[Granville-Hough] 18 May 2009 - more on kudzu

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

From: "Herbert, Teri Lynn" <herbertl at musc.edu>
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 09:30:28 -0400
Subject: Re: Kudzu history


>From the Dept. of Agriculture,  what I've heard all my life in biology
courses, too:  There is a basketmaker in Boykin, SC that makes lovely
baskets of the vines.  And it is used to make paper which is lovely. The
natural dye in kudzu is a pale golden color...  Teri Lynn



Kudzu (Pueraria montana [Lour.] Merr. var. lobata [Willd.] Maesen and
Almeida) was originally introduced into the United States as an ornamental
vine at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. David Fairchild
observed extensive use of kudzu as pasturage in Japan. In 1902, he planted
seedlings around his Washington, D.C. home to explore their potential in the
United States. By 1938, he became disenchanted with kudzu because it grew
all over the bushes and climbed the pines, smothering them with a mass of
vegetation which bent them to the ground and became a tangled nuisance. I
spent two hundred dollars in the years which followed trying to get rid of
it, but when we sold the place there was still some kudzu behind the
houses. (Fairchild, 1938). In 1907, kudzu hay was exhibited at Jamestown,
Virginia. Mr. C. E. Pleas, a farmer in Chipley, Florida, was thrilled to
accidentally discover the growth potential of kudzu, and that many animals
on his farm liked to eat it. He became an enthusiastic promoter of kudzu,
grew 35 acres to sell as a fodder crop, and sold rooted cuttings through the
mail (Shurtleff and Aoyagi, 1985). In the 1930s and 1940s, kudzu was
propagated and promoted by the Soil Conservation Service as a means of
holding soil on the swiftly eroding gullies of the deforested southern
landscape, especially in the Piedmont regions of Alabama, Georgia, and
Mississippi. Farmers were paid $8.00 per acre by the Soil Erosion Service to
plant kudzu, and more than 1.2 million acres were planted under this
subsidized program. Kudzu seedling nurseries produced and distributed more
than 73 million seedlings between 1935 and 1941 (Tabor and Susott, 1941). In
his 1949 book, Front Porch Farmer, Channing Cope presents kudzu as the
panacea that will allow farmers to adopt a life of leisure and relaxation,
as this new crop "works while you sleep." Kudzu was widely promoted as a
drought-resistant, high-nitrogen forage crop. Research in the 1930s examined
optimum planting density, fertilization (Ahlgren, 1956), and the optimum
time of mowing to maximize yield without depleting the kudzu root starch so
much as to prevent regrowth each spring (Sturkie and Grimes, 1939). However,
it proved difficult to bale. Direct grazing was used to some extent, but the
vines are damaged by trampling, and this practice fell into disuse. In the
1950s, kudzu was recognized as a weed, and removed from the list of species
acceptable for use under the Agricultural Conservation Program. In 1998,
kudzu was listed by the U.S. Congress as a Federal Noxious Weed.