1882 | Agriculture
Agriculture
Drought continues on western U.S. ranch lands. Edinburgh's Prairie Cattle Company pays $350,000 to acquire the Quarter Circle T Ranch of Texas Panhandle rancher Thomas Bugbee, who 6 years ago drove a small herd from Kansas to the Canadian River and established the ranch (see 1881; 1884).
The Farmers' Alliance claims 100,000 members in eight state alliances and 200 local alliances. The Alliance is now headed by Milton George (see 1880; 1889).
German bacteriologist Friedrich (August Johannes) Löffler, 30, at Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm Institute discovers the bacilli that produce swine fever (hog cholera), swine erysipelas, and glanders (another livestock disease) (see medicine, 1884).
Germany will assume leadership of European industry in the next two decades, but the Germans will attempt to maintain self-sufficiency in food production where the British have not. Germany will plant another 2 million acres to food crops and use high tariffs to protect her farmers from foreign competition, even though such a policy means keeping domestic food prices high.
U.S. hybridizer Thomas Volney Munson helps the French reestablish their vineyards in the wake of the grape phylloxera disaster (see 1881). French botanist Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet, 46, invents a fungicide based on a solution of copper sulfate, lime, and water he has used to discourage thieves from stealing his grapes (it stains everything that it touches a brilliant and unappetizing blue), but he notices in October that the thick mixture also seems to control downy mildew; his "Bordeaux mixture" will be the first fungicide to be used on a large scale worldwide, and it will be found effective not only in combatting the plant lice Phylloxera that attack French vineyards but also those that cause potato blight (see 1847). It will help revive the French wine industry.