Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
agreements with the Lettuce Board. The researcher could survive the ill will
of the Lettuce Board and fi nd other funding sources for her campus-based
research, but the advisor could not afford to alienate the board and needed
to treat the confl ict much more delicately.
This case is instructive for exploring the tensions that can surface in
collaborative projects to minimize the environmental impact of agricul-
ture. In addition, the DM case points to the complex politics surrounding
science and the repair of environmental problems associated with the farm
industry. What is really being repaired through the DM project? It is inter-
esting to note which actors were most in danger of becoming outsiders in
the eyes of the industry, and for what reasons. Although the boundary
between inside and outside is often drawn by marking off science from
politics, both the Davis researcher and the plant pathology advisor risked
outsider status by taking a very scientistic approach to the DM project.
The Lettuce Board grew impatient with the strict scientifi c standards of the
Davis researcher. The advisor needed to walk a fi ne line to avoid a similar
fate and was frustrated by the board's unwillingness to further test and
refi ne the model. Thus, the farm industry's attempt to send a message to
regulators actually interfered with and hindered these researchers' attempts
to improve environmental practices in agriculture.
The Balance of Power and Social Change
Any serious attempts to repair agriculture's environmental impacts imply
changes to the fundamental practices of farming. Chemical inputs used to
fertilize crops and control pests are an integral part of modern vegetable
farming; it is hard to imagine the scale of production in a place like the
Salinas Valley without them.
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As I have argued throughout this topic,
analyzing the link between practice and power is essential for understand-
ing how repair works (or not) in industrial agriculture. The cases I present
in this chapter raise questions about the character of this repair. What is
being repaired? Can farm advisors really do much to repair environmental
problems in agriculture?
Although the quick test and the weather stations were quite different in
their degree of technological sophistication, they shared a focus on man-
agement of existing practices. In this respect, each solution was an attempt
to maintain the existing system of practice for vegetable farming, a way to
