Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Expanding BIOS
Even with its epistemological controversies, BIOS demonstrated that
alternative extension practices could facilitate alternative agriculture. It
opened up the institutional space for other partnerships to emerge
through the social agency of growers, agricultural scientists, NGOs, and
commodity organizations. These actors brought new programs, funding,
and imaginaries to conventional California agriculture. CAFF did not
“cause” others to start partnership activities. Other partnerships (the
California Clean Growers Association, the Randall Island Project, and
the Lodi Woodbridge Winegrape Commission) had been initiated earlier,
and partnerships in prunes and in cotton started while BIOS was still in
its infancy. The success of BIOS, however, suggested that a different
approach to extension would result in socially preferable environmental
impacts.
CAFF parlayed BIOS's documented agrochemical reduction to trans-
form it from a pilot alternative extension project into a model. They
acquired funding to expand BIOS to other counties, engaged the Almond
Board of California with their ideas, advocated for the state to fund
BIOS-type programs in other commodities, and encouraged the
Department of Pesticide Regulation to undertake its own agroecological
partnership programs. CAFF's ambition is manifest in the work plan that
was developed during the second year of BIOS:
1. Select one or two commodities with high pesticide use patterns;
2. Identify production practices that could reduce or eliminate targeted pesti-
cides;
3. Create a grassroots outreach program to support farmer experimentation
with identified alternative approaches;
4. Work with grassroots groups of growers to identify important areas of
research that could reduce pesticide use;
5. Influence the funding decisions of the commodity board.
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CAFF relentlessly publicized BIOS, its vision of farming, and its hybrid
economic/agroecological advantages, in all manner of farm trade publi-
cations. Feder, in turn, helped CAFF obtain a $1.8 million grant from a
CalFed, a joint federal/state water management agency. Private philan-
thropic foundations wanted to invest in BIOS and to be able to claim
some success for investing in it.
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It expanded to San Joaquin, Stanislaus,
Madera, and Colusa Counties. It also ran a walnut BIOS partnership in
Yolo and Solano Counties.
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