife will tell you I was definitely married to the job. I was at work in the morning at 6:30. If I was home by 5:30, it was pretty surprising. Once we got computers, and I had to teach myself software, I’d spend many a night, weekends, at work, learning the software. I just love the work. The only reason I’m retiring is because I can’t offer as much as I used to.
A few years ago, someone asked me when I was going to retire. I said, 'My perfect life would be to have worked the day before I died.' My wife heard that, and she went ballistic! [Laughs.] So we had a talk about what we’d do if I retired. And so we recently started traveling, and now I’m ready to retire because I’m ready to do other things. This was a great profession."
[Becky asked: What advice do you have to pass on?]
"I think everybody should have to work at a job that they don’t like, so they can really appreciate a job like this. I just don’t ever talk to Weed and Pest people that say, 'I’m looking for another job.' Every one of them love their jobs. And it’s great. You work with people, and the people that you work with are great.
The nature of the work requires a certain caliber, a certain type of person, that makes them great to work with."
[Becky asked: What advice do you have for Josh?]
"I think there’s a happy medium between people my generation and my work experience and the younger generation. If I have to do something, it’s 'Aim, aim, aim. OK, Fire.' But there are those that are, 'Fire, Aim.' You have to find that happy medium. Make sure you’re aiming at the right thing, then, 'OK. Fire.'
You do need to move at a pace, because you’re working with people. Some things are irreversible.
I’m very fortunate to have worked with Josh for 10 years,. I’ve learned a lot from him. You have to learn from the people who went before you. I think this sharing of our legacy is important. Don’t pass up a chance to become better educated. Don’t pass up a chance to work with your fellow colleagues."
[Becky asked: What are the biggest challenges for Weed and Pest Supervisors?]
"Continued expansion of educating people in subdivisions. Working with small acreage landowners.
The Federal Government may not always provide enough funding. Keep working with them.
Enjoy the time you get to spend with farmers and ranchers."
Links to the other Wyoming County interviews: