Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
an appropriate scale for fruit and nut crops. In addition, as some of these
growers became more successful in their chosen niche market industry,
their property values rose, increasing taxes. In response to these factors,
the land and water companies established by these land barons and by the
Southern Pacifi c Railroad (which also owned huge acreages of California
land) began investing in irrigation and other infrastructural improvements
to their landholdings, hoping to subdivide the larger blocks and sell
individual plots in “agricultural colonies,” many just two to ten acres in
size (Liebman 1983, chs. 2, 3; Stoll 1998, ch. 2).
As a result of this subdivision, the period 1890-1920 saw distinct changes
in the landholding patterns of California agriculture. At least on average,
and only temporarily, the state's farms became slightly smaller in scale.
The fate awaiting most of these new colonies of growers was often grim,
given the low prices and oversupply problems that often plagued the fi rst
several decades of the orchard industry in California. If the colonists had
money up-front to purchase a good piece of land with trees that were
already bearing fruit, then they had a much better chance of surviving
these problems. But other, less fortunate growers often had to wait a year
or two before their orchards yielded a crop. If commodity prices were low
when the crop fi nally came in, these growers faced fi nancial ruin.
This was the agricultural ecology that faced Cooperative Extension
during its early years in California, and advisors' expertise was not always
well suited to the problems facing growers in the niche markets. Advisors
often had little experience with these crops, simply because the growers
themselves were creating the techniques needed to grow and market them
on a large scale. Further, the advisors often could not help smaller growers
who fared poorly under postwar market conditions of low prices and too
many orchard crops. Advisors were much better prepared to address under-
production than overproduction.
How was Cooperative Extension supposed to transform agriculture in
California? The tensions and uncertainties are clear in
Progress in Agricul-
tural Extension
, a series of reports by the UC director of Cooperative Exten-
sion, B. H. Crocheron, who felt that Cooperative Extension was sometimes
misunderstood and underappreciated in this period. Throughout reports
that Crocheron wrote just before and after the onset of the Great Depres-
sion, especially 1927 through 1931, he appears torn between the needs
and constraints of smaller growers and the demands of a market economy.
