Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
their
land. In this chapter I describe farm advisors' efforts to change agri-
culture in Monterey County through these two interrelated factors: the
practice of farming and the place where it happens. More specifi cally, I
focus on a form of experimental demonstration that advisors often use to
simultaneously collect data on agricultural methods and change practices
among their agricultural clientele: the fi eld trial. Field trials retain the
properties of other forms of experiment, such as control groups and special
experimental methods, but are often conducted on a grower's property,
and the data from the experiment is a grower's crop. Unlike laboratory-
based experiments, which are intended to cut through the messiness and
contingencies of place, fi eld trials are intended to be place-bound.
1
In this
respect, fi eld trials combine agricultural and scientifi c modes of produc-
tion: they produce crops as data in order to, in turn, produce consent. With
this combination of features, advisors use fi eld trials to “make a place for
science,” controlling a farming place through experimentation but also
trying to maintain the particular “authentic” character of a given fi eld.
This authenticity makes fi eld trials a powerful demonstration for growers,
but the local, place-bound qualities of fi eld trials also make them diffi cult
to control; in many ways, advisors also need to strike a kind of balance
when using fi eld trials as a means of intervention.
Because fi eld trials combine these issues of place, control, and consent,
they make a useful case for exploring the negotiation of order in agricul-
ture. I focus on these aspects of fi eld trials to show how they are a tech-
nique for repair. When advisors make a place for science, they reconstruct
the relationships between people and things, altering the sociomaterial
context of farming. By combining the kinds of work that scientists and
farmers do, fi eld trials also combine the knowledge that each gains through
their work. This symbolic capital, in turn, allows advisors to argue for a
new way of farming, thereby fulfi lling their mission to change farming
places, shaping how they are built. In addition, because fi eld trials are
ultimately grounded in the kinds of agricultural and scientifi c practices
that growers and advisors use, fi eld trials make an excellent case for explor-
ing the relationship between practice and place. Field trials show how
places are more than just a collection of soil, climate, bugs, and other local
conditions; places are partly constituted by the practices that happen there.
If science is not crafted to account for current farming practices, then
