1877 | Agriculture
Agriculture
British entomologist Eleanor A. Ormerod, 49, begins publishing Annual Report of Observations of Injurious Pests, beginning a 20-year career in which she will make herself an international clearinghouse for entomological information. Ormerod's efficient and inexpensive methods for eradicating insect pests (saline solution for turnip moths, axle grease and sulfur applied to infested areas of the hide for maggots that plague livestock) will be credited with saving half the cows in Britain (see 1889).
Congress establishes a U.S. Entomological Commission to control grasshoppers that have been devastating western farms and rangelands.
San Francisco lawyer and land speculator James Ben Ali Haggin and his Kentucky-born brother-in-law Lloyd Tevis, 53, use political influence to have Congress pass a Desert Land Act offering land at 25ยข per acre to settlers who will agree to irrigate and cultivate the land for 3 years. Haggin and Tevis have acquired hundreds of thousands of acres by buying up old Spanish land grants, often of dubious value, and they acquire 96,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley by hiring scores of vagabonds to enter false claims which they then transfer to themselves, ousting settlers who have not yet perfected their titles under old laws and have not heard about the new law. The Haggin-Tevis lands will become the basis of Kern County Land Company (see 1890).
San Francisco flour and grain king Isaac Friedlander files for bankruptcy (see 1858). His Eureka Flour Mills are the largest in the state. He has gained control of almost all California wheat exports, financed construction of grain elevators, and with help from local bankers has developed a network of agents and intelligence sources to estimate the size of the California crop, thus enabling him to charter the appropriate number of ships to transport it. But this year he has overchartered. Calling him "the money king as well as the grain king," the National Grange has attacked Friedlander in its fight for regulation of railroads and grain warehouses (see 1878).