THE EVOLUTION OF AGRICULTURE AND

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

The California Department of Food and Agriculture traces its origins to the needs of 100 years ago to protect the State’s crops from the ravages of pests both domestic and imported.  Then, as now, one of the principle weapons employed was a legal device called a “quarantine”, which derives from the French word “quarante”, meaning “forty”.  The quarantine came about as a detention device, its first use being in the year 1340 when passengers on ships bound for Venice, Italy, were detained on board ship for 40 days.  This was considered a long enough period to determine whether or not those passengers carried with them the Black Plague, which was killing many people in Europe in the mid-14th century.

California’s first statewide program, which was the start of the present Department of Food and Agriculture, began with “An Act For the Promotion of Viticultural Industries of the State” on April 5,1880.  It provides for the appointment of a Board of State Viticultural Commissioners whose duties included the study of the grape root rot disease, Phylloxera.  The Act specified that the University of California was responsible for instruction and experiments - a concept still existing today - giving the University the authority for research and the Department the regulatory functions.  The Act provided for seven viticultural districts. 

Until the year 1911, the duties of the State Board of Horticulture, the State Commissioner of Horticulture, county boards of horticulture commissioners and the county horticulture commissioners were limited to just a few obligations.  They had to do with preventing the introduction into the state of the pests from outside its boundaries, prevention of spread of insect pests and plant diseases through the media of nursery stock, fruit boxes, and other containers, and the inspection of nurseries.  The years that followed would find the duties not only intensified in the same areas, but expanded into many other aspects of agriculture.

In the beginning the regulatory concern was to protect the California farmer from the depredations of exotic pests.  After 1911, these duties were to be expanded to include concerns of the market place (standardization), and such cultural aids as assistance to the farmer in weed control and control of rodents and other damaging creatures.  Later, they would enlarge to assure the farmer honest weights and measures, and protection from unscrupulous middlemen.  Finally, the regulations would blossom into the full relationship of the farmer and the consumer.

Today, the California Department of Food and Agriculture and County Agricultural Commissioners are as busy helping the consumer, as they are the farmer.  They keep exotic pests away from the farmer’s fields by fighting them in city gardens, where they nearly always are found first in the State.  By so doing, they are affording city people as much protection as farmers, for these pests generally can wreak as much havoc in the city as in the country.  They provide for, and oversee, standardization practices, thus insuring the farmers good markets for their products and insuring quality for consumers.  They promote marketing of goods in a variety of ways, also assuring quality and quantity to consumers.  They look after the health of livestock and plants, and the same benefits accrue to the consumer.  They insist on measurement standards that also have dual blessings; and they assure the consumer and the farmer protection against the careless use of pesticides, thus affording protection to both people and the environment.

Last yeat the California Agricultural Commissioner and Sealer Association celebrated it's 125-year anniversary.