Certified crop advisors' knowledge paradigms and pesticide resistance management: A sociological perspective

A major unintended risk of modern US agricultural use of pesticides has been pesticide resistance—addressing it will necessitate a transformation in how agriculture is done, including major structural diversification of management practices and the involvement of a broad community of diverse stakeholders co-producing knowledge. Crop advisors are one group has a high potential impact on what pesticide resistance management strategies and farmers' information networks. However, there is minimal research on how crop advisors approach the topic of pesticide resistance with their customers. We explore this topic through a series of regional focus groups intended to uncover crop advisors’ perspectives on structural barriers to resistance management and use of reflexivity along with various knowledge paradigms. We find that crop advisors recognize complex structural barriers to effective pesticide resistance management; most were reflexively critical of simplistic, reductionist approaches and preferred a more iterative format. However, they were often constrained from taking action on this preference due to structures based in the capitalist industrialized US agricultural system. We propose that reflexivity is present but insufficient to alter patterns of pesticide resistance information and management without significant structural alterations.