Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
working for this company and 98 percent of 'em are damn good people.
But I think that's some of the areas that [the UC gets] a little goofy on.
And I think it comes from the top.
CRH:
Does that ever provide a problem here on the local level in Monterey
County, or is it mostly confi ned to the talk up there?
Grower:
Well, it diverts time and resources. . . . Some of [the farm advi-
sors'] time was being diverted into stuff that was not economically viable
and was somebody's pet idea on what oughta be done. And, if I didn't
think it was a cynical, politically correct, way to get-my-budget-increased
kind of crap, it wouldn't bother me. You know if a guy says, “You know
what? I can make 15 migrant Mexican families stay home, and raise straw-
berries and make $30,000 a year, and that's good for society”—I can accept
that. If he genuinely believes it. But when it's, “Just do that crap so nobody
gets on our butt. It's the right thing to do for the politics at the moment”—
I don't like that kind of cynicism.
This grower emphasizes the economics of small farming and frames the
UC's involvement in such undertakings as a cynical waste of resources.
Several other growers echoed these feelings, stressing the larger economic
importance of industrial agriculture. These commercial growers acknowl-
edged that Cooperative Extension had a mission to serve the general
public, but they also argued that the UC needed “to spend a bigger chunk
of time with the problems that our industry has, because our industry is
driving the economy.”
Infl uenced in part by these feelings within the farm industry, the now-
retired cohort of advisors in Monterey County chose to ignore pressures
from the UC to expand their clientele base, and the strong support of
commercial growers undoubtedly helped them maintain this resistance
until their retirement. This cohort of advisors who oversaw the changeover
to discipline-based advising in the late 1950s and 1960s retired in the
1980s. The new group of farm advisors hired to replace them began their
careers as the UC was experimenting with and formally implementing
affi rmative action policies and were not in a position, with respect to their
career trajectory, to simply resist these new programs. In addition, the
current advisors were less likely to express the same kind of conservativism
toward working with the groups targeted through these initiatives.
11
A new
county extension director, appointed in the early 1990s, has been espe-
