Download e-book for kindle: Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and by Christopher R. Henke

Just south of San Francisco lies California's Salinas Valley, the center of a multi-billion buck agricultural that dominates U. S. vegetable construction. How did the sleepy valley defined within the tales of John Steinbeck turn into the nation's "salad bowl"? In Cultivating technological know-how, Harvesting Power, Christopher R. Henke explores the ways in which technology helped construct the Salinas Valley and California's broader farm undefined. Henke makes a speciality of the case of collage of California "farm advisors," scientists stationed in counties during the kingdom who've progressed to aid growers care for crises starting from hard work shortages to plagues of bugs. those disruptions in what Henke phrases commercial agriculture's "ecology of strength" supply a window onto how agricultural scientists and growers have collaborated -- and struggled -- in shaping this undefined. via those interventions, Henke argues, technological know-how has served as a mechanism of fix for commercial agriculture. Basing his research on specific ethnographic and old learn, Henke examines the heritage of state-sponsored farm advising -- specifically, its roots in innovative period politics -- and appears at either previous and current practices by means of farm advisors within the Salinas Valley. He is going directly to research particular examples, together with the answer of a farm exertions problem in the course of international struggle II on the Spreckels Sugar corporation, using box trials for selling new farming practices, and farm advisors' and growers' responses to environmental matters. past this, Henke argues that the idea that of fix is largely appropriate to different situations and that services will be deployed extra regularly to inspire swap for the way forward for American agriculture.