Posted on 01/17/2020 2:13:54 PM PST by nickcarraway
In the past five years, almond milk consumption in the United States has exploded over 250 percent. The lower-calorie, vegan milk alternative is a staple in grocery stores and coffee shops across the country now, but its booming popularity comes at a heavy environmental cost. According to a new report from the Guardian this week, the titanic and growing demands of the California almond industry are placing a huge strain on the hives of bees used to pollinate their orchards, wiping out billions of honeybees in a matter of months.
“My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” Dennis Arp, a commercial beekeeper, told the Guardian. Like many of his peers, nearly half of Arp’s income comes from renting out his hives to pollinate almonds. But now, he says, he loses 30 percent or more of his bees a year, a number that’s on par for many beekeepers in the U.S. One survey of commercial beekeepers found that 50 billion honeybees were wiped out in just a few months during the winter of 2018–19.
The high mortality rate among bees who pollinate almonds, beekeepers believe, is due in part to the enormous quantities of pesticides used on almonds — far more than any other crop in California, whose Central Valley region is responsible for more than 80 percent of the world’s almond supply. What’s more, almond pollination is especially demanding for bees, because they need to wake up from their annual period of winter dormancy one to two months earlier than usual to begin. Then, once they start, massive numbers of bees are concentrated in small geographic areas, making it easier for diseases to spread among them.
As Patrick Pynes, an organic beekeeper who teaches environmental studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, told the Guardian, “The bees in the almond groves are being exploited and disrespected. They are in severe decline because our human relationship to them has become so destructive.”
In order to improve the pollination process, groups have launched programs to help protect bees and signal to consumers which products have been made with “bee-friendly” methods. The nonprofit “Bee Better,” for instance, partners with almond growers to increase biodiversity for bees in their groves by planting wildflowers, mustard, and clover between the rows of almond trees.
Still, even the most bee-friendly almond groves have a heavy environmental footprint. Almonds are an especially thirsty crop. As Mother Jones reported back in 2014, it takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond, an astounding demand in a regularly drought-stricken state.
Maybe try out oat milk for a while instead?
Aggree 100%! To bad there aren't more like us.
Long ago I saw a post about a "Weston Price" ping list but I nothing like it recently. Do you know of any like-minded Freepers?
Nature doesn’t kill the entire hive in response to a lack of nectar, it shrinks the bee populations of the hives. . . or they swarm and move the entire hive to where scout bees have found more food.
Incidentally, I did a little basic research and another assertion of the author of the article turns out to be not true. The claim that almond orchardists use more pesticides than any other agricultural crop is patently false. . . which is what I thought. They generally do a single spraying once per season, any more would be uneconomical. Apple and peach orchardists use far more, as do tomato growers. So the article drips ignorant assertions, which I suspect is based in funding likely sourced by the dairy industry.
That was another of the high pesticide use crops listed, blueberries. I didn’t see watermelons, though.
Funny how the healthful food people (not 'healthy food') spell and use grammar so poorly.
The pesticides are killing the bees.
Argentinian beef, Canadian wheat and Ukrainian corn tastes just like ours.
Yep, it is shipped all the way up here directly from their grocery stores, except they have different regulations (if any) about how the products are created in their back rooms, unlike ours which are heavily regulated to make sure the product looks just like the ones agriculture used to create in those filthy fields which are better used to grow housing developments, office buildings and shopping centers, and tax revenue.
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And now you know who sponsored this story.
Just not buying all the hype.
Great idea.
Let’s put ourselves in a position of becoming dependent on other countries for our food.
That’s as good an idea as the Germans becoming dependent on Russia for their oil and gas.......
We are not an agrarian nation ( 1% of GDP ) .
The USA would be better off making everything and importing non subsidized ag products than the other way around.
Your idea is simply nuts. Null and Void made a great quip about it, and you should have known how off base you were being.
I tried to show you an easy parallel, and untenable, situation that ought to have given you pause.
But you persist.....
Good luck with that.
Good luck with GOP ever being a true populist majority party.
Lack of Nectar or Pollen shrinks the hive population of adult bees. In this weakened state the hive is easily killed by Robbers or Small Hive Beetles.
You steered this into really weird places, assuming really bizarre stuff.
Good luck, there’s not much more to be said, and I’d rather be absent from your craziness.
Free markets except for subsidized farmers.... /sarc
That’s an argument I can grasp, but that’s not what these people are claiming. Nor is that what numerous studies are finding. It’s mites.
Frankly, as an economist, I question the accuracy of ANY pie chart that purports to represent the GDP distribution that subsumes healthcare in an mere 8% segment along with educational services and social services, separate from government, when we already know healthcare alone is actually over 20% of the economy . . . and social services are a far higher. Where are they hiding those?
So you completely miss the point. The GOP is oriented to appease 1% farming ( which is a front for big globalist corporations like Archer Daniels ) and pretty much ignores, or works against, the economic needs of over 50% of the population that works in manufacturing and other service industries.
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