Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of farming in a unique place. Further, these can all shift from season to
season, as changes in climatic, pest, and market conditions modify farming
needs. Overall, these examples point to the surprising murkiness of fi eld
trials—a type of experiment that ostensibly produces straightforward,
unambiguous results. When practices are put into their context, we can
see more clearly why growers do or do not make changes based on the
results of fi eld trials.
Field Trials and Their Potential for Repair in Agriculture
Field trials are an interesting blend of order and change in farming prac-
tices. They incorporate a grower's current farming methods but also make
small changes in them. Social order and change seem like opposites, but
in this chapter I have argued that advisors must create a local infrastructure
of order to successfully promote change. Of course, change can happen
quite easily when things fall apart and people are free to do as they
wish—anarchy makes change easy but hard to control. This brings up yet
another aspect of control inherent in fi eld trials: fi eld trials are attempts at
a kind of
controlled
change, confronting an established system of order and
arguing for a relatively small change. Thus, the use of fi eld trials to inter-
vene in agriculture is a fundamentally conservative approach to change.
By focusing on this type of change, fi eld trials attempt a kind of repair as
maintenance that may preclude larger, more transformative changes in
agriculture. Recall the entomology advisor's fi eld trial to demonstrate the
effi cacy of an insecticide that controls insects by regulating their growth
cycle. This advisor wanted growers to adopt a new chemical, but he also
hoped that growers would embrace a new way of thinking about insect
control—one that considered the whole valley as the place for pest man-
agement. Growers were hesitant to accept this method of control because
it did not fi t with their current way of “seeing” a fi eld and its insects.
Getting growers to see in this new way will take a transformation, not
maintenance, and fi eld trials may not be as effective for this kind of
change.
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In addition to taking a conservative approach, fi eld trials conducted on
growers' land may serve to reproduce inequality among growers, especially
along the axis of social class. I occasionally heard advisors and others in
the Salinas Valley farm industry claim that there “are no small lettuce [or
