Review by Choice Review
A historian's perspective sheds new light on the growth of fruit monoculture in California as a microcosm of the economic, sociological, and ecological consequences of shifting from diversified family farming to large areas devoted to single crops. Monoculture is the ultimate expression of Ricardian comparative advantage, selecting crops uniquely suited to the local soil and climate. But while monoculture reaps the promised private financial rewards of specialization based on comparative advantage, it also creates some substantial costs that are long-term and/or social rather than private in nature. For fruit and many other forms of monoculture, those costs include the loss of biodiversity, increased use of pesticides (monoculture is very vulnerable to insect pests), and the creation of an underclass of migrant workers to cope with a pattern of long periods of little activity punctuated by peak demands at harvest time. Stoll also documents the marketing challenges, the development of marketing cooperatives, the irrigation of the Central Valley, and the evolution of the agricultural extension service in the context of the emergence of California's orchards and vines. Well written and documented, this publication is a good case study of the industrialization of agriculture. All collections. H. H. Ulbrich; Clemson University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
