Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of farm advising. PCAs are now largely responsible for the day-to-day
advice that growers receive about particular pest control problems, what
types of controls are available, and which controls to use.
5
Although this
kind of face-to-face interaction between experts and growers has not been
privatized to the extent cited in some reports (at least in California), the
trend toward increasing privatization is clear (Wolf 1998; 2006; Warner
2007, ch. 4).
Second, much of the research that is still done by UC advisors is funded
through private grants from commodity boards or chemical and equip-
ment manufacturers. These private sources of funding have a very strong
infl uence on the kind of work that advisors do, but the availability of
private funding also has wider implications for the future of Cooperative
Extension. For example, the UC is increasingly asking growers to foot the
bill for the salaries and facilities of researchers, items that in the past were
provided through UC and county budgets. The ability and willingness of
growers to underwrite a larger share of the expenses for agricultural science
could entice the UC to continue exploiting this source of support, espe-
cially as budget pressures force it to retrench while still meeting the
demand for new areas of research.
Third, several western European countries, Australia, and New Zealand
have already implemented more fully privatized systems of university-
based agricultural extension, and the UC is moving toward this model
itself. Most of the funding for advisors' research comes from private sources,
and PCAs provide much of the daily advice to growers about pest control.
In this respect, advisors are already engaged in the money hunt that all
university researchers must participate in to support their work. If the UC
asks the industry to provide the salaries and facilities of more researchers,
it will be hard to distinguish this system from the fully privatized extension
systems of other countries.
Given these trends, privatization is already under way, and farm advisors
expressed strong reservations about this process. They speculated that if
extension work became fully privatized, most of their time would be spent
hunting for fi nancial support, and serving smaller, less fi nancially secure
growers would be even harder than it is now. For example, the director of
UC Cooperative Extension in Monterey County voiced concerns about the
potential for privatized agricultural research to limit access to new knowl-
edge about food production:
