Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Grower:
What we say is, [Retired Advisor] did great research, he never
screwed up. If he says it's good, it's good. Let's go do it.
Later in the same interview, though, he invoked the “seeing is believing”
power of a trial that compared a new chemical fungicide with some older
treatments. In this case, visualization trumped trust:
Grower:
While we trust extension . . . there's nothing like seeing it with
your own eyes to, to say, “This really does work.”
CRH:
It was pretty clear in [that trial] that it did?
Grower:
Like turning a light on in a dark room.
In itself, this diversity is not surprising—the interpretive fl exibility of
representations is a founding principle of constructivist STS.
8
But represen-
tations that come from fi eld trials and are intended to infl uence changed
practices have complex interactions with the current practices and interests
of growers, in addition to their personal relationships with and trust in the
advisors. When used to represent fi eld trials, numbers and visualization are
representations of place
; their worth is contingent on the multiple interests
at play in the fi eld. Therefore, just as advisors try to simultaneously control
and cooperate with other users of the fi eld, they face a tension between
accommodating growers' representational demands and shaping growers'
perceptions of a trial's results.
To illustrate this tension, I draw on a few examples of numerical and
visual representations from fi eld trials. I discussed the issue of numbers
briefl y at the end of the previous section. In the example of the celery trial,
farmworkers' skills were essential for getting accurate data, but they were
also vital for getting data relevant to growers. As noted, if growers in the
celery industry think of yield in terms of boxes, then these are the data
that will impact them the most. Beyond the measuring practices of a par-
ticular industry, though, there are also the standards for individual growers
and their companies. For example, when I asked one grower about the use
of numbers in farm advisors' presentations at meetings, she described how
different growers may have different numerical production standards:
CRH:
You mentioned before that a lot of times the [advisors'] presenta-
tions are quantitative. That's something you think convinces a lot of
people, too—they can see charts and stuff that have a lot of data in
them?
