Working the mission: Science and industry in California agriculture

Food is important—not just for human life, but also for the stability and legitimacy of states. In the second half of the nineteenth century, agricultural scientists, farm interests, and state officials in the United States pushed for the creation of a system of agricultural science and education, culminating in the nation's “land-grant” university system. This system was charged with a “mission” to improve farming in US, but from its beginning few have agreed on the actual direction and methods to use in this project. In this thesis I develop a “repair” perspective that I use to analyze the ambiguity surrounding the land-grant system's mission. Expanding on the ethnomethodological meaning of the term, I use repair as a way of understanding how social groups negotiate the shape and meaning of specific socio-material contexts or “orders.” Although science-based intervention was meant to repair farm communities, I argue that it has also been used to maintain specific practices and power relations within farm industries.;The data for this thesis comes from my ethnographic fieldwork with a group of University of California (UC) Cooperative Extension “farm advisors.” Farm advisors are employees of the university but are stationed in specific counties of the State, with a mandate to improve the production practices of farming in their particular county. Advisors work directly with growers, and the highly localized and interactional character of farm advising work makes it very useful as a site for studying the influence of state-funded science on agriculture and vice-versa. The main portion of my fieldwork was conducted in 1997–1998, when I spent nearly a year living in Monterey County, California and working with the county's farm advisors. Monterey County is home to the Salinas Valley, a very important vegetable growing region for both California and US.;The individual chapters of this thesis examine different historical and contemporary themes, each focused on specific modes of interaction between Cooperative Extension advisors and their farm clientele. These themes include the ongoing negotiations surrounding farm advisors' work and mission; growers' and advisors' responses to a labor crisis during World War Two; farm advisors' use of “field trials” to collect data on new farm practices and to convince growers that these new practices are worth adopting; and the tricky balance advisors must maintain while addressing environmental problems, in order to maintain good relations with the farm industry. Using these diverse episodes and contexts I demonstrate how repair works on multiple levels of analysis and through differing constructions of “crisis.”...