Otis Barrett

Otis Warren Barrett was born in Clarendon, Vermont on April 18, 1872; his parents were James and Alice W. Kelley Barrett.[1][2] He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1897, where he was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity.[2][3] He afterwards worked with the entomologist JA Pringle in Mexico, collecting insects until 1898.[3] Barrett then worked for the West India Improvement Company, as a curator and entomologist at the Museum de la Comision Geographivo Exploradora and was a travelling agent for the Mexican exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition.[2]

Between 1901 and 1905 Barrett was entomologist and botanist to the Puerto Rico Agricultural Experiment Station.[1] In 1903 he was listed as an "agent and expert" in the US Department of Agriculture's Office of Experiment Stations on a salary of $1,500 per year and was working in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.[4] On July 8, 1905 he was appointed assistant in the Office of Seed and Plant Introduction on a salary of $1,800 per annum. It was stated that his services were urgently needed to assist the chief of that office in communicating with other countries regarding possible plant introductions.[5] Barrett held this position until 1908 when he was appointed director of agriculture for the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. By the time his term ended in 1910 he had established a scientific agricultural program in that state.[1]

Barrett was made chief of the Bureau of Agriculture's experimental stations and horticultural divisions in the Philippines in 1910 and held this position until 1914 when he was appointed a horticulturalist of the Panama Canal Zone, where he served until 1917.[2] He was the United States War Department's agricultural adviser to Liberia from 1920 to 1921 and with the Department of Agriculture in Puerto Rico from 1923 to 1929.[2][1] During this time he was responsible for introducing the Artocarpus integer fruiting tree to the territory. It was said to be similar, but superior to, the jackfruit.[6] From 1929 until 1930 he was a horticulturalist at the University of Hawaii.[1]

In his varied career Barrett also advised the agricultural society of Trinidad and Tobago on the diseases affecting Theobroma cacao and managed coconut plantations in Nicaragua.[2] He was also a member of the Botany Society of Washington.[2] In 1935 he was sent to Dominica to collect a quantity of rotenone-producing plants for the Department of Agriculture which might be used for pesticide production. En route he stopped at the Panama Canal Zone where he collected a number of Derris elliptica plants from the experimental gardens. He recommended that the Canal Zone horticulturalists expand the cultivation of such plants, though there was insufficient funding to enable this.[7] Barrett died at his brother Percy's home in Clarendon on October 6, 1950.[1][2]