Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
state were large-scale projects, in terms of the way growers produced crops,
the creation of new organizations or the use of bracero labor changed very
little. Growers still had large crews of workers thin their beet plantings
and harvest their lettuce. In terms of repair and the production of power,
the use of bracero labor during World War II and after allowed growers
to maintain their production practices as closely as possible, thereby
maintaining power over the production process. By tracing the practices
and the lengths that growers went to maintain them, we can see how local
practices and power are very closely tied together.
Further, the Spreckels case shows that the counterexample to this general
course of action actually helps to support my analysis. Spreckels's competi-
tion with vegetable crops and its diffi culties in securing enough beets to
run its factory at full capacity pointed to a fundamental problem with the
political economy of beet farming in the Salinas Valley. Because beet
farming shared so many of the same production practices and costs with
vegetable farming, Spreckels sought to revolutionize the production of
beets through mechanization. However, by the time beet growers had fully
mechanized production in the mid-1960s, the vegetable industry was very
well established in the Salinas Valley and had already driven out many
other extensive crops. In this respect, though the Spreckels factory in the
valley operated for more than 80 years, Salinas was never really an ideal
place for beet production and processing. In other beet-growing regions
where alternative crops were not as lucrative, Spreckels had a much easier
time convincing beet growers to make a transformative change in beet
production. Therefore, Spreckels's attempts to transform the production of
beet farming represents a special case of the relationship between practice
and power, where a stable order never truly coalesced, despite much
effort.
The production practices in which growers invest to raise crops, then,
are vital for understanding how they defi ne problems and plan for repair.
Just as in natural talk between two actors, where conversation analysts
have discovered that we have preferences for when and where we engage
in an act of repair,
35
the structure of production (in the broadest sense)
also gives actors preferences for how to maintain and protect this system.
However, this does not mean that actors have a mechanistic or overly
structured response to “external” problems. Instead, the nature of the pro-
blems themselves are contested and shaped through negotiation; in the
