Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
closely with the Lettuce Board and other commodity boards on these
issues. In this case, however, the Lettuce Board was not giving him a grant
for a project designed and implemented according to his own ideas, with
the kind of freedom from interference described in the previous excerpt.
After their diffi culties with the Davis researcher, the Lettuce Board wanted
specifi c assistance from the plant pathology advisor. The history of this
project and the way that he was brought in to salvage the project made
him uncomfortable with the situation. In another interview, in the early
spring of 1998, he was even more reserved in his opinion of the DM system
and frustrated by the Lettuce Board's and the company's push to imple-
ment it. In this excerpt, he described the many groups at play in the DM
project and their tendency to have different interests from his own:
CRH:
I was wondering if you could talk about what you feel are some
particularly diffi cult problems that you have been able to solve—or maybe
even some that you feel like you really couldn't solve because they were
especially diffi cult.
PlantPath:
OK, . . . how about one that isn't solved yet?
CRH:
Yeah.
PlantPath:
Because the biggest one that I can think of . . . [is] the predic-
tion system for downy mildew on lettuce. . . . [DM is] the most important
disease that the Lettuce Board has identifi ed for . . . [lettuce]. So there's
industry interest. There's lots of funding, because they want this done. And
so [I] jumped in because of that. It's been diffi cult for several reasons. One:
technically it's a very diffi cult issue or system. If you look at all the litera-
ture on [these systems] there's not a whole lot of these systems that work
anywhere in the world.
CRH:
Computer models, you mean?
PlantPath:
Right, where you have a computer model, weather data, and
whatever equipment that [use a] model to predict when the disease is
gonna come. The track record is pretty bad—there's nothing that really
works that well consistently. So it's a challenging technical area. I think
on top of that, I really feel my limitations in this project, in terms of my
own background. Because I'm not a modeler—I haven't worked with mod-
eling systems. . . . This is my fi rst try at it. The project is well within my
scope, because they're not telling me to devise a model. That's been
done—they want me to test it. So that's pretty straightforward, but I feel
