Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ing that new strain of mildew on the lettuce?” or, “What do you know
about that?” If you're not aware of it you hear about it, and it gives you a
chance to see if there's a need to get involved.
The thing with caulifl ower verticillium . . . it was one of my fi rst big
projects when I came here in 1990. And the manager for [Company X] just
called me and said, “I want to show you this fi eld. We think it's something
unusual and it's wiping out the whole fi eld—it's just turning yellow. Will
you take a ride with me?” And, so I went out for a ride and that turned
out to be the start of a project that went four years and we got a pretty
generous amount of funding—probably close to $40,000. Which is—that's
pretty good for me.
CRH:
Does caulifl ower have a [commodity] board?
PlantPath:
No, it was informal. It was a big enough problem to where the
major caulifl ower growers just funded it. Just contributed to a pot. So it
resulted in a nice project. Got some publications out of that and identifi ed
a new problem for them. It came out of an informal encounter.
With advisors' move toward specialization and the amount of money
made available to them for research projects, working on the problems of
large growers is not a question—one simply makes sure to work on their
problems in order to remain in the good graces of the commodity boards,
but also, of course, to impact the growers who are farming the majority of
the land in the valley.
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Thus, the disciplinary structure of farm advising in
Monterey County, the availability of research money, the nature of com-
mercial growers' problems, the publication demands of the university, and
the intractability of many problems facing smaller growers all contribute
to advisors' tendency to spend more time on the research and problem-
solving needs of large growers.
Critiques of Cooperative Extension's Ties to Industrial Agriculture
The move toward research-based extension work has been challenged,
both by contemporary advocates of the agrarian, small-farm ideal and by
critics who charge that the UC system, particularly Cooperative Extension,
discriminates by ethnicity and class in its selection of clientele. The publi-
cation of Jim Hightower's
Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times
in 1973 launched a
renewed debate on the mission of the land-grant schools and state-funded
