Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
nice to have someone [who speaks Spanish] to be able to communicate
very clearly to these people exactly what we need them to do and why
it's important to help us out and what they can contribute to the project.
And then after we're done, after they've fi nished, the likelihood of them
getting involved with another one of these projects is relatively slim, so,
if they're interested we try to explain to them what we've done and why
we did it.
On one hand, advisors rely on farmworkers to provide practices that stand-
ardize the data and make them commercially relevant. On the other hand,
they need to control the farmworkers so that the data collection is accurate.
The entomology advisor did not speak Spanish and could not communi-
cate with the farmworkers, most of whom were recent immigrants from
Mexico. Therefore, he relied on one of his technicians to explain the
researchers' needs and supervise the work (see fi gure 5.4).
In chapter 4, I argued that understanding the link between practice and
the production of power was vital for understanding how farm labor rela-
tions played out in the twentieth century; similarly, labor practices are also
important for understanding how knowledge is produced in fi eld trials.
Although these two cases are not perfectly comparable, in each the working
body is a site for control. Advisors use farmworkers' skills to account for
the relationship between practice and place, but they also closely monitor
this work. In this way, fi eld work is almost completely invisible in the
production of applied agricultural knowledge, but this invisibility is not a
given—it is only made invisible through more work.
Representing the Field: Controlling Field Trial Results
Control of fi eld trials is not limited to work in the fi eld. How the results
from trials are represented and used to convince growers is also an impor-
tant part of producing consent and promoting change through fi eld trials.
Why should a grower change farming practices based on the advice of
a farm advisor? Several advisors emphasized the power of fi eld trials to
produce consent; recall the weed science advisor's statement that “once
[a trial] was out there in the [grower's fi eld], and they saw it standing
up tall...compared to the standard, then they'd believe it.” But this
“seeing is believing” power of fi eld trials is not always enough; though
