Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Making a Place for Science: Cooperation and Control, Part II
In addition to the advisors and the growers themselves, there are often
other groups of workers who make their living in the fi eld. This is especially
true in California, where agriculture has long depended on migrant labor
for planting, weeding, and harvesting crops (see chapter 4). The farmwork-
ers working in harvest crews make for an even more complicated way of
thinking about control because their skills are an essential, if somewhat
obscured, part of an agricultural research trial in the fi eld. Therefore, many
of the practices that constitute a farming place in the Salinas Valley are
actually the practices of farmworkers. Farmworkers help standardize the
collection of data, making the data “scientifi c.” At the same time, their
skills make the trial seem relevant to the current standards and practices
of the local farm industry. In this way, the work and skill of farmworkers
are at the center of the production of knowledge for many fi eld trials, just
as they are for the production of commodities.
The part that farmworkers play in fi eld trials mirrors other research on
the role of the “invisible technician” within the literatures of science and
technology studies and the sociology of work.
4
These works emphasize an
irony about scientifi c practice: although technicians' work is indispensable
for successful science, one rarely fi nds any evidence of this importance in
offi cial representations of research practice (published journal articles,
etc.). The farm advisors' technicians suffer from this same invisibility, but
their names do occasionally make their way into published accounts as
co-authors with the advisors. The dualistic nature of this work—essential
yet isolated—is further magnifi ed in the case of farmworkers' participation
in fi eld trials. One does not often hear agricultural fi eldwork described as
skilled labor. Indeed, the work is perhaps the most denigrated and least
envied of any occupation. But many of the niche market industry crops
in California remain highly dependent on manual labor, including the
vegetable and berry industries in the Salinas Valley.
Through this work, farmworkers develop a very deep knowledge of
farming practices and criteria used for judging the maturity and quality of
crops, and this is where they make a contribution to fi eld trials. In order
to avoid introducing extra variables into a fi eld trial, the research design
requires uniform farming practices; without them, it is impossible to obtain
data that can be used for making comparisons between experimental and
