Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
came up in our conversation. This advisor had been speaking generally
about his relationships with commodity boards, and I include an excerpt
here because it shows the power of commodity boards to shape research
priorities. This interview took place in the fall of 1997, about three months
after my initial conversation with the plant pathology advisor about the
DM system:
Advisor:
If you have a history of delivering on what you said you'll do,
then [the commodity boards] tend to pretty much back off and let you do
that the way you feel you need to do it. If you have a history of proposing
to do something and then you're not coming up with an answer, or
coming up with something that they don't feel is useful, something they
don't understand, then they're gonna fi nd a way so that it's more workable
for them.
CRH:
Is that what you were saying before, about, how when you fi rst
[started working for Cooperative Extension], you had to let the Lettuce
Board kind of get to know you?
Advisor:
Yeah, that's exactly why I said it.
CRH:
And you develop a reputation as someone who can do something
without screwing it up or whatever?
Advisor:
Right. And I will ask and answer questions that are appropriate
to them in the fi eld. An example of something that's happened recently
with the Lettuce Board, is that...they gave a grant to [DavisSci] from
Davis to do some modeling work for downy mildew. You might want to
talk to [PlantPath] about this because he's getting involved with this and
it's kind of an interesting situation. Basically, she was doing the very aca-
demic sort of [modeling]...and [the Lettuce Board] tried on numerous
occasions to affect the kind of work that she was doing. And they weren't
really successful with that. So they just...stopped funding her. [The
Lettuce Board] tried [to say], “This is what we want” or, “This is what you're
doing and we're not happy with that; you need to do
this
.” And when she
wasn't willing to do that for them, they said, “OK, fi ne, you're not doing
any more research for us.” They shut it off. And then they go to someone
like [PlantPath] and say, “OK, now [PlantPath] will
you
do this for us?” So
it kind of put him in an awkward position.
Like the advisor in this interview, the plant pathology advisor had a
reputation for providing solutions to local problems and often worked very
