Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
broccoli, or grape, or...] growers here.” But smaller farms do exist in
Monterey County and especially in adjacent Santa Cruz and San Benito
counties, where many of the advisors had cross-county responsibilities.
Perhaps the best example of the continued coexistence of industrial-scale
production and small farms is the strawberry industry. The marketing and
distribution of strawberries on California's Central Coast is dominated by
a few very large corporations, but a signifi cant portion of the actual pro-
duction of strawberries is done on small farms, often by former farmwork-
ers who were able to buy or lease a small plot of land after several years of
fi eldwork (usually less than 50 acres). In some cases, it is the corporations
themselves who lease the land to these small growers, in an arrangement
that is essentially a form of sharecropping (Wells 1996).
Just as the rich and the poor tend to live in different places in urban
areas, wealth and the quality of land are also closely correlated in the case
of agriculture: rich farmers have good land, and poor farmers tend to work
on land with inferior soils, water, and drainage. In this way, a fi eld trial
that tests a new technique or technology on the land of wealthier growers
may not be as applicable to land farmed by poorer growers. As I noted in
chapter 3, research conducted by Daniel Mountjoy (1996) shows that
Mexican-American strawberry growers on California's Central Coast are
less likely to cite Cooperative Extension as a trusted source of information
when compared with white and Asian-American growers. Mountjoy cites
cultural differences as the main barrier that prevents Mexican-American
growers from taking better advantage of Cooperative Extension and other
state-based resources. But if place matters for growers, and they assess new
practices against an ecology that includes an expanded, sociomaterial
conception of place, then research developed for one kind of place may
not be as appropriate for another.
This is where the funding of fi eld trials becomes an important factor
in understanding the connection between place, trust, and change. As
employees of the university and of the state, advisors' research results are
meant to be a public resource, free and accessible to all. In this respect,
fi eld trials, as experiments meant to elicit consent through public demon-
stration, should be open to all, regardless of whose land and money are
used to conduct them. Advisors put a great deal of effort into disseminating
these results as widely as possible, through fi eld days, meetings, publica-
tions, and other methods of publicity. In the end, however, the risk and
