Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The frustrations this advisor faced when trying to serve the niche
market industries of Monterey County were shared by the industry's
growers as well. As County Director A. A. Tavernetti reached retirement
age in the late 1950s, members from the vegetable industry began
pressuring the UC to restructure and expand the Cooperative Extension
staff in Monterey County to better accommodate the research needs
of agriculture in the Salinas Valley, especially the vegetable industry.
William Huffman succeeded Tavernetti as the extension director for
Monterey County in 1958 and was charged with overseeing changes to
the organization and style of farm advising in the county. These changes
abandoned the more common method of commodity-based assign-
ments—advisors' being assigned to a specifi c commodity or group of com-
modities—in favor of a discipline-based format. In this new mode, advisors
were assigned to work in disciplines of applied agricultural science, in-
cluding entomology (study of insects), plant pathology (study of plant
diseases), weed science, soils and irrigation, and agricultural engineering.
Two advisors working at the time of this transition were sent to UC
Davis for graduate training in plant pathology and weed science, and
three others were assigned to the county in the remaining disciplinary
specializations.
As the weed science advisor who was trained during this change described
the situation, the local agricultural industry felt that these specializations
would be much more useful to them than the previous commodity-based
advisor positions. The following excerpt highlights the infl uence of vegeta-
ble industry growers in this transition:
WeedsSci:
And well the growers here, the grower-shipper industry if you
will, were very progressive, in all candidness. This is maybe the part I
should say not to tell, but I'm going to. We weren't used very much in
those days—[the fruit and vegetable industry] would pick up the phone
and call [UC] Davis direct. In those days, professors did a lot of applied
work, and they had answers for these people....This was mid-50s now.
Probably late 50s. So, they were gonna retool, or reconvert this position
to the specialization, and that's when they were thinking the entomolo-
gist, pathologist, and the weed science position . . . and the rationale was,
these grower-shippers wanted that specifi c timely information. . . . So they
[pause] put this squeeze play on the university.
CRH:
So it was kind of from pressure from the—
