Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4 treats the issue of farm labor during World War II and details
how growers and advisors tried to respond to a labor crisis during the war
years. Although labor was an important problem for growers during this
period, I show that the war years were actually part of a long series of labor
“crises” in California's farm fi elds. Both within the farm industry and
among experts and intellectuals, this recurring history of labor confl ict
represented an irrational problem that merited a rational solution, but the
defi nitions of the problem and the proposed solutions were diverse. With
these ongoing debates as a larger context, I use the case of the Spreckels
Sugar Company to show how the farm industry and the UC worked to
resolve the farm labor problem in the years before, during, and after World
War II. The case makes a useful example of how labor, technologies, grower
practices, experimental knowledge, and the production of commodities
are enmeshed in a struggle to maintain control over the larger ecology of
power in industrial agriculture.
In chapters 5 and 6, I focus on more contemporary instances of advisor-
grower interaction. Chapter 5 describes how farm advisors use fi eld trials
to collect data on new farm practices and to convince growers that these
new practices are worth adopting. These trials make a useful case for
exploring the role of place in the negotiation over what set of practices
makes up the best way to farm a given piece of land. Typically, growers
are most likely to trust research results that are generated from a trust-
worthy place—often their own land—and so fi eld trials conducted on a
grower's own fi eld can make a powerful demonstration. At the same time,
the place-bound character of these trials raises many issues of control for
the advisors and their experimental practices. Therefore, fi eld trials are an
excellent site for studying in detail how place and practice shape, and are
shaped through, the use of experiment.
Chapter 6 also focuses on the balance that advisors strive to maintain
between their ideals for new farming practices and the investments that
growers may have in existing methods. In this case, the balance concerns
environmental problems related to farming in the Salinas Valley. Today's
farm advisors spend a signifi cant amount of their time working on envi-
ronmental issues, trying to minimize the environmental impacts of farming
in the county. Growers also see these issues as problems, but not in the
same way; they may be primarily interested in defl ecting criticism of their
industry and preventing further government regulation. These alternative
