FROM SETTLEMENT TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION—IN ONE GENERATION
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Association, located in Myton. The association marketed the county's alfalfa seed through the Western Seed and Marketing Company to all parts of the country. 64 Leading businessmen from Roosevelt and Myton invited the J.G. Peppard Seed Company of Kansas City, Missouri, to establish alfalfaseed processing plants in the county 6 5 The high prices and the connection with two national seed companies encouraged m o r e area farmers to raise alfalfa seed, and by 1923 county seed producers sold 5 million pounds of seed at an average of fifteen cents per pound. By 1924 there were 1,211 seed growers in Duchesne and western Uintah counties planting 39,000 acres of alfalfa seed.66 The zenith of alfalfa-seed production in the county occurred in 1925. That year the Uintah Basin Alfalfa Experimental Farm was established at Fort Duchesne to study alfalfa-seed pollination and commercial production, develop new and improved strains of seed, and find effective ways to combat the lygus bugs that were destructive to the high-quality alfalfa seed yield. During the 1920s the county was also plagued by grasshoppers, which created serious problems for the seed farmers as well as for other farmers in the county. In 1923 the grasshopper problem was so serious that a county b o u n t y of one cent per p o u n d was paid for grasshoppers. 67 Poisoning was a c o m m o n m e t h o d used to rid the fields of the hoppers; however, according to local farmer Fred Dickerson, "every time [I] poison a hopper, ten million come to the funeral."68 Between 1925 and 1930 alfalfa-seed production in the county and in the state dropped precipitously. The Peppard Seed Company kept its doors open until 1936, when it closed its activities in the county. In 1930 Utah produced less than 3.8 percent of the alfalfa seed in the United States.69 In Duchesne County several of the alfalfaseed processing and marketing companies closed their doors. In 1934 the agricultural college's alfalfa experiment farm at Fort Duchesne closed as well. The downturn in the production of alfalfa seed was devastating to the county's economy, especially as the nation entered the most serious economic crisis in its history.70 There were other factors involved in the downturn in the alfalfa seed market nationally and locally: drought, competition from
