While the National Cotton Council said a man-made eradication program ranked close to Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin as one of the greatest advancements ever for the industry, it’s the South Texas weather that could take the final swipe at the beetle.

Noel Troxclair, an entomologist with the Texas AgriLife Research and Extension Center in Uvalde, said a string of circumstances, many of them weather-related, have combined to get the area much closer to being free of the pest.

It may not happen this year, unless everything comes together perfectly, said Troxclair. With more progress next year, boll weevil counts in south Texas could fall to a minimal level in 2011 and reach zero a year or two after that, he said.

Freezing temperatures in the area this winter, combined with the wet fall, killed cotton seed and mature plants that survived the last harvest. As a result, weevils will have less opportunity to reproduce and eat as they emerge this year. The harsh weather itself also will kill a large number of the weevils, Troxclair said.

He said the impact of the freeze won’t be known until weevil traps around fields are tabulated during the growing season later this year. While the pest is not likely to disappear this year, it could get to the point where it won’t recover, Troxclair said.

Boll weevils would have forced Jimmy Dodson out of the cotton-growing business south of Corpus Christi if agricultural officials had not developed effective controls over the last 15 years.

“We were spending lots of money and losing lots of cotton to weevils,” said Dodson, whose father and grandfather had farmed the area since the turn of the century.

Now those controls have virtually eliminated the weevil in much of north and west Texas and have substantially reduced the threat in south Texas.

Rainfall this fall and freezing temperatures this winter could provide the punch that knocks the legendary pest out of commission in an area where it first spread from Mexico during the early 1890s.

“I guarantee we’ll have a celebration when that day comes,” said Dodson, who is “pretty confident” that boll weevils are close to disappearing in the area.

“This is the best chance we’ve had in a decade to be where we need to be,” Troxclair said.

Boll weevils, grayish beetles of up to a half-inch in size, are considered the worst pest the nation’s cotton industry has faced.

The National Cotton Council estimated the pest, which spread across the nation’s cotton belt in 30 years after its arrival, produced more than $15 billion in yield losses and additional costs for cotton growers.

The National Boll Weevil Eradication program, which includes monitoring and chemical treatments paid for by cotton growers, has succeeded in eradicating the pest in most states, including Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma and California.

Texas, the nation’s largest cotton producer with more than 4.9 million bales of the crop last year, started boll weevil eradication activities in the mid-1990s.

Jeff Nunley, executive director of the South Texas Cotton & Grain Association, said getting the last weevils eliminated will take the hardest work. But the worst infestation has been compressed to an area around Uvalde, and Nunley believes, with no weather setbacks, the area will be nearly weevil-free this year.