Search Results

This chapter explores the use of animals for food and the realities of farmed-animal law. It shows how farmed animals receive no effective legal protection in the U.S.A., and details how the law to determine whether or not a farming practice is illegally cruel has been altered to transfer the power from the court to the farmed-animal industry. The chapter provides a concrete sense of the extent of the problem and of what should be done about it.

This chapter focuses on the farm labor strikes during the 1930s and 1970s that led to a struggle between the growers, farmworkers, and their sympathizers and scientists, along with state-based resources to maintain or transform the social and material order of California’s agriculture. Dependence of the niche market farm industries on the often-seasonal migrant workers has proven to be a problem for the growers as they have not been able to maintain control over the labor during the challenging times for them. The chapter presents the point of view of growers, laborers, and the state of California regarding farm labor, which can be problematic for California agriculture. It also presents the perspective of the critics who defined the labor problem as a social conflict and suggestions such as including improving the working conditions of farm laborers and dividing the farms into smaller units.

This chapter focuses on the structural elements of Cooperative Extension and the farm industry’s political and financial relationship, along with the factors responsible for the interaction between farm advisors and growers. Changes in the work profile of advisors to suit the local farm industry’s research needs, including disciplinary specialization movements of farm advisors stationed in Monterey County, are discussed. Factors including adapting to particular conditions and farm industry practices helped the farm advisors to transform farming ecology. The example of Monterey County adopting discipline-based advising is presented along with the fact that the niche market industries’ power and influence has shaped the work that advisors choose.

This book focuses on the cooperation between scientists and agricultural growers over solving problems associated with building California’s farm industry. The use of methods such as participant-observation fieldwork, semistructured interviews, and analysis of historical documents for understanding the importance of the interrelationship between science and industrial agriculture is discussed. Changes in the U.S. agriculture agrarian ideal, with respect to industrialization and social change during the nineteenth century, are explored. Cooperative Extension history, in the context of the U.S., California, and the Salinas Valley, is discussed along with the response of growers and advisors at the time of the farm labor crisis during World War II. The book presents information on the use of field trials by farm advisors to collect data on new farm practices.

This chapter traces the origins of certification programs in the fisheries sector and how the process was influenced by the Marine Stewardship Council's (MSC) institutional design. It discusses the three separate paths through which information relating to fisheries certification and labeling was transmitted: the organic certifiers' application of the ideas of organic husbandry to the burgeoning fish farming industry; the World Wide Fund for Nature's attempt to replicate in fisheries its experience with the Forest Stewardship Council; and the response of producers in North America to building campaigns directed at fisheries. It also examines the MSC's focus on ocean capture and environmental considerations.