February, ’20] 
MARLATT: EUROPEAN CORN BORER 
81 
doubtedly been in this western New York area eight or ten years to 
have gained the existing spread and, therefore, the absolutely 
negligible damage to field corn in this large area is a very strong 
support of the immunity of such corn. 
The third point which I wish to make is the strong indication that 
clean culture will very largely limit damage by the corn borer. In 
Massachusetts, where the insect is doing its greatest damage and where 
it is double-brooded, the worst fields were weedy fields or fields sur¬ 
rounded by weedy areas. The general weediness throughout the 
Boston area has undoubtedly very much increased the abundance of 
this corn borer. I do not want you to take my dictum only on that 
factor. I wish to read a statement from Mr. Worthley who goes 
vigorously into this subject. It was made at the hearing in Boston 
last August and is as follows: 
We made a special examination for this hearing of fields and we found especially 
in celery fields a great amount of weeds. We would like to plead with the market 
gardeners as evidently it must be a good crop to try to keep the weeds down as near 
as possible and help us in control measures. One of the celery fields I visited recently 
is worth probably $100,000. While we found no borers in the celery, we found them 
in weeds right adjacent to the celery. They have a large force of men working on the 
place and for a couple of hundred dollars they could have cleaned up those weeds 
and there would have been no borers. It seems to me with the large amount of 
money involved in these market garden crops, a small percentage might be laid aside 
to keep the weeds down and this will help the work just that much more. I hope 
the members of the Market Gardeners’ Association will appreciate that and that will 
make our money go much farther. 
In response to this, Mr. Ballinger, representing the Market Gar¬ 
deners said: 
The gentleman who has just spoken has brought up the subject of weeds. . . . 
He wants us to keep the weeds down. Where can we get labor? It is easy enough 
to say that but where do we get the labor? . . . It is practically within the same 
period that the borer has been in existence that the farmer has been short of labor. 
We all know that we have had more weeds during that time than at any time before. 
The several commissions that I have mentioned have all noticed 
the weed factor and that the fields worst damaged were either weedy 
or surrounded by areas of weeds. The gardeners and commission men 
at the hearing in question pointed out that this condition had been 
particularly bad since the war. The inability to get labor has resulted 
in general neglect of headlands and vacant fields and lots and road¬ 
sides. Often labor has not been available to weed out even the planted 
fields. Many of these weedy areas are even worse attacked than 
cornfields. The corn borer works not in some fifty plants, as men¬ 
tioned by Dr. Felt, but in a hundred different plants, as now known, 
and the small patches of sweet and flint corn in the Boston area have 
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