Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
growers are unlikely to accept the research-based advice of advisors. This
terrain of practice and place, however, is sensitive ground. As I detailed in
the previous chapter, growers' power is rooted in the interaction of labor,
farming and technical practices, and the kind of capital that fl ows from
this mix. Changes in practice can lead to changes in this relationship.
Therefore, the prominence of practice in fi eld trials gives them a dual
character: powerful but also threatening.
This characteristic makes advisors' use of fi eld trials a tricky kind of bal-
ancing act, where they must negotiate the boundaries of order and change.
In this chapter I focus especially on this process and how advisors try to
balance accommodation and control. Advisors can give their research trials
an aura of realism and commercial relevance by placing them in a grower's
fi eld, but this also means special risks to the experiment's scientifi c status.
This dual character of fi eld trials leads to issues of control in the fi eld. The
diverse group of people who work in the fi eld have varying interests, and
their defi nition of control is different from that of advisors: namely, advi-
sors want to control for a certain variable, and growers want to control
anything that limits production. The struggle for advisors is to regulate
growers' and other farmworkers' activities in the fi eld for the sake of
making a trial “good science” as well as commercially authentic. In sum,
fi eld trials bring together several elements from the ecology of power,
providing a way of seeing in close detail the local negotiations between
advisors and growers over farm practice.
Extension Work and the Importance of Place
The history of Cooperative Extension is closely tied to the history of fi eld
trials. When the idea and practice of extension work fi rst began to develop
in the 1890s and fi rst decade of the 1900s, the concept of extension was
nearly synonymous with the concept of demonstration, and extension
workers were sometimes called demonstration agents. Seaman Knapp, who
was instrumental in creating one of the fi rst networks of extension agents
in Texas during the early years of twentieth century, fi rmly believed that
growers would be most receptive to new practices if they were demon-
strated in the very place where growers farmed their crops (R. V. Scott 1970;
Danbom 1979; 1995). Local demonstrations meant that growers could be
