Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
bumbling in its control of the local. Unlike the projects described by Scott,
Cooperative Extension was intended to intervene on the local level by
specifi cally accounting for the importance of place and practice. Although
it has meant different things to different people, Cooperative Extension
was designed as a way of infl uencing farm practices by putting a network
of experts directly in contact with farm communities. Given this differ-
ence, farm advisors' work at fi rst seems more in line with the kind of
knowledge-based techniques of mastery that Foucault describes. But when
the state does intervene in a decentralized way, the results are mixed, and
do not always resemble the kind of totalizing power that Foucault attributes
to the rise of expert systems of control (Mukerji 1997, 321). As a result, my
analysis here is aimed in a slightly different direction, toward understand-
ing how these experts themselves—farm advisors in this case—become
entangled in existing and ongoing power struggles that tie local places and
practices to the state and the wider farm industry.
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As depicted in fi gure
1.2, the knowledge and expertise of advisors (and the university) has infl u-
ence on other state actors and the farm industry, but these same groups
also shape the work of advisors through their own sources of infl uence,
including wealth and political regulation. In the face of constant change
and crisis from many sources, Cooperative Extension has served to stabilize
and reproduce the ecology of power in industrial agriculture, repairing
elements on every level of this ecology. At the same time, the story of
Cooperative Extension is just as much about how local actors resist and
reshape state institutions. As one example, during a series of labor crises
brought on by the onset of World War II, the farm industry demanded
that Cooperative Extension advisors organize and ration the use of diverse
sources of farm labor, essentially acting as a kind of labor contractor (see
chapter 4). Farm advisors cross many boundaries in the course of their
work, but the common thread among this work is repair; Cooperative
Extension is an institution of repair. Its mandate to improve the productiv-
ity of agricultural communities has often served to preserve and maintain
the power structure of the local social and material ecology.
The Structure of This Topic
Science and industrial agriculture are engaged in a long process of histori-
cal and cultural coproduction. Because I want to understand and see this
