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Commercializing chemical warfare: citrus, cyanide, and an endless war

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Abstract

Astonishing changes have occurred to agricultural production systems since WWII. As such, many people tend to date the origins of industrial chemical agricultural to the early 1940s. The origins of industrial chemical agriculture, however, both on and off the field, have a much longer history. Indeed, industrial agriculture’s much discussed chemical dependency—in particular its need for toxic chemicals—and the development of the industries that feed this fix, have a long and diverse past that extend well back into the nineteenth century. In this paper, through the narrative of a late nineteenth century creation story, I go in search of a crucial linchpin in that longer history. I argue that industrial pest control has been imbued with the practices, discourse, materials, and ethics of modern chemical warfare since its inception. Faced with pest-induced collapse, Los Angeles citrus growers and scientists of the USDA and UC Agricultural Extension chemically fixed the citrus pest problem by developing and utilizing the cyanide gas chamber. Cyanide fumigation quickly became the toxic cornerstone of the citrus industry, enabling its intensification and expansion as the pest infection became systemic. By the turn the century, furnished with an economic poison made cheap and weapons-grade due to changes in the world gold mining industry, growers transformed cyanide fumigation into a necessary agricultural input. In chemically overriding an agro-ecological contradiction of capitalist agriculture, growers, scientists, and government officials amalgamated industrially organized agriculture to accelerating and endless chemical warfare. These suddenly necessary agricultural practices signaled a state change in world-ecology and agroindustrial organization, thus, the discovery of effective industrial control for citrus pests was not only a pivotal moment in the history of Southern California but it was also an event that has had world-historical implications.

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Notes

  1. For example: Fries (1921), Fradkin (1929), Smart (1997), Cook (1999), Harris and Paxman (2002), Jenkins (2002), Coleman (2005), Brophy et al. (2005), Tucker (2006), Christianson (2010).

  2. For example: Carson (1962), Whorton (1974), Perkins (1978, 1982), Russell (2001), Daniel (2005), McWilliams (2008), Ceccatti (2009).

  3. I use the term life history throughout the narrative for two reasons, one passive and one active. The first is that the term life history was used in the late 19th century to describe a particular type of economic entomological study. The study of an insect’s life history—defined in this case as a descriptive analysis of the ecological physiology of an insect—was critical to determining what stages of an insect’s life were most susceptible to economic poisons. For example, the egg stage of reproduction was often the least vulnerable to economic poisons. The second, active meaning of life history resonates from current evolutionary and ecological theory (Sterns 1976, 1992; Byrne 2011; Selman et al. 2012; Nik-Zainal et al. 2012). In this case life history describes the influence of eco-evolutionary selection on an organism’s developmental/reproductive/senescent timing and duration to maximize fitness (defined as offspring survival). Thus, when I use the term, I use it in both senses, as way to describe the adaption of insects’ ecological physiology—for example, their rate of reproduction or instar size—to new niches created by value-oriented agroecological change, and as a way to link the developmental stages of a insect’s life (and the historical study of this) with industrially efficient death. Although I disagree with fitness described solely in terms of maximum offspring survival, I like the term life history because it captures the complexity of insect’s physiology/behavior over dynamic ecological space and generational time and because it also can be used to view agricultural pests and pesticide resistance as effects of anthropogenic eco-evolutionary forcing (Levins 1968). In this way agricultural pests embody both object and subject, both passive non-agent and active agent, in dialectical tension over time and space (Levins and Lewontin 1985; Mitchell 2002; Odling-Smee et al. 2003; Lewontin and Levins 2007; Peck 2010; Kirksey and Helmrich 2010; Monosson 2015).

  4. Without knowing it, growers and scientists turned citrus’ alternative oxidase (AOX) biochemical pathway, and scale insects lack thereof, into an agroindustrial exaptation. As streams of hydrogen cyanide gas evolved, under the tented tree the evolutionary characteristic developed over hundreds of millions of years that allows many plants to physiologically resist cyanide meant that plants would emerge from fumigation relatively unscathed while the insects succumbed. Over the next few years, growers unconsciously coopted an evolutionary characteristic of the citrus tree by industrially mimicking the tactical strategies of many higher plants, in turn, recasting the citrus AOX pathway with a capitalist hue and introducing biochemical selectivity as an active participant in the development of the industrial citrus empire (Solomos 1977; Gould and Vrba 1982; Way 1984; Siedow and Berthold 1986; Vanlerberghe and McIntosh 1997; Poulton 1990; Harborne 1993; Zagrobelny et al. 2004).

  5. Sometime in late 1704, Diesbach, a renowned Prussian colorist, on a quest to make Florentine red, a lake pigment, stumbled upon a new blue color. On that fortuitous day, instead of the deep sheer red that Diesbach expected, he pulled the first “synthetic” pigment from his alchemical fire. Having previously run out of potash, he asked his friend, the infamous alchemist Dippel, for some of his leftover potash residues. Dippel’s alkali, however, was contaminated with organic nitrogen compounds that were extracted from the animal blood he had been alchemically probing. Thus, Diesbach accidentally combined organic carbon and nitrogen distilled from animal blood with iron over red heat, synthesizing ferric ferrocyanide, a striking blue compound, naming it Prussian blue for his motherland. Like so many chemical discoveries that followed, Diesbach was a “happy victim of impure reagents.” (Ball 2001, p. 242; Hoefer 1842; Clennell 1910) His blue was so true, so fast, and so striking that it continues to marvel us everyday. Prussian blue can further be oxidized into hydrogen cyanide (Prussic acid) and iron oxide.

  6. By this time cyanide fumigation had also become a common industry practice of west coast nurseries and quarantine operations. In 1894, L.O. Howard, recently appointed Chief of the USDA Bureau of Entomology, introduced cyanide fumigation to East Coast nurserymen in a USDA Circular and by 1896 it was in limited but general use in the nursery trade across the US (Howard 1894; Howard and Marlatt 1896; Howard 1899). By 1900, there was network of specialized buildings across the US constructed for the sole purpose of fumigating nursery stock, creating a nodal and agglomerative geography of agroindustrial gas chambers. Cyanide fumigation was also introduced to other commercial orange growing regions in the 1890s. For example, C. V. Riley, former Chief of the Bureau of Entomology introduced it to Montserrat, British West Indies in 1894 and word of its success reached Capetown, South Africa, about the same time (Pugsley 1897; Tyrrell 1999). Although UC Agriculture Extension and the USDA would eventually help the practice spread to citrus growing regions around the world (Quayle 1910), early extension of the practice into other citrus growing regions was met with commercial failure, likely due in part to the lack of intensive and economically efficient (cooperative) organizational structure of Southern California’s industry and the lack of government subsidy that first brought cyanide fumigation within reach of the average grower. R. S. Woglum of the USDA introduced Florida citrus to California’s fumigation techniques in 1905 (Essig 1931).

  7. Cyanide extraction tanks also contributed to the mass death of birds, fish, and insects via tank effluent disposed in water bodies or by birds and insects drinking from or landing on the tanks (cf. Donato et al. 2007). “Birds and insects by the millions have been killed by drinking from the cyanide tanks. At first contact they fall dead” (LAT 1896a). “Another place [for birding in the desert], and a most deadly trap it proved judging from the dead birds floating on its surface, was the cyanide tanks… Birds that essayed to quench their thirst at this fount toppled over dead in an instant” (Daggett 1902).

Abbreviations

AOX:

Alternative oxidase

CF:

California Farmer

CSAS:

California State Agricultural Society

DA:

District Attorney

DAC:

Daily Alta California

KCN:

Potassium cyanide

LA:

Los Angeles

LAT:

Los Angeles Times

LAH:

Los Angeles Herald

NYT:

New York Times

PRP:

Pacific Rural Press

R&H:

Roessler & Hasslacher Chemical Company

SDU:

Sacramento Daily Union

SFC:

San Francisco Chronicle

SCH:

Southern California Horticulturist

US:

United States

USDA:

United States Department of Agriculture

WWI:

World War I

WWII:

World War II

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Acknowledgments

This project was funded in part by grants from the Martin Institute (Geraldine F. Martin, President) and the Chemical Heritage Foundation along with a graduate fellowship from the Bancroft Library. The author would like to thank the Sayre Lab group at UC Berkeley for their thoughts on an earlier draft and the reviewers for their comments.

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    Adam M. Romero

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Romero, A.M. Commercializing chemical warfare: citrus, cyanide, and an endless war. Agric Hum Values 33, 3–26 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9591-1

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