Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
hybrid corn garnered public accolades and continued funding for LGU
research, and laid the foundation for the biotechnology revolution.
California leads the nation in processing tomato production, and dur-
ing the first half of the twentieth century relied on imported cheap farm
labor to harvest this crop. In 1964 Congress ended the
Bracero
program,
which had facilitated the importation of Mexican farmworkers. Many
California growers were alarmed about the potential for labor unrest so
they collaborated with LGU scientists to develop a mechanical tomato
harvester. Designing the machine was a relatively straightforward engi-
neering project, but the real breakthrough was the development of a
processing tomato that would not bruise. G. C. “Jack” Hanna, a profes-
sor of vegetable crops at UC Davis, bred a tomato plant whose fruit
would ripen at roughly the same time and was tough enough to be
machine harvested: the VF-145. The harvester was manufactured by
Ernest Blackwelder, a friend of Hanna. By 1972, instead of 50,000 field
harvesters, tomato growers needed only 18,000 sorters to ride on the
1,152 machines. In 1962, roughly 4,000 farmers produced California
tomatoes, but within a decade only 600 of these growers were still in
business.
17
Jim Hightower's book
Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times
brought the social
impacts of LGU publicly funded research to the attention of a popular
audience.
18
This topic brought an end to the unquestioned public support
for LGUs and inspired a populist agenda that demanded alternative
products from them. “From the early 1970s until roughly 1990,”
Fredrick Buttel notes, “Hightower-style criticism of and activism toward
the public agricultural research system focused on a set of closely
interrelated themes: the tendencies for the publicly supported research
enterprise to be an unwarranted taxpayer subsidy of agribusiness, for
agricultural research and extension to favor large farmers and be
disadvantageous for family farmers, for public research to stress mecha-
nization while ignoring the concerns and interests of farm workers,
and for the research and extension establishment to ignore rural poverty
and other rural social problems.”
19
According to academic critics, the
LGUs were guided by a “productionist” ideology: a deep-seated institu-
tional conviction that increased agricultural production is always
socially desirable, and that all elements of society benefit from increased
output. This ideology trumpets the public benefits of new technology
