Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Ironically, although the specialist and the farm advisor working on the
project both agreed that regulation would be the quickest way to change
grower practices, neither of them was very confi dent in the ability of the
state to implement a program that would effectively balance the needs of
the environment and the farm industry. Just as growers expressed a wari-
ness regarding the intentions of regulators and their potential misunder-
standing of the larger ecology of agriculture, so the researchers declared
similar worries:
Soil/Water:
The state will probably step in pretty soon, because some-
thing like half of the groundwater in the southern part of the valley is
unsafe to drink. The problem is, you can't just stop putting fertilizer on
crops. It doesn't matter how clean your water is if you don't have any food
to eat.
CRH:
What about the reaction [to the initial success of the quick test
system] from the regulatory agencies—they must be sitting up and saying,
“We were right.”
UC Specialist:
They are excited by it, but I've tried to work with them to
get them to see the realities of production ag. These agencies are mostly
staffed with people who have backgrounds in biology or chemistry but
have no experience or sense of the industry. They need to have an idea of
how growers live their lives and do their work. The growers are not Lud-
dites or [intentional] polluters. They have minimal profi ts and already have
a lot of regulations and paperwork to deal with.
These research team members implied that an outright ban on fertilizers
would be impractical. Once again, the researchers described their roles as
leaders for change, but for balanced change. In addition, they talked about
providing leadership to both the industry and
the regulatory state, trying
to make them see the “realities” of the full farm ecology. The research team
hoped to use the “subtle” edge of change as a selling point to renegotiate
the meaning of the quick test method as a reasonable and balanced mode
of change. This process can be frustrating: at this stage in the negotiations
over environmental change, the quick test did not satisfy the ideals of
either the industry or the regulators.
When I conducted follow-up interviews with the Salinas Valley farm
advisors in the spring of 2003, little had changed. Nitrate contamination
