Kudzu: Another “Gift” to America from the USDA

Happy 250th Birthday Americans and to everyone around the world that shares the original American values of individual rights against government!

In honor of this day, I have decided to delay the 3rd part of my series on American government—its much to much of a downer and very negative. Instead, I will go back to (record a second intro starting here) the roots of this podcast to examine a minor issue. In this case, government has several built-in advantages in terms of expertise, funding, size and scope. In contrast, the market, specifically the realm of the mom-and-pop solutions, has several built-in disadvantages. At the time, government had an overwhelming mandate just to do something in the face of several simultaneous catastrophic events. This is the case of kudzu—the flower of the South, southern Japan that is.

Japan sent Kudzu and several other plants to the 1876 Exhibition in Philadelphia and later to the exhibition in New Orleans. These plants all became big hits with American gardeners. The plants included Bonsai, Japanese Maples, the Princess Tree, Sawara Cypress, Dogwood, Hydrangea, Japanese Honeysuckle, and the Porcelain Berry. Kudzu was grown in limited, controlled areas around gazebos and porches for its foliage, fragrance, and shade in the summer months and was a big hit with Southern gardeners. In Japan it was also grown agriculturally on low with very low opportunity cost for forage, fiber for textiles, and a fine cooking starch, but such applications did not have a comparative advantage in the Southern US where hay, cotton, and corn remained supreme.

That did not completely stop some enthusiasm and effort to use the crop commercially. As early as 1917, agricultural experts at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (later named Auburn University, where this podcast is being recorded across the street) were actively exploring the potential of planting kudzu as a cash crop, but the results were found to be mixed at best—War Eagle! A central Georgia railroad trying to stimulate its own crop transportation business and imagining large profits from shipping bales of kudzu started providing free plants of kudzu to farmers along its routes not realizing that it was a plant that was difficult to harvest and process for the domestic textile industry. An Atlanta newspaper jumped the gun exclaiming in 1927 that “Cotton isn’t king here anymore. Kudzu is king.” That was not true in 1927 but it sure seemed to be when I first visited Georgia in 1975, the first and only time of my life when I was scared of a plant!

While private interest in Kudzu was therefore “limited” and commercial interest was sparse and fleeting. Kudzu’s day in the policy sun came with FDR and the Great Depression. The 1930s in the US brought to a head many major problems to Americans from the earlier deeds of Progressives’ policies including WWI, the Federal Reserve, and some of the agricultural policies of the previous 15 years. Earlier policies that stimulated production contributed to the development of soil depletion and erosion, dust bowls, and an agricultural depression resulting from both the Federal Reserve and finally the Smoot-Hawley Tariff which cutoff the exports of American farm products.

Given the horrendous problems of erosion in farming, in both the soil and farmers’ incomes, the Franklin Roosevelt administration sought out and found a magic bullet: Kudzu! FDR declared the establishment of the Soil Erosion Service in 1933 as a major first achievement. The Department of the Interior headed up the project, the “Kudzu Boys” of the Civilian Conservation Corps planted nearly 100 million plants and farmers were paid $8 per acre ($1600 in today’s gold) for having the crop planted on otherwise unusable land. The crop quickly spread and boy did it spread!

However, there was little or no annual return for the “crop.” It therefore did almost nothing for the farmers’ pocketbook. Of course, many farmers went bankrupt due to the many macroeconomic and agricultural policy blunders (see Rothbard 1962). Farms were abandoned and the magic bullet crop soon took possession of the farms, swallowing up fields, trees, and farmhouses and then passing over property boundaries, spreading its domain, like a modern-day carpetbagger.

By the time of WWII, the cure-all-plant was shallowing up all the land, buildings and even parked vehicles in its path. This was especially true of government created rights-of-way for roads and power lines that were typically not well maintained where the plants had plenty of sunshine from which it could create new pathways of growth.

After much thought, the government decided to act and decided to change its mind. The plant would henceforth not be labeled as a cure for all woes but would now become the scourge of society: a noxious, spreading weed in need of eradication.

Several more programs and research efforts would be started. The nation was already armed with a Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture which consisted of branch franchises in all States, each with research departments manned by men of practical and theoretical specialties, many with advanced degrees from prestigious agricultural schools of respected State Universities funded by government.

This effort turned out a vast array of chemical agents and techniques to address the Kudzu infestation, which has been estimated by the mainstream media to cover 10,000,000 acres while recent government estimates claim less than a quarter million acres. Some of the government solutions were “viable” in some respects, but the solutions didn’t work in practice to actually control the problem. They were too expensive and time-consuming or were too awkward to be sustained in practice. For the longest time, my motto for fighting kudzu was the only thing that seemed to work was consumer driven economic growth and development pushing the kudzu back one acre at a time.

Fortunately, in recent years some mom-and-pop approaches have been established as both effective and economical. One successful approach is to use herds of young goats to eat back the kudzu, moving from patch to patch over a period of a few years to ultimately drain the Kudzu root stock of its vitality and die. The herds are sold or rented out, and the resulting goat meat has been a boon for the Mexican American working class.

That is the thing about solutions. On the one hand, government solutions are “top-down.” They tend to be expensive, to not really work well or as intended, and the secondary effects are often much worse than the original problem. On the other hand, economic solutions are bottom-up. All costs including capital investment are constrained by profit motivation; effectiveness is established through small scale experimentation in the real world, and success is ultimately based on serving consumer interests in the long run.