Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
change a system that they themselves constructed and promoted, main-
taining the system while mitigating its environmental impact?
For farm advisors, addressing environmental problems is a kind of double
repair—a repair of a repair—where they attempt to modify or curtail
farming methods that Cooperative Extension promoted in the fi rst place.
It is only slightly an exaggeration to say that the ecology of power in niche
market industrial agriculture was founded on the very technologies that
are now most implicated in the environmental impacts from industrial-
scale farming. Salinas Valley growers are largely dependent on very inten-
sive use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, raising the question of
whether and how much their use could be reduced. Whereas in the past
a new pest could be addressed through the use of chemical interventions,
environmentally aware solutions may require increased costs and more
work on the part of growers. Further, the often controversial nature of
environmental issues only exacerbates this diffi culty. Growers in Monterey
County and California are often portrayed as big fans of research-based
intervention, but what happens when science says that agriculture is a
threat to the environment? Confl ict over environmental problems and
agricultural research may then spill over into growers' perception of science
and its roles in repairing agriculture. In these situations, just as the agri-
cultural industry mobilizes to solve the kinds of problems described in the
previous chapters, growers may deploy their political, economic, and
organizational resources to attack the defi nition of agriculture as an envi-
ronmental problem.
These tensions between established farming practices and discourses,
impacts on the environment, and attempts at change are the subject of
this chapter. Because environmental problems invoke both the practical
structure and discursive meanings that compose agricultural production,
they make an excellent case for exploring how repair encompasses these
multiple levels of social order. Because many environmental issues are less
obvious than the sudden damage from a swarm of insects or an outbreak
of disease, there is often confl ict over whether a problem exists at all, much
less what the best solution is. This ambiguity creates an opening for actors
to promote their own defi nition of a problem through rhetoric and infl u-
ence, thus forming yet a third way of thinking about environmental prob-
lems in agriculture, as political problems. When growers and others resist
the designation of agriculture as an environmental problem, claiming that
