Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
they establish a foundation for agreement through their basis in place and
practice, they do not in themselves produce consent. The demonstration
method is meant to be a transparent way of proving a new technique or
technology, but convincing growers to change the way they farm is not
simply a matter of showing them the extra potatoes. 7 This may frustrate
the advisors, especially when a grower easily dismisses trial results with a
wave of the hand and an aphorism: “One robin doesn't make it spring,
and one . . . [small trial] doesn't mean that you're 100 percent convinced.”
Further, even if a grower does concede that a trial demonstrates an improved
way of doing things, he or she still might not change, especially if the new
way involves extra costs.
Thus, control is also a problem for how a place is represented through
fi eld trials, and in this section I examine how advisors attempt to accom-
modate and control the representational demands of growers. A trial may
be well designed and executed to account for the contingencies of place,
but growers also use representational practices that must be controlled. Just
as doing a fi eld trial on a grower's land increases the commercialism of
the trial but makes control problematic, so it is with representations of the
fi eld. Advisors try to establish the same kind of control over depictions of
the fi eld yet also need to accommodate these data to growers' representa-
tional practices.
During my research with advisors and growers, we often talked about
this topic—what was convincing or not about some type of representa-
tion—and I was struck by both the uniformity and the diversity of exam-
ples. The uniformity appeared through three factors that were often used
to represent the fi eld and fi eld trials: numbers, visualization, and growers'
orientation to these representations through their trust in advisors' work
and advice. These are all ways of framing fi eld trials to indicate the promise
of experimental practices for commercial agriculture. For instance, the
potato demonstration (see fi gure 5.2) is a powerful visual and numerical
representation portraying the effects of fertilizer on potato yields. Although
advisors and growers often invoked trust, numbers, and visualization to
explain their personal interpretations, they attached very diverse readings
and merit to specifi c instances of these factors. For any given fi eld situa-
tion, the same detail might be used to support an interpretation in one
instance and to devalue a claim in another. This grower, for example, used
trust to explain his faith in a retired farm advisor:
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