Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
A. A. Tavernetti explained the relationship of wages in comparison with net profi t
for ranch operations and brought out that usually it takes approximately one ton
of a commodity to bear the expense of harvesting operations. Tavernetti further
explained that with the present prices of commodities this wage rate increase was
not out of line....After a thorough discussion of the matter, those in attendance
found that the Farm Production Council had made a wise decision and that such
action was necessary to avert further trouble. (MCFB 1946, 1)
Despite the potential for confl ict between growers and the state (includ-
ing Cooperative Extension), it would be a mistake to represent this tension
as a broader confl ict between incompatible visions of repair. Clearly, farm
advisors were somewhat reluctant to get entangled in the politics of farm
labor in California, and yet it was growers themselves who lobbied for
Cooperative Extension's involvement in the Mexican National Program.
Further, the very fact that farm advisors dared to go before farm groups
during this time period and seriously suggest wage increases shows the
extent to which advisors were integrated with the local farm community
and could suggest controversial, if modest, forms of repair. In the end,
advisors' suggestions for small wage increases still represented a mainte-
nance approach to repair, and in many ways the Mexican National Program
was the ultimate maintenance plan for the growers' system of farm labor;
it repaired the system while making few or no concessions on growers'
power. The use of farm labor during the war years was essentially under
direct grower control, but with extensive support from all levels of the
state. For all these reasons, growers viewed the Mexican National Program
as a great success, and niche crop industries across the State became more
and more dependent on the use of Mexican national labor in this
period.
Maintenance or Transformation? The Spreckels Case
One farm sector in California that became very dependent on Mexican
national labor was the beet sugar industry. Unlike with many vegetable
and other niche market crops, however, the use of this source of labor
during and after the war years created a tension between the use of hand
labor and plans for a more transformative change: fully mechanized pro-
duction of sugar beets. In this section I describe how one company, the
Spreckels Sugar Company, struggled to reconcile these two modes of repair
in the Salinas Valley.
