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'Like sending bees to war': the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession

7 points by vanusa 7y ago

jelliclesfarm 7y ago
The writing is on the wall. It IS a war on bees. We are spraying them to extinction. You WILL be gagged and tarred and feathered if you say anything about Monsanto(now Bayer)..and Other companies as they are not the only ones. Bees need diverse habitat. We are destroying habitat and growing food in open air factories. They are not farms. They are factories. Round and round we can go and talk about consumption, but the root cause of over consumption, destruction of our natural resources and ecology and habitat is the insatiable demand for cheap food. Key word being cheap. For 8 billion mouths and growing. We have gone way beyond carrying capacity of the planet. Most of the almonds goes Asia and China and rest of the world. How is even remotely possible that our current population is sustainable for the planet? Do all of us ABSOLUTELY need almond milk? It’s expensive to grow food and why can’t we pay for food? Cheap food is not a right. The externalities will eventually do us in...because there is no price or number on nature that we have destroyed. Forget about honey bees(they are not even native to California, btw. Most of them are Italian bees)..there are hundreds of thousands of insects that have gone extinct..or endangered. Bees are not the only pollinators. If there are no pollinators and have given trucked in, what does it really mean? This..this below...I am not a generational farmer and I am not an almond farmer but I consider myself a steward of the land and nature..that’s why I came to farming. This is reality. There is nothing natural about farming anymore. It’s cut throat. [..] Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes. Honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year. Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honeybees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined. “The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.”[..]

7 points by vanusa 7y ago

The writing is on the wall. It IS a war on bees. We are spraying them to extinction. You WILL be gagged and tarred and feathered if you say anything about Monsanto(now Bayer)..and Other companies as they are not the only ones. Bees need diverse habitat. We are destroying habitat and growing food in open air factories. They are not farms. They are factories. Round and round we can go and talk about consumption, but the root cause of over consumption, destruction of our natural resources and ecology and habitat is the insatiable demand for cheap food. Key word being cheap. For 8 billion mouths and growing. We have gone way beyond carrying capacity of the planet. Most of the almonds goes Asia and China and rest of the world. How is even remotely possible that our current population is sustainable for the planet? Do all of us ABSOLUTELY need almond milk? It’s expensive to grow food and why can’t we pay for food? Cheap food is not a right. The externalities will eventually do us in...because there is no price or number on nature that we have destroyed. Forget about honey bees(they are not even native to California, btw. Most of them are Italian bees)..there are hundreds of thousands of insects that have gone extinct..or endangered. Bees are not the only pollinators. If there are no pollinators and have given trucked in, what does it really mean? This..this below...I am not a generational farmer and I am not an almond farmer but I consider myself a steward of the land and nature..that’s why I came to farming. This is reality. There is nothing natural about farming anymore. It’s cut throat. [..] Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes. Honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year. Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honeybees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined. “The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.”[..]