Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the social programs that the university has gotten into. Diverted a lot of
resources over to that. So [commercial growers] don't appreciate that.
Extension has made changes along those lines, and extension here [in
Monterey County] has not changed as much in that regard as some other
areas. We've remained almost exclusively agriculturally oriented, with the
exception of the home advisor program. There's been some pressures—in
the last few years [of my career] there was a lot of pressure for us to develop
all sorts of programs in these areas, even on us [farm advisors], which I
thought was kind of foolish. So we would write up a few things, but in
reality, we stayed pretty much—we knew where our priorities
had
to lie,
and where our support was coming from....The new [advisor] coming
along has got a little bit more diffi cult job, I think. Because his advance-
ment is at stake—he's got to show this and show that. And a lot of those
fi gures that went in all over the state, I think a lot of that, a lot of the
social programs, low-income programs—not so much with the home advi-
sors but with those of us in the ag fi eld—there was just an awful lot of
smoke with that stuff that went in. It was a lot of effort, a lot of planning,
a lot of paperwork that, I think, for all intents and purposes, just stacked
up in some room and never was looked at again. A lot of time and effort
and money went into that, and I think, with very little good, practical
results.
According to these advisors, the door was open to all, but they could
not be expected to make radical changes to their programs in order to reach
out to new clientele groups, particularly if this took them away from work
with larger growers. They emphasized that they were willing to help smaller
growers—the weed science advisor's discussion of his work with barley
growers in the 1960s is just one example—but that growers had to show
some initiative of their own. However, under this scenario, not all ethnic
groups of small growers could take equal advantage of extension resources.
In a study of Monterey County strawberry growers, Daniel Mountjoy
(1996) found that Anglo- and Japanese-American growers were more likely
to cite farm advisors as trusted sources of information on farming practices
than were Mexican-American growers, who were more likely to cite
respected growers in their peer group. Although language was sometimes
a barrier, Mountjoy's analysis shows that cultural differences among the
groups constituted the most important distinction. Given these differ-
ences, expecting growers to actively approach advisors only exacerbated
