Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
culture into the industrial age. But once Cooperative Extension had been
established, a key question remained: what exactly should Cooperative
Extension do to make U.S. farming better? In this chapter I describe and
analyze the cultural context for extension work in its early years. The
overarching frame for the debate over the status of U.S. agriculture was
a dichotomy between the industrialization of farming and the classic
agrarian ideal of small independent farms. These contrasting ideals shaped
the debate over what was wrong with agriculture and how it ought to be
fi xed. In addition, key ideas in Progressive thought—especially the value
placed on expert knowledge and effi cient methods of working and living—
provided an intellectual and political context in which the state could seek
to transform farming communities by sending agents into each county
of the nation to intervene in a practical and local fashion. Once in place,
however, Cooperative Extension advisors found that expertise and effi -
ciency did not change agriculture for the better in and of themselves, and
that growers did not necessarily appraise these values in the same ways.
The debates about how to improve agriculture were not resolved by
Cooperative Extension; instead, these competing discourses formed the
basis of a kind of institutional identity crisis for farm advisors. Cooperative
Extension was born at the same time that the California farm industry was
beginning to take shape, and so its identity and mission were tied up in
the same questions about what was the best kind of agriculture for the state
and nation. Farm advisors had new techniques and technologies to offer
growers, but advisors' expertise was not necessarily useful for all growers in
the same ways. Therefore, the historical development of Cooperative Exten-
sion makes a good case for exploring situations where repair itself is a con-
tested category and actors negotiate the techniques and extent of repair.
Understanding this complexity is important for understanding the struc-
ture of Cooperative Extension and the work of advisors. Cooperative Exten-
sion was created as an institution to promote transformational change in
U.S. agriculture and rural life, but advisors could not simply wipe existing
practices, structures, and power relations of agriculture away. Their work
began in a context of industrialization that had already been reshaping
agriculture in California for several decades. In this way, the work of farm
advisors helped to create the ecology of industrial agriculture in California,
but this nascent ecology of power also shaped Cooperative Extension.
