Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cially important during the war years), and advice to growers in the coun-
ty's nascent lettuce industry. Early in 1920 a committee of the Monterey
County Farm Bureau's board of directors met with their county's Board of
Supervisors to secure a $1,000 appropriation to hire an assistant farm
advisor to work with Mayhew.
4
After a few assistants shuffl ed through the
county in the early 1920s, A. A. Tavernetti, a native of Monterey County,
was hired; he was promoted to farm advisor when Mayhew left for a
statewide leadership position with UC Cooperative Extension in 1924.
Tavernetti would remain Monterey County's head farm advisor for the
next 34 years, until his retirement in 1958. In addition, Monterey County's
fi rst home demonstration agent, Mabel Eager, began work in August 1922.
Eager began a child nutrition plan intended to raise the weights of farm
children to “normal” levels. She also gave “Americanization” courses to
Japanese men and women, intended to teach them “American customs of
serving food.”
5
Overall, Cooperative Extension's fi rst two decades in Monterey County
mirrored the experience of farm advisors in other California counties:
success with fi eld crops such as wheat and barley as well as with cattle
ranching and dairying, but less impact on the niche market industries that
began to defi ne California agriculture in the 1910s and 1920s. The niche
for the Salinas Valley was fresh produce, especially cool-season vegetable
crops such as lettuce, celery, broccoli, and caulifl ower. Unlike the climate
in California's Central Valley, where temperatures regularly exceed 100°F
in the summer months, the climate in the Salinas Valley stays cooler and
moister, created by ocean air currents drawn down the valley from Monterey
Bay. Before 1920 the availability of these delicate crops had been seasonal
and costly, but growers engineered a new system of year-round vegetable
production in the Salinas, Imperial, and Santa Maria valleys, shipping their
produce to points as far as New York via rail on boxcars packed with ice.
The post-World War I era brought a huge increase in the demand for and
production of lettuce and other vegetables. In 1916 a two-horse team made
the fi rst shipment of lettuce from Salinas to San Francisco; only fourteen
years later, in 1930, Salinas Valley growers were shipping thousands of
boxcars of lettuce to points across the country.
6
The rise of the vegetable industry was full of technical challenges. A fresh
head of lettuce is vulnerable to a wide variety of pests and is quickly per-
ishable once harvested and transported to market. Because the industry
