Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
crops such as fruit, nut, and vegetable crops that may rely heavily on hand
labor for planting and harvesting, require more intensive use of water and
other farming inputs, and are often much more expensive to produce than
extensive fi eld crops such as corn, wheat, or cotton. The requirements for
intensive crops are offset by the potential for much greater profi t. For
example, in 2003 an average acre of corn in the United States was worth
$334, whereas an acre of head lettuce brought $6,370 (USDA 2004a; 2004b).
At the same time, this acre of lettuce cost thousands of dollars to produce,
creating a situation where the potential risk and profi t for the grower
are both relatively high. For this reason, farming in California has often
been likened to the fortune-seeking, risk-taking ways of the miners who
fl ocked to the state during the Gold Rush. This characterization has often
been used in a pejorative sense, as when Carey McWilliams, in his sweep-
ing work of social criticism,
California: The Great Exception
(1949), wrote,
“The soil [in California] is really mined, not farmed” (101). But the capital-
intensive character of California's niche market industries does encourage
a kind of speculator's logic. This logic was emphasized to me in an inter-
view with the owner of a large fertilizer company in the Salinas Valley,
who described the attitude growers in niche markets often take toward
growing conditions:
You don't make money in the produce business when everything is right. If the
weather is beautiful and you get a good crop, the odds are you're gonna sell it for
[little profi t]. It's just when something happens—weather events or something like
that—that causes a decrease in production and the market goes up.
The ideal for the niche market grower, in this view, is for a catastrophic
event to destroy everyone else's crop while leaving the grower's own crop
healthy and ready for a seller's market. This “moral economy” of niche
market growers places a special emphasis on California growers' interest
in controlling their farming environments and helps to explain their atti-
tudes toward and investments in agricultural science.
6
Although agricul-
ture and science may seem like disparate activities, they have some common
features and goals. Perhaps the most fundamental of these similarities
stems from the unpredictability of farming. Industrial agriculture is a
complex built environment, but changes in the weather, shifting pest pres-
sures, and fi ckle markets all make agriculture an uncertain venture. Farming
is organized on a seasonal cycle with the optimistic assumption that condi-
tions will be more or less the same from year to year, but things are almost
