0:07 okay so we're getting into the 1900s here
0:08 here and
0:12 there was a publication by upton sinclair
0:14 sinclair
0:17 i think it was first published in 1905
0:19 perhaps it was written in 1905 and
0:21 published in 1906
0:23 doesn't matter it was right about that
0:24 period of time
0:27 but it was a groundbreaking book because
0:29 it exposed what was going on in the
0:32 chicago meat packing industry
0:33 there were extremely unsanitary
0:36 conditions going on and it wasn't just
0:38 the chicago meat packing industry that
0:40 was just what was being highlighted
0:43 because it was what this
0:45 author often sinclair was able to uncover
0:46 uncover and
0:48 and
0:49 it was appalling
0:51 the things that were going on in the
0:53 meat industry and
0:53 and
0:56 it outraged public it outraged a lot of
0:58 people a lot of people pointed fingers
1:00 at this book saying this is a bunch of
1:06 that what the industry is doing is
1:09 garbage so it actually
1:12 led to a presidential commission to
1:15 generate the neil reynolds report and
1:18 that verified much of what was in that
1:20 book as true
1:22 and certainly
1:25 it led to other
1:28 actions and laws to again protect the public
1:30 public
1:34 so we're still in that late 1900s 1800s
1:37 early 1900s period but we're we got a
1:39 long way to go to fix things to make
1:47 that this whole book the jungle is a
1:50 really important landmark in terms of
1:55 a snapshot in the history of some of the
1:57 bumps and bruises in the agriculture industry
2:01 i
2:03 mentioned the precursor to the
2:05 pure food and drug act earlier but now
2:07 it officially
2:09 becomes the pure food and drug act in 1906
2:11 1906
2:14 and i'm sure that was a lot of the
2:17 outrage and
2:21 public sentiment coming out at the time
2:23 the book the jungle was
2:25 the right book at the right time with
2:27 the right mentality of the population
2:29 ready to hear that and wanting to do
2:31 something about it it's like we can't go
2:35 on living like this this is not okay
2:38 companies can't do that we have to fix it
2:39 it so
2:40 so
2:42 on comes the book along comes
2:43 these new
2:47 regulations our laws and regulations
2:49 pure food and drug act
2:51 as well as the federal meat inspection
2:54 act these are direct
2:57 results of the
3:08 uh
3:11 1910 the insecticide and fungicide act
3:13 was passed it's now called fifra
3:15 fifra
3:18 the fungicide insectis no the federal
3:21 insecticide fungicide
3:23 rodenticide act
3:27 but the earliest pesticide act was 1910.
3:29 we're not even to world war one yet and
3:31 we're already having
3:32 controls and regulations about
3:34 pesticides back then they were really dangerous
3:35 dangerous
3:37 they still are but at least they're
3:40 highly regulated we have safe ways of
3:42 handling them but
3:46 it was bad in the late 1800s early 1900s
3:49 the first farm bureau farm bureau is a
3:51 massively important organization in
3:54 agriculture there's the federal farm
3:56 bureau and all of the state's farm
3:58 bureaus and county farm bureaus we have
4:01 our own monterey county farm bureau
4:05 right in salinas and the very first one
4:09 woodrow wilson in the department of
4:17 really important to understand how
4:20 workers were being abused
4:23 work long hours poor pay
4:25 totally outrageous things
4:28 going on in terms of how businesses were
4:30 handling the workforce and
4:34 we needed some rules
4:36 rules
4:37 to say no
4:39 this people
4:41 need lives people need protections
4:43 people need
4:45 to be able to
4:48 have some rules to protect them it's not
4:50 just about you do whatever you want
4:52 business because it's all about profit
4:54 it still feels that way sometimes but we
4:56 have to be thankful for all the things
4:57 that happened
4:59 in the last
5:08 and it's because of things like this
5:10 department of labor act that allows us
5:14 some of the protections we have today
5:17 1914 the smith-lever act formalized
5:21 cooperative agriculture extension work
5:23 so we have that till today we have our
5:26 farm advisors office in salinas on
5:28 abbott street and
5:29 and
5:32 so in california it's all done through
5:34 the university of california largely
5:36 through uc davis and
5:38 and
5:39 so we have all this all of this
5:43 extension work which uses the resources
5:45 of the university system and the college
5:48 land grant system to perform
5:50 agricultural research
5:53 and use that agricultural research to
5:56 improve our ability to grow
5:59 effectively to
6:02 control pests and diseases effectively
6:04 and then get that information
6:12 [Music]
6:14 in most counties they actually organized
6:17 through farm bureaus initially and the
6:20 smith labor act did the extension work
6:22 under the umbrella of the
6:25 farm bureaus now it's done primarily
6:28 through universities and farm bureaus
6:31 have been more of an education
6:35 going towards the farmers and
6:38 lobbying going towards our politicians
6:44 so i will say this
6:47 since i mentioned the word lobbying
6:49 a lot of people think of lobbyists as
6:52 something that's a bad thing and
6:56 uncontrolled money in a in politics is
6:58 not a good thing i will definitely agree
6:59 with that
7:02 but people and industries do need voices
7:04 because if i'm
7:06 a legislator
7:08 in sacramento
7:10 i might be
7:11 formerly a school teacher i might
7:14 formally be formerly being
7:18 an attorney or a carpenter who knows
7:20 what my background is but i don't know
7:22 everything i can't know about all
7:24 industries so i need people to tell me
7:27 what's going on in agriculture
7:29 i need to be educated so i can make a
7:31 good decision as a
7:34 representative of my elected
7:36 constituents and that's the purpose of lobbying
7:38 lobbying
7:41 that's a really crucial purpose for lobbying
7:42 lobbying
7:44 you need lobbyists period
7:45 period
7:47 the problem is
7:55 mixed mixings of lobbying and money
7:57 and we will
8:00 support your candidacy in order to
8:04 do what we want vote the way we want
8:06 take this piece of
8:10 legislation that we as lobbyists wrote and
8:11 and
8:14 if you can push this into law we really
8:16 appreciate it by the way here's a
8:18 hundred thousand bucks for your
8:20 re-election campaign
8:22 that's where the problem
8:25 uh begins it's all about money where the
8:26 problem is
8:28 if you forget about
8:31 the money part as a
8:33 realize that's a separate issue
8:36 lobbying is crucial
8:39 you need people who can
8:48 individuals come from public
8:50 public
8:52 representatives who understand various
8:56 issues and educate your legislature legislators
8:58 legislators prior
8:59 prior
9:02 to the development of or during the
9:05 development of new laws and regulations
9:07 there's no way they can do a good job if
9:09 they don't have lobbyists
9:12 and so we have the farm bureau as one of
9:15 the major lobbying organizations
9:23 um so i think you've got a little bit of
9:25 my politics in there i try to keep it
9:27 out as much as i can here and there but
9:29 i think that's an important one lobbying
9:30 i think is something that's getting a
9:32 bad name
9:34 for the wrong reasons lobbying is
9:38 important lobbying is crucial we need it
9:40 what we need to do is get money and lobbying
9:42 lobbying separated
9:43 separated
9:46 that's when you corrupt the system anyway
9:47 anyway
9:51 on to the next one 1915 the clayton act
9:54 um it exempts unions from the sherman
9:56 antitrust act
9:58 huge remember i mentioned before about
10:01 antitrust you can't get together
10:04 to work out some sort of a back room
10:11 manipulate the market
10:16 so
10:18 what about a union
10:21 businesses were saying no no no unions
10:24 are illegal you can't have people coming
10:27 together and working on these deals and
10:30 you you know you've got the uh
10:32 farmworkers union which didn't exist
10:34 back then but let's just say the farm
10:38 workers union with farm workers from
10:40 40 different companies coming together
10:43 to try to negotiate working conditions
10:45 and safety conditions and all these
10:47 other things
10:49 that are important for
10:50 for
10:52 the workers
10:54 because that would be considered a
10:57 violation of antitrust and in a way
10:59 they were right the way the sherman
11:02 antitrust act was written you could
11:05 argue that unions were illegal
11:08 and so the clayton act came in to say no
11:10 no no no that's not the purpose individuals
11:12 individuals
11:15 don't have power
11:17 as individuals
11:19 businesses hold all the cards and all
11:22 the power so businesses
11:26 must comply with anti-trust to protect the
11:27 the uh
11:28 uh
11:32 population the public and the workers but
11:33 but
11:37 individuals can create unions to give
11:39 them some sort of
11:44 equal power to negotiate and discuss and
11:46 work out deals
11:47 deals
11:49 with business
11:51 so now the union
11:53 has the ability
11:56 to have some power to negotiate working
11:58 conditions for the workers
12:01 with their respective businesses
12:05 and so this 1915 clayton act is huge
12:07 and there's a lot of different sentiment about
12:08 about
12:11 pro-union anti-union and i've heard a
12:14 lot of anti-union talk over the last 10 years
12:15 years
12:17 and people talking about how um
12:18 um
12:21 unions do nothing but create lazy
12:22 workers and
12:26 um and protect people who don't do
12:27 anything and they're collecting a whole
12:29 bunch of money and getting fat off of
12:31 your dollars
12:33 there's a lot of uh individual
12:36 individual
12:38 tiny stories that give some sort of
12:41 legitimacy and truth to these kinds of arguments
12:42 arguments
12:44 but again i'm gonna
12:48 let some of my own personal politics uh
12:48 uh
12:50 come out here
12:52 unions are crucial
12:56 without unions we wouldn't have
12:59 40-hour work weeks or
13:03 minimum wages we wouldn't have overtime
13:05 pay we wouldn't have
13:08 worker protections we wouldn't have
13:11 anything that we take for granted today and
13:13 and unions
13:19 have turned what has been absolutely
13:20 absolutely
13:23 atrocious abominable behavior of businesses
13:25 businesses in
13:26 in
13:28 the history of the world
13:30 and at least in this country the unions
13:32 have allowed a
13:32 a rational
13:34 rational
13:36 ability for
13:39 working conditions to be
13:41 spelled out in the law
13:43 are there stories where unions do stupid
13:45 things or or
13:48 take advantage of situations yeah sure
13:50 there are some
13:52 there's some bad stories and i've been
13:54 pissed off at some unions like what the
13:56 hell did you do that for i've seen
13:59 unions protects people that have no
14:00 right being
14:03 protected um uh
14:04 uh
14:06 just a quick example there were two
14:08 people at a company
14:11 that i was not working for but i was
14:13 involved with the situation and
14:14 and
14:17 they basically worked for about 10
14:20 minutes every hour and took 50 minute
14:22 breaks because
14:26 nobody paid attention for 10 15 years
14:27 they had a routine
14:29 of doing their 10 minutes of work and
14:31 then going and sitting down and drinking
14:32 coffee and doing their little cheese
14:39 when they reorganize the company the
14:43 the new supervisor is like no we're
14:44 going to reorganize things people are
14:46 going to work you take your breaks when
14:48 breaks are due you take your lunch when
14:50 lunch is due but
14:51 we got a lot of things that need to be
14:53 done around here you're going to work for
14:55 for
14:56 a couple hours and then take your break
14:58 and work for a couple hours and then
15:00 take lunch
15:03 the union came in and was
15:05 livid and protecting these people that
15:09 wanted basically to work for about
15:13 an hour out of every eight hour shift
15:15 and and that was pathetic
15:18 um was i pissed at the union yeah
15:20 do i support unions
15:27 not in everything not with every single
15:29 decision i think sometimes unions are on
15:31 the right side of an issue sometimes
15:32 they're on the wrong side of the issue
15:36 but the fact that unions need to exist i
15:41 and anybody who thinks that union
15:44 shouldn't exist or want to crush unions
15:48 you better rethink it because
15:54 probably for the wrong reason
15:56 you might want a union on a different
15:58 side of a particular issue but
16:01 trust me you do not want humans to go away
16:02 away
16:04 that would be bad and there's a lot of effort
16:05 effort
16:08 in this country right now to crush
16:19 1916 federal farm loan act the standard
16:23 container act you need containers so
16:25 that they all fit in the same truck and
16:27 you can stack them on pallets without
16:30 standard containers it's really hard to
16:31 sell things
16:33 you know what is a carton of lettuce
16:36 well if one person's carton is six heads
16:38 and another per person's carton is 18 heads
16:40 heads
16:42 it's really hard so you've got to
16:44 standardize things in order to have
16:46 effective trade so again
16:49 we dealt with quality to a large degree
16:57 u.s grade standards for potatoes again
17:00 standardizing to help with interstate
17:01 and international trade
17:08 uh 1918 world war one ended
17:12 1919 the term biological control was coined
17:19 1922 the capri volstead act provided
17:21 legal status for agricultural cooperatives
17:23 cooperatives
17:25 really important
17:27 a cooperative is when a group of
17:29 companies can come together
17:32 and have better selling power so let's say
17:33 say
17:35 i develop a cooperative i'm some tiny
17:37 little farmer
17:39 and it's really hard for me to sell my
17:41 product to some of these big buyers
17:43 because i'm just a tiny little grower
17:46 what if i get together with 20 other growers
17:48 growers
17:49 and between
17:51 all of us
17:53 we can not only supply better more
17:55 product all year long but a better
17:57 variety of products when i'm at a
18:00 product this guy's got products so now
18:03 we've got one voice as a cooperative to
18:05 help sell our product
18:07 cooperatives can be fabulous and there
18:08 are some great
