Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
mental area of the fi eld. In this event, the grower would be controlling for
pests, but the advisor's distinction between experiment and control would
be ruined. The entomology advisor described this dilemma:
CRH:
Sounds like you have to be pretty up-front with [cooperators] about
what you need and what you'll do.
Entomol:
And they're usually pretty up-front with me too because . . . for
example, when I wanted to test some parasite releases, I said, “I want to
take this block of your fi eld and I don't want you to use any insecticides
on it.” So they say, “OK, we'll do that . . . we're even willing to let the
insects get bad in that section but if those insects start spreading through
the rest of the fi eld, we're gonna spray you out. And that's the ground
rules. As long as things are going okay, that's fi ne. But if it gets bad, you
know, we're out of here.” So, and that's fi ne—as long as they tell me up-
front what their expectations are and what's gonna happen, then I can
live with that.
The thing that gets frustrating is, when you set something up with
someone and you do all this work, and they call you up and say, “Well,
sorry last night I had to go in and spray it by air and spray all your plots.”
[And I say,] “OK, well, thanks for calling but you just ruined six months
of work” [both laugh].
In practice, this double risk—to the grower's crop and to the advisor's
trial—leads to a need for surveillance in the fi eld, yet a third meaning
of
control
. In my interviews with farm advisors and fi eldwork with their
technicians, there was a constant emphasis on monitoring the ongoing
progress of a particular fi eld where a trial was being held in order to make
sure that the grower was not doing something that would wreck an exper-
iment. Advisors and their technicians make regular visits to the sites of
fi eld trials to examine the progress of the experiment and to monitor any
dangers to the trial itself. This surveillance is particularly intense just
before the crop is harvested because this is when data about yield and
other crop factors are “reaped” by the researchers. Harvest scheduling is
complicated by several factors, including prevailing market conditions for
the crop, weather, and the quality of a given crop at maturity compared
with others owned by the grower. Growers will often change harvest
plans at the last minute to account for one of these factors. As the soil
