Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
growers. Several farm advisors with small-farms assignments were also
placed in counties throughout the state. Finally, the UC and the state
sponsored several programs for educating and providing fi nancial assist-
ance to small growers, especially in the strawberry industry. Former fi eld-
workers, many of them Mexican-Americans, took advantage of these
programs and formed
cooperativas
to produce and market strawberries in
the Santa Cruz and Watsonville areas. In all, there was fl urry of activity in
the UC during this period, as the system scrambled to respond to critiques
at the national, state, and local levels (Scheuring 1995, ch. 7).
In my interviews with the now-retired cohort of Monterey County farm
advisors—the advisors who were fi rst impacted by these new programs—
their reactions were mostly negative. By the late 1970s, when the UC began
encouraging advisors to work more closely with minority populations and
small growers, Monterey County advisors had been working in their disci-
plinary specializations for nearly 20 years, and their focus on research-
based service to commercial growers and the commodity boards was well
established. As white men, they seemed puzzled and even offended by calls
to work proactively with new clientele groups:
Retired Advisor:
A lot of us old-timers got frustrated in this era when we
did start getting some inputs that we weren't spending enough time with
minorities. And our natural rebuff was, “Hey, the door's open there.
Anybody can walk in and we're not gonna refuse 'em.” And that was
always our retort, that we didn't feel we had to be proactive and go and
knock on doors of a Japanese guy or a Finnish guy or an Armenian [laugh-
ing] or a Hispanic guy. We were here, and, we liked to think, a grower
acknowledged that, hey, there's a source of information. Now the only—
trying to look realistic—the only criticism might be, is that we had a lan-
guage barrier. Yes, maybe they never heard of extension, and particularly
if they came recently from the Third World or another country. Uh, but
the traditionalists knew who we were. Even the new guy starting out, he
might not be [on the] magnitude of [Big Grower X] or [Big Grower Y],
but...they knew who we were and they would come and ask for
information.
Retired Advisor:
There is still a general, good respect for university work
here . . . for a lot of the university work. You expect agriculture to be politi-
cally, socially quite conservative, and they're not in favor at all of a lot of
