Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
10. Richard Walker (2004) calls California's “the most perfect capitalist agricul-
ture in the world.” The Gold Rush of 1849 established economic ties and
generated wealth that subsequently circulated from California city to country-
side, and specialized monocultural production sprouted where growers thought
local conditions favorable (Henderson 1999). Agrarian capitalism never compet-
ed here with other social relations or production methods, such as integrated
family farming, sharecropping, or plantation.
11. Perennial crop growers and their organizations have deployed the agroeco-
logical partnership model with much greater enthusiasm than other growers,
and the description that follows should be understood to refer primarily to
them because the vast majority of my investigations were among them. This
description of growers should be understood to apply foremost to perennial crop
growers.
12. The first diffusion-of-innovation study was that of Ryan and Gross (1943).
For a description of this tradition, see Rogers 1983. See also Ruttan 1996.
13. This study is reported in Brodt et al. 2004. The methodology is described in
greater detail in Brodt et al. 2001. For a summary, see Warner 2004, pp.
194-199. Brodt and her colleagues posed 48 statements that allowed growers to
rate their relative preference for an economic and personal satisfaction goal.
They used a quantitative technique to analyze grower subjectivity known as Q
methodology, an “inverted” form of factor analysis that “shifts the focus toward
intercorrelations of people based on each individual's overall pattern of all traits
tested for, and away from intercorrelations of individual traits.” They asked each
subject to rank their agreement with a whole series of questions that reveal their
own internal frame of reference. They interviewed 40 growers in northern San
Joaquin Valley, half participants in a partnership and half not. Each grower was
asked to sort a set of 48 statements designed to express a belief, a general value,
or a management goal. These statements were carefully worded so as to “force”
the grower to rank his or her relative preference for an economic and a satisfac-
tion factor. The researchers entered the results into the PQ method software that
performed principal components analysis and a varimax rotation to identify a
small number of heavily loaded factors, which they used to define these three
management styles.
14. The threefold typology of Brodt et al. should not obscure the fundamental
fact that all but a handful of growers are attracted to partnership activities pri-
marily because they believe they can learn how to cut costs, as other surveys of
walnut and prune growers have shown. These surveys were conducted by SAREP
in association with the California Dried Plum and Walnut Boards, and Farm
Advisor Joe Grant (Walnuts). The walnut survey results are from Ransom et al.
2003. The prune survey results are not yet published. The data are summarized
and discussed in Warner 2004; see especially table 3.4 on page 200. At the time
of my field research (2002-03), winegrape growers, and to a certain extent
almond growers, had enjoyed profitable years that offered the financial opportu-
nity for some to experiment with some new practices, but no growers would
voluntarily adopt these methods if they lost money in the process.
