Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The decision to enroll conventional growers but extend production
practices derived from an organic orchard was remarkable. Each succes-
sive year of Hendricks's study of the organic/conventional comparison
had revealed that Glenn's organic methods were viable. Unlike most
Farm Advisors, Hendricks was comfortable with participatory research
and extension. He made more modest and nuanced claims relative to
other BIOS creators, but felt that partnering to promote BIOS practices
made him a more effective extensionist.
UC Farm Advisors dedicate their professional lives to maintaining and
enhancing UC's reputation in the farming community. They build on 100
years of socially constructing scientific credibility and legitimacy.
Pressure on Farm Advisors from colleagues and UC administrators to
defend this reputation is enormous. Losing credibility in the farming
community can destroy the career of an individual Farm Advisor, and
reflect negatively on the UC extension system as a whole. In situations of
uncertainty, Farm Advisors recommend pesticides as a form of risk man-
agement, both for the grower's crop and for their own reputations. When
in doubt, most growers use pesticides, and Farm Advisors have managed
risks to their professional reputation by prescribing them.
Bugg, Reed, and Anderson wanted to do more than demonstrate
pesticide reduction. They wanted to spark an alternative vision for agri-
culture by challenging how people thought about farming. “This is
a very charismatic production system,” said Bugg in an interview. He
continued:
It is a beautiful production system. The medicinal herbs in the understory. It's a
really beautiful thing to look at. As Walt Bentley said, 'It's like approaching a
trout stream, a premier trout stream.' It's beautiful. And the biology is something
that just grabs everybody . . . and then you say 'Wow, a production system that
looks like this and feels like this. It vibrates like this, also has these great yields.'
You say 'Oh my gosh! What have we been missing?' And that gets people
excited.
Almond BIOS provided outreach and support for growers as they exper-
imented with agroecological methods taken from Anderson's organic
orchard. The creators of almond BIOS built the BIOS model of exten-
sion, understood as both content (table 3.1) and process (table 3.2) and
flavored by an agricultural populist discourse. Almond BIOS enrolled 26
growers in the initial Merced County project, and helped them establish
side by side comparisons of their standard farming practices with a
