Cope, who was manager of GPC's agricultural division, advocated a method of farming designed to save the Southern farmer from traditional back-breaking labor – to enable him to farm from his front porch by raising livestock on a series of permanent pastures which flourish at different times of the year. The heart of this system was kudzu, to check erosion and serve as summer and fall grazing. He formed the Kudzu Club of America, which had as its goal in 1945 the planting of a million acres of kudzu in Georgia by 1950 and eight million acres in the South as a whole.

"In a part of the country farmed almost to death under the old crop- and-chop system, kudzu is lively, hopeful, exciting," wrote Russell Lord in Reader's Digest. "’A strange ecstasy," Cope says, 'lifts Southern growers' hearts and exalts their language when they get together to praise kudzu."

By the mid '50s, few voices praising kudzu were left. In the Far East, kudzu had natural enemies and its spread was confined by intense cultivation. But in the South, the very things which had made kudzu a savior – a deep root system which stored food in roots as big around as a man and the plant's ability to grow up to a foot a day – made it a devil as it escaped and ran across fields and up poles.

But it can be killed--by overgrazing, by cultivation and with herbicides--and most importantly, with patience and persistence.

"You have to be just as aggressive and persistent as it is," said senior land forester Ralph Hall, who works out of the land department's Lake Oconee office.

"You have to keep after it. We'll look at a little plant and say, 'I've got to write this up and do something about it.’ Then it will climb up into a transformer and do its dirty work before we can get back to it," he said.

Hall has recently been fighting some kudzu on Company land near Plant Bowen. "We try to keep our acreage in commercial forest and kudzu will kill a stand of pine trees," said Hall. At Bowen, the kudzu had also grown over fences and had started up the 500-kv towers. To treat the kudzu, contractors sprayed it with a herbicide last year and then in early spring, Hall, with the help of Plant Bowen workers, burned off about 300 acres. The fire, which was also used to clear undergrowth under the pines, cleared the land so that a second application of herbicide this year can get down to the roots. Hall says that after this spraying, the remaining kudzu can probably be spot treated.

This spring's fire got pretty hot and, when Hall returned to Bowen to check on the results of the fire, some of his fellow firebugs grinned and said, "If we know how to do one thing around here, it's start a fire." The plant manager, Bob Boyer, responded to Hall's "I’ll be back soon" with "Just don't bring any matches."'

A nuisance to distribution
"It's not a huge problem, but it sure is a nuisance," said F. R. (Butch) Howard, distribution manager of engineering services. "It runs up poles and shorts out lines. We've had people injured by an electrical flash while trying to get it off the lines. We probably have more than a hundred cases of line trouble a year caused by kudzu.

"It sets up a path for an arc to start. It grows up until it touches a line. When it's dry, it burns off, but when it's wet and windy, it blows against the line, starting an arc and shorting out the line. And there's just no way to treat every pole."

Despite some people's contention that kudzu was Japan's revenge for World War II, the plant was first brought to the United States from Japan in 1876 and was grown in the Japanese pavilion at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Until 1910, it was largely used as an ornamental vine and between 1910 and 1935, it was promoted as livestock feed.

It was in the mid '30s, with the rise of soil conservation programs designed to rebuild the eroding, worn-out soil of the South, that kudzu became king. The U.S. Soil Conservation Service, the Department of Agriculture and state agricultural extension services promoted it and the government paid farmers to plant it. Civilian Conservation Corps workers planted it in gullies and along roads throughout the South and zealous promoters such as Cope declared, "Cotton isn't king here anymore. Kudzu is king." By the mid '50s, when it became clear how destructive its growth pattern was, the party was over. "It was like," as one writer noted, "discovering Ole Blue was a chicken killer."

In the Orient, kudzu is a different story. In China, where the vine apparently originated, its roots are used for medicinal purposes. In Japan, the roots, which bring good prices, are made into kudzu powder, which is used like cornstarch for thickening. Young shoots and leaves are cooked as vegetables. In China, Japan and Korea, the vines are retted like flax and the resultant fiber woven into a water-resistant cloth. In the U.S., work is being done on the possibility of using kudzu as biomass to produce alcohol and other fuels.

Most people don't care how kudzu got here, says Tom Kowalski of the state Department of Agriculture. "They don't want to know where it came from or how it got here. They want chemicals to kill it and they want them now, and they want to kill it in one spraying. But you can't just spray it once and have it go away. The reason it's here, and the reason it was planted so extensively, is because it is so tough."

Like a horror movie
Kowalski recently had a horror-stricken call from a man who had just moved into a new house. "He looked out across his beautiful new lawn, and these mysterious things started creeping out of it, like something out of a horror movie. His house had been built on a kudzu field and the kudzu covered with fill dirt. Now he's right back in the middle of a kudzu field."

Noting that there is no "ultimate solution" for kudzu, Kowalski pointed out that "it costs about $200 an acre to really blast the stuff with heavy duty chemicals – and it will still probably grow back. It's really getting to be a problem within the city, because if you spray these chemicals in a residential area, they can blow into other yards, killing ornamental plants." The chemicals often used include Banvel and Tordon. Roundup is the major herbicide available to homeowners.

Although he agreed that kudzu has been effective as erosion control, Kowalski said, "We'd have a lot more erosion, but I don't know what's worse--erosion or kudzu. Once land is in kudzu, it almost doesn't pay you to get rid of it, except in locations with high-density use, such as apartment complexes."

Hall agreed that it costs about $200 an acre to spray, noting that it sometimes takes three sprayings – or $600 an acre –to get control. Transmission department field supervisor of line clearing Mike Phillips noted that in Rome division, where he used to be the forester, last year there was a two-man contract crew spraying along lines from May through September.

Phillips noted, "Our poles and lines often go through subdivisions, so we have to use a herbicide that won't be picked up in the soil and kill neighboring plants. We generally use Roundup or Banvel."

On large areas, such as at Plant Bowen, the Company sometimes uses Tordon, which is a soil-active herbicide. Hall notes, "I use that very carefully, because we're concerned about its long-term effects on the soil. However, we're getting pretty good new plant growth over the areas on which we've used Tordon before."