Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
agricultural research. Hightower accused campus-based researchers and
extension personnel in the nation's land-grant universities of focusing
exclusively on the problems of “agribusiness,” and he argued that this
attention had led to a decline in small family farms in the United States.
Similarly, other critics, some of them UC researchers themselves, ques-
tioned the UC's agricultural research priorities.
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These writers examined
the “social consequences” of agricultural research and depicted university
scientists, especially those involved with the mechanization of agricultural
production, as major contributors to the increasing concentration of farm-
land and production in the hands of a few large industrial growers. One
farm group even brought a lawsuit against the UC, charging that its devel-
opment of the mechanical tomato harvester in cooperation with equip-
ment manufacturers and farm industry groups constituted a confl ict of
interest and a violation of the Hatch Experiment Station Act's mandate for
land-grant research. Other groups brought charges of racial discrimination
against the Cooperative Extension system, both with respect to its hiring
practices and advisors' clientele. Lawmakers in the California State Legis-
lature questioned the programmatic priorities of Cooperative Extension
and the UC's record on hiring minorities and women for advisor positions
(Scheuring 1995, ch. 7). These critiques led the UC to establish a number
of new programs and policies intended to address these problems. In this
section I describe some of these actions and the responses to them from
advisors, commercial growers, and advocates for small farmers in Monterey
County.
Following these criticisms in the 1970s, the UC developed affi rmative
action policies for Cooperative Extension hiring and encouraged advisors
to develop new clientele through special outreach programs. The univer-
sity created a formal accounting procedure to evaluate individual advisors'
efforts in this area and requires them to provide tallies of the different
racial and ethnic groups they serve in a given year in their county. This
fi gure can then be compared with census fi gures or other data that provide
an overall idea of the population that could potentially be served. This
form of evaluation is a major component of each advisor's yearly reviews
and the formal review process for their promotion within the UC system.
In addition, new efforts at outreach to small growers were initiated through
the Small Farms Center, an organization formed on the Davis campus in
1978 to generate and distribute information tailored to the needs of small
