Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
tion, and control over the places, practices, and institutions of this produc-
tion yields capital and power.
4
Cooperative Extension and Public Support of Agricultural Research
Nearly every year, when the U.S. Congress debates large appropriations
bills, or when a new farm bill comes up for funding, public attention is
drawn to the role of farm subsidies in U.S. agriculture. News stories about
millions of dollars to fund the storage of peanuts, to support tobacco
growers, or to fi nance research on the “sex lives” of insect pests provide a
convenient way for journalists to manufacture controversy and for politi-
cians to portray themselves as fi scal conservatives. The very terms used to
describe appropriations for a specifi c project in a particular location—
pork
and
earmarks
—come to us via the farm. Agricultural subsidies are a complex
set of economic and political structures, and a full discussion of them is
beyond the scope of this topic. But, at base, subsidies are a method of
repair: they are meant as a fi nancial or technical inducement to change
grower practices and reorient their farm ecology. As such, it makes sense
to consider Cooperative Extension itself as a kind of farm subsidy and to
examine the logic of funding a nationwide system of agricultural expertise
when fewer than 2 percent of Americans continue to farm. As more and
more people have few or no connections to farming, who still believes
that farming is a public good that needs science for protection and im-
provement? In short, who still thinks that farming needs state-sponsored
repair?
During my conversations with the farm advisors in Monterey County,
we often talked about the privatization of applied agricultural research.
The advisors felt they had good relations with the local farm industry
and could expect continued support from growers, but they were less
optimistic about the budgetary priorities of the UC and the county. In
fact, there are several factors that point to the increasing privatization of
advising work and the likelihood that this trend will continue. First,
though private, for-profi t sources of advice in farming have been around
for a long time, the emergence of Pest Control Advisors (PCAs) in
California and other new professions associated with agricultural exper-
tise has had an especially strong impact on the move toward privatization
