Tag Archives: food and ag

Here’s Why All the Bees Are Dying

by Reinaldo96Q Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Bees are having a really hard time right now. For about a decade, they’ve been dying off at an unprecedented rate—up to 30 percent per year, with a total loss of domesticated honeybee hives in the United States worth an estimated $2 billion.

At first, no one knew why. But as my colleague Tom Philpott has reported extensively, in the last few years scientists have accumulated a compelling pile of evidence pointing to a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. These chemicals are widely used in commercial agriculture but can have lethal effects on bees. Other pesticides are also adding to the toll. So are invasive parasites and a general decline in the quality of bees’ diets.

Clearly, that combination of factors poses a pretty serious problem for anyone who likes to eat, since bees—both the domesticated kind and their wild bumblebee cousins, both of which are in decline—are the main pollinators of many major fruit and nut crops. The problem is so severe that this spring President Barack Obama unveiled the first-ever national strategy for improving the health of bees and other key pollinators.

Now, it appears that lurking in the background behind the ag-industry-related problems is an even more insidious threat: climate change. According to new research published in the journal Science, dozens of bumblebee species began losing habitat as early as the 1970s—well before neonicotinoids were as widespread as they are today. Since then, largely as a result of global warming, bees have lost nearly 200 miles off the southern end of their historic wild range in both the US and in Europe, a trend that is continuing at a rate of about five miles every year.

As temperatures increase (the US is about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer today, on average, than in 1900), many plant and animal species in the Northern Hemisphere are shifting their range north. But by analyzing a vast archive of bee distribution records reaching back more than a century, ecologists at the University of Ottawa showed that bees are not joining that trend. Instead of shifting north like many other species, the bees’ range is only compressing in from the south, leaving less and less available habitat. That finding is illustrated in the chart below (and explained in more detail in the video at the bottom of this post, produced by Science).

Kerr et al, Science 2015

In a call with reporters, lead scientist Jeremy Kerr stressed that although pesticide use is a critical cause of bee mortality at local levels, it doesn’t explain the continent-wide habitat shrinkage that stands out in the bee data. But temperature trends do.

“They are in serious and immediate risk from human-caused climate change,” Kerr said. “The impacts are large and they are underway.”

The question of why bees aren’t pushing northward is a bit trickier, and it isn’t resolved in this paper. But Kerr said he suspects the answer could be the relatively long time it takes for bees to reach a critical mass of population that can be sustained in new places.

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Here’s Why All the Bees Are Dying

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Finally, a Little Good News on the California Drought Front

by GeneCrusedgeupd Posted on July 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Finally, some good news on the California drought beat: Californians reduced their residential water usage in May by a whopping 29 percent compared to the same month in 2013, according to a report released today by the State Water Resources Control Board. That’s the steepest drop in more than a year.

Californians may have been inspired to reduce their water use by the mandatory, statewide municipal water cut of 25 percent that Gov. Jerry Brown announced in April, though those cuts didn’t go into effect until June. (Those 25 percent reductions did not apply to agriculture, which uses an estimated 80 percent of the state’s water, though some farmers have faced curtailments.)

“The numbers tell us that more Californians are stepping up to help make their communities more water secure, which is welcome news in the face of this dire drought,” said State Water Board Chair Felicia Marcus in a press release. “That said, we need all Californians to step up—and keep it up—as if we don’t know when it will rain and snow again, because we don’t.”

In May, California residents used 87.5 gallons per capita per day—three gallons per day less than the previous month. Big cities that showed the most dramatic cuts include Folsom, Fresno, and San Jose. But water use by area varies drastically, with places known for green lawns and gardens, like Coachella and Malibu, using more than 200 gallons per person per day. Outdoor water usage is estimated to account for about half of overall residential use.

Officials are cautiously optimistic. Board spokesman George Kostyrko says Californians “did great in May and we are asking them to keep doing what they are doing and work even harder to conserve water during these critical summer months and beyond.”

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Finally, a Little Good News on the California Drought Front

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Egg Prices Soar 60 Percent as Avian Flu Slams Midwest

by 9pelerinaje9 Posted on June 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Retail egg prices have risen from an average of $1.22 per dozen in mid-May to $1.95 this week, the US Department of Agriculture reports. That’s a 60 percent jump in just a month—a reflection of the massive toll being exacted by an avian flu outbreak that has ripped through the Midwest’s egg-laying farms.

“Highly pathogenic” to birds, but so far not to people, the strain first turned up in Oregon in last December and has since rapidly moved east to Minnesota and Iowa. It has now killed or triggered the euthanasia of 47 million birds. I go into more detail on the outbreak here and here, and evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace of the Institute of Global Studies at the University of Minnesota gives his take here.

The flu’s spread is slowing as the weather warms up (flu viruses don’t thrive in the heat), but producers in the south, where the great bulk of US chicken is grown, fear an outbreak there this fall. Last week, North Carolina’s agriculture department announced the ban of poultry shows and public live bird sales, effective Aug. 15 to Jan. 15, “due to the threat of highly pathogenic avian influenza.”

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Egg Prices Soar 60 Percent as Avian Flu Slams Midwest

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The Future of Food Has Robot Arms and Smells Like Bacon

by JacintoHahn Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Cooki, a robotic cooking machine prototype, on display at the Parisoma “Future of Food” meet-up Maddie Oatman

In the not-so-distant future, a robot named Cooki will make you dinner. Cooki will follow a recipe drawn from a database of millions of crowd-sourced ideas accessed through a subscription service similar to iTunes. Then, it will stir together pre-chopped ingredients with a robotic arm. Instead of the $15 required to buy and deliver take-out food, Cooki’s meal will cost you $4 to $5.

At least, that’s how the future will look if Timothy Chen has anything to do with it.

Chen is the CEO of Sereneti Kitchen, the company producing an automated robot that can supposedly cook “restaurant-quality” meals at your kitchen counter and clean up after itself. Chen was one of around a dozen entrepreneurs pitching their victual innovations at a tech event called the “Future of Food,” hosted by the San Francisco co-working space Parisoma on Wednesday. A line snaked around the block at the entrance of the building at 7 p.m. when I arrived. Inside, designers, data-geeks, food marketers, and underground supper club hosts mingled over beers or the papaya-colored smoothie samples from the Pantry vending machine. I overheard the phrases “superfood” and “drought-friendly” more than once over the course of the evening.

Timothy Chen unwraps a plastic tray of ingredients to feed into Cooki during a demonstration

The concept behind the cooking robot comes from Chen’s 18-year-old twin sisters, Haidee and Helen, who wondered why their mom had to spend so many hours making fresh food every day. “Shouldn’t cooking be as easy as pushing a button?” their IndieGogo campaign page implores. Aside from making cooking more efficient, Sereneti’s social mission includes a desire to cut down on food waste and promote access to healthy ingredients.

Though Cooki only really does one-pot cooking, Sereneti imagines its machine making 60 percent of the world’s types of food—from pastas to salads to curries. Chen hopes to retail Cooki for around $500, or $200 if customers subscribe to a recipe and ingredients delivery service. (You could also prepare and input your own ingredients into the robot).

Midway through the “Future of Food” event, I wander over to Sereneti’s table to catch Cooki in action. Dressed in an argyle sweater and sporting rectangular glasses, Chen’s a quick-talking guy with a background in robotics. “This is the Keurig for food,” he explains, referring to the individualized coffee pod machines that I’ve covered in the past. He pulls out clear plastic trays full of raw bacon, lamb, cherries, and pine nuts that have been prepared and preserved with the help of food scientists. Once loaded up with the goods, the machine extracts one of the trays, tips it into a pot heated underneath by coils, and begins to stir. Soon, the smell of bacon oozes out from under the machine’s glossy white hood.

Chen has pretty big dreams for Cooki: As he sees it, it will not only save parents time, it could also make them money. By crowd-sourcing recipes and charging people one-time-use fees, “every time someone uses your recipe—you get paid,” Chen explains. “It’s the ultimate in multi-level marketing,” he says to me—”and it’s not even a Ponzi scheme!”

Okay. While Cooki’s frying, I decide to check out some of the other booths. A man with watery blue eyes and a thick French accent passes out crackers smudged with bone-white brie made from almond milk. Unlike some of the tasteless, pasty vegan cheeses I’ve sampled in the past, Kite Hill’s cheese draws from the traditional cheesemaking process: Cultures and enzymes are added to the milk to create an actual curd. Kite Hill claims to be the only company treating almond milk this way. The result is impressive—if I didn’t know any better, I would think it was a sheep’s milk cheese. Kite Hill’s cheesemaker, Jean Prevot, who hails from France, spent 15 years in the dairy industry before turning to almond milk “for the challenge of it.”

Soft ripened almond brie from Kite Hill

At the table across the way, two chipper, unblinking blonde women dish up crackers made with flour from ground-up crickets. Their San Francisco-based company, Bitty Foods, produces the cookies as well as a cricket-based baking flour “that’s high in protein, drought-resistant, and lower in greenhouse-gas emissions,” as cofounder Megan Miller tells one taster. I overhear two men discussing their cookies in between bites. “There’s a little aftertaste,” one says. “It’s subtle—if I wasn’t thinking about it, I wouldn’t have picked up on it.”

Leslie Ziegler and Megan Miller serve cricket-flour cookies from their company Bitty

Over to the Kuli Kuli Foods table, where women in acid-green aprons peddle samples of bars made of moringa, a leafy plant that Time recently deemed the new kale. Kuli Kuli is the first US company marketing moringa. Its founder, Lisa Curtis, first learned about the plant while in Peace Corps in Niger in 2010. Feeling malnourished on the local diet, she was urged to try the nutrient-dense moringa plant, which is high in calcium, protein, amino acids, and vitamin C. The plant grows super fast and thrives in hot, dry climates. Curtis realized that locals weren’t marketing the superfood because they had no international market, so she set out to create one in the US by importing the plant in powder form. Aside from fueling her own fruit and nut bar company, she tells me that local juice joints around San Francisco are picking it up for use in smoothies. (Side note: Fidel Castro is a huge moringa fan.)

Moringa bar samples from Kuli Kuli

I want to love moringa. If the current California drought is any predictor, we’re going to need plants that survive harsher conditions and provide such an impressive array of nutrients. But this one tastes rather grassy, and goes down like a shot of wheatgrass, which is to say, abruptly. So power to Kuli Kuli, but here’s hoping its moringa recipes continue to evolve.

I make it back to Chen’s table just in time for the tasting of Cooki’s “sauteéd lamb and macerated cherries” dish. Cooki had certainly cooked through the lamb, softened the cherries, and roasted the pine nuts. I don’t eat meat, so I had to rely on other people’s tastebuds to know how the dish turned out. “It’s pretty good,” one woman, Barb, told me, and shrugged. “I do wonder how it will cook vegetables,” another taster said. Neither of them were aware that the dish included bacon grease. To which, I had to ask—doesn’t everything taste pretty good when coated in bacon grease?

Lamb, cherries, and pine nuts (and bacon) made by Cooki

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The Future of Food Has Robot Arms and Smells Like Bacon

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You’re Wasting More Food Than You Think

by JonahYIIko Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

America wastes insane amounts of food. Pretty much everyone knows that. It turns out, however, that hardly anyone thinks they’re among those who trash perfectly edible food. In a new study from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) published this morning in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers surveyed 1,010 nationally representative Americans to better understand the public’s perception of food waste, and discovered that three-quarters of them believe they waste less food than the national average.

Despite the fact that as much as 40 percent of American food goes uneaten—primarily from homes, stores, and restaurants, and at a cost of more than $160 billion a year—”Americans perceive themselves as wasting little,” said study leader and director of the Food System Sustainability & Public Health Program at CLF, Roni Neff in a statement. “But in reality, we are wasting substantial quantities.” The average American family wastes between $1,365 to $2,275 worth of food and beverages annually.

We waste so much, in fact, that New York City’s Sanitation Department wants to require restaurants, catering companies, grocery stores, and others to start composting all of their wasted food by July 1, but is concerned that that the city may not have the capacity to handle it all. Currently, the nine facilities in the area can only compost a measly 100,000 tons of waste. (If all New Yorkers were to start composting, they’d produce an estimated one million tons of wasted food.)

More than a third of the survey’s respondents claimed they don’t throw away food at all or very little. The top reasons listed for wanting to throw out less food were to save money and set a positive example for children. Environmental reasons came in last—despite the profound environmental impacts of wasted food, which accounts for a quarter of the fresh water supply and 300 million gallons of oil a year.

The study, in addition to asking about individuals’ food waste habits, also covered general awareness, knowledge, and attitudes towards wasted food. Read the study to see how all the questions break down here.

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You’re Wasting More Food Than You Think

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We’ll All Eat Less Meat Soon—Like It or Not

by VedaChapman7 Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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The great bulk of American beef comes from cows that have been fattened in confined yards with thousands of of their peers, munching a diet of corn, soybeans, and chemical additives. Should the feedlot model, innovated in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, continue its global spread—or is it better to raise cows on pasture, eating grass?

The question is critical, because global demand for animal flesh is on the rise, driven by growing appetites for meat in developing countries, where per capita meat consumption stands at about a third of developed-world levels.

In a much-shared interview on the website of the Breakthrough Institute, Washington State University researcher Judith Capper informs us that the US status quo is the way forward. “If we switched to all grass-fed beef in the United States, it would require an additional 64.6 million cows, 131 million acres more land, and 135 million more tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “We’d have the same amount of beef, but with a huge environmental cost.”

I agree with Capper that it would be a disaster to empty the feedlots and put all of the hungry cows out to pasture—that, at current levels of beef production, finding enough grass to feed every cow that now relies on copious supplies of corn would likely prove impossible.

But there’s a deeper question that Capper doesn’t look at: Is the feedlot system itself sustainable? That is, can we keep stuffing animals—not just cows but also chickens and pigs—into confinements and feeding them gargantuan amounts of corn and soybeans? And can other countries mimic that path, as China is currently?

The answer, plainly, is no, according to the eminent ecologist Vaclav Smil in a 2014 paper. Smil notes that global meat production has risen from less than 55 million tons in 1950 to more than 300 million tons in 2010—a nearly six-fold increase in 60 years. “But this has been a rather costly achievement because mass-scale meat production is one of the most environmentally burdensome activities,” he writes, and then proceeds to list off the problems: it requires a large-scale shift from diversified farmland and rainforests to “monocultures of animal feed,” which triggered massive soil erosion, carbon emissions, and coastal “dead zones” fed by fertilizer runoff. Also, concentrating animals tightly together produces “huge volumes of waste,” more than can be recycled into nearby farmland, creating noxious air and water pollution. Moreover, it’s “inherently inefficient” to feed edible grains to farm animals, when we could just eat the grain, Smil adds.

This ruinous system would have to be scaled up to if present trends in global meat demand continue, Smil writes—reaching 412 million tons of meat in 2030, 500 million tons in 2050, and 577 million tons in 2080, according to projections from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Such a carnivorous future is “possible but it is neither rational nor sustainable”—it will ultimately destroy the ecosystems on which it relies.

Smil is no anti-meat crusader. He acknowledges that “human evolution has been closely linked in many fundamental ways to the killing of animals and eating their meat.” But the rise of the feedlot has provided much more meat than is necessary nutritionally—Americans consume on average about 209 pounds of meat per year, while a “wealth of evidence confirms” that bit less than 100 pounds is “compatible with good health and high longevity.”

He calculates that such a level could be achieved globally, without the ecosystem destruction built into the status quo meat production model. Rather than gobble up stuff we could eat like corn and soybeans, farm animals should be fed solely crop residues and food waste. And rather than be crammed into concentrated feedlots, they should be kept on pasture in rotation with food crops. Managing meet production that way, he calculates, would generate more 200 million tons of meat per year—about enough, he calculates, to provide the globe with sufficient meat for optimal health.

Of course, massive challenges stand between Smil’s vision and reality. For one, it would require people in industrialized countries like the United States to cut their meat consumption by half or more, even as consumption in Asia and Africa rises to roughly equal levels. Then, of course, there are the massive globe-spanning meat companies like US-owned Tyson, Brazil-owned JBS, and China’s Smithfield that have a huge stake in defending the status quo.

But ramping up the current system to provide the entire globe with US levels carnivory is hard to fathom, too. If it happens, “there is no realistic possibility of limiting the combustion of fossil fuels and moderating the rate of global climate change,” Smil writes. In other words, like it or not, it’s probably time to get used to eating less meat—pushed by the climate crisis, industrialized societies may have little choice but to ramp down meat production along lines suggested by Smil.

Meanwhile, US meat consumption, long among the very highest in the world, is waning, if slowly. The total annual slaughter peaked at 9.5 billion animals in 2009, and dropped to 9.1 billion by 2013. Interestingly, Paul Shapiro, vice president of farm-animal protection of the the Humane Society of the United States, told me that that the decrease reflects meat eaters’ cutting back, not any turn to abstention—the percentage of vegetarians and vegans among the population has “remained relatively stable” in recent years, he said. (See my colleague Gabrielle Canon’s list of the most common ways in which meat eaters justify their diet here.)

If we can continue this trend, the feedlot, which looks hyper-efficient at mass-producing meat only if you ignore a host of environmental liabilities, may yet prove to be a passing fad.

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We’ll All Eat Less Meat Soon—Like It or Not

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You May Soon Be Able to Calculate How Many Calories Are in Your Food Porn

by Emilie7110 Posted on June 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Are you the kind of person who relishes publishing over-saturated photos of your dinner onto Instagram? If so, a new project, reportedly being developed by Google, may soon provide you with yet another interactive activity with your food—other than simply eating it.

The Guardian reports the prospective project, coined “Im2Calories,” aims to help users calculate the caloric makeup of food photos. Using an artificial-intelligence technology that would “analyze the depth of pixels in an image” it would then figure out “the size and shape” of our meals by subjecting that analysis to various algorithms. After all that? Voila! That caloric content of those perfectly manicured entrees.

It’s not perfect. Developers say that initially the technology may only be able to correctly measure the calories in a photo 30 percent of the time. But in a recent presentation, Google research scientist Kevin Murphy said that success rate is good enough to attract enough curious users to improve it over time.

Although a spokesperson for Google said the tool is still only in research mode, its potential creation could certainly help people keep tabs on their calorie intake. But is this really effective for losing weight? Research suggests such knowledge does little to impact a person’s food choices.

This might not matter much to Instagram’s crowded food wing, reflected in popular accounts such as You Did Not Eat That and You Wish You Ate This, which is likely to gobble up the calorie counting tool. Just look at the overnight success of Microsoft’s age guessing app. And after all, there is only so much satisfaction the number of likes a perfectly manicured food post can provide a person.

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You May Soon Be Able to Calculate How Many Calories Are in Your Food Porn

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We’re Eating Less Meat—Yet Factory Farms Are Still Growing

by WilmaR93bxwinuf Posted on June 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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The United States remains one of the globe’s most carnivorous nations, but things have changed subtly in recent decades. While our consumption of chicken has skyrocketed, we’re eating much less red meat.

Carolyn Perot

Overall per capita meat consumption has fallen nearly 10 percent since the 2007-‘8 financial meltdown; and as we cut back on quantity, we’re more likely to pay up for animals raised outside and not dosed with all manner of drugs.

Meanwhile, though, the meat industry lurches on, consolidating operations and stuffing its factory-scale facilities ever tighter with animals, as the organization Food and Water Watch shows in a recently updated map:

See the interactive version of this map here. Food and Water Watch

The charts below show the big picture. Note that the overall number of animals kept on US farms is leveling off, and in the case of beef cattle and meat chickens (broilers), actually dropping a bit. But the number of animals stuffed into each facility remains steadily on the rise for beef and dairy cows, hogs, and egg-laying hens. The number of meat chickens per site has plateaued—at the stunning level of more than 100,000 birds.

Among the many ecological problems you create when you concentrate so many animals in one place is massive loads of manure. How much?

These factory-farmed livestock produced 369 million tons of manure in 2012, about 13 times as much as the sewage produced by the entire U.S. population. This 13.8 billion cubic feet of manure is enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys stadium 133 times.

When humans live together in large numbers, as in cities, we’ve learned to treat our waste before sending it downstream. The meat industry faces no such requirement, and instead collects manure in large outdoor cesspools (known, picturesquely, as “lagoons”) before being spread on surrounding farmland. Some individual counties churn out much more waste than large metropolises. Here’s Food and Water Watch on the nation’s most dairy- and hog-centric counties:

Recycling manure as farm fertilizer is an ecologically sound idea in the abstract—but when animals are concentrated in such numbers, they produce much more waste than surrounding landscapes can healthily absorb. As a result, nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus leach into streams and rivers, feeding algae blooms and fouling drinking water. Then there are bacterial nasties. “Six of the 150 pathogens found in animal manure are responsible for 90 percent of human food- and water-borne diseases: Campylobacter, Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli 0157:H7, Cryptosporidium and Giardia,” Food and Water Watch reports.

Air, too, is a problem, as anyone who’s ever gotten close to a teeming cow, pig, or chicken facility can testify. Thousands of people, of course, are forced to live near them or work on them, and it’s no picnic. “Overexposure to hydrogen sulfide a pungent gas emanating from lagoons can cause dizziness, nausea, headaches, respiratory failure, hypoxia and even death,” Food and Water Watch states. “Workers in factory farm facilities experience high levels of asthma-like symptoms, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases.”

And these counties tended to be bunched together in great manure-churning clusters. Note, for example, how most industrial-scale hog production takes place in the Midwest and in eastern North Carolina:

While Big Chicken has chosen to alight largely upon the southeast, the Mississippi Delta, and California’s Central Valley:

So why are these large facilities humming even as US eaters cut back? Globally, demand for meat continues to rise, and the dark-red spots on the maps above have emerged as key production nodes in an increasingly globalized meat market. US meat exports have tripled in value since 1997 (USDA numbers), and the industry wants more, as evidenced by its push to support the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with Asia.

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We’re Eating Less Meat—Yet Factory Farms Are Still Growing

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San Francisco Moves to Require Health Warnings on Soda Ads

by Giselle2690 Posted on June 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sugar has invaded just about every part of our diet (Americans consume an estimated five times the amount of added sugar recommended by the World Health Organization), and it’s making us sick. Too much added sugar can lead to heart disease and myriad other health issues, and research suggests sugar in liquid form is worst of all for you.

That’s why today San Francisco lawmakers discussed requiring soda advertisements to include a health warning. It would read, “WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay. This is a message from the City and County of San Francisco.”

Other proposed ordinances would prohibit the advertising of sugar-sweetened drinks on city property and ban their purchase with city funds or grants. These measures would be the first of their kind taken by an American city.

As expected, the sugar industry is not happy about them. Last year, it spent more than $10 million campaigning against a San Francisco ballot measure to tax sugary beverages, and, according to the San Jose Mercury News, industry groups are prepared to fight these ordinances, as well.

CalBev, the trade group representing California’s nonalcoholic beverage industry, called the proposals “anti-consumer choice” and said the warnings would not improve health and instead mislead and confuse consumers.

San Francisco supervisor Malia Cohen, who introduced the soda ordinances along with fellow supervisors Scott Wiener and Eric Mar, has a different perspective. “Soda companies are spending billions of dollars every year to target low-income and minority communities, which also happen to be some of the communities with the highest risks of Type II diabetes,” she said in a statement. “This ban on soda advertising will help bridge this existing health inequity.”

Wiener added, “These health warning labels will give people the information they need to make informed choices about how these sodas are impacting their lives and the lives of people in their community.”

A hearing was held for the ordinances earlier today. Next, they will be brought to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a vote.

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San Francisco Moves to Require Health Warnings on Soda Ads

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Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

by DonnaWahl Posted on May 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Growing 80 percent of the globe’s almonds in California doesn’t just require massive amounts of water. It also takes a whole bunch of honeybees for pollination—roughly two hives’ worth for every acre of almonds trees, around 1.7 million hives altogether. That’s at least 80 percent of all available commercial hives in the United States, Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper who serves as vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation, recently told NPR.

Now, that vast army of bees—made up, all told, of more than 80 billion flying, buzzing soldiers—doesn’t stay put in California’s almond-happy Central Valley all year. The almond bloom typically lasts for just a few weeks (or less) in February. The modern honeybee operation is an itinerant business—beekeepers move hives throughout the year, in pursuit of paid pollination gigs—from tangerines in Florida to cherries in Washington state—as well as good forage for honey.

But California’s almond bloom is the biggest gig of all—the “largest managed pollination event anywhere in the world,” Scientific American reports. And as US honeybee populations’ health has flagged in recent years—most famously epitomized by the mysterious winter die-offs that began around a decade ago, known as colony collapse disorder—the almond industry has been drawing in a larger and and larger portion of the nation’s available bee hives.

One question that arises is: Why do the nation’s beekeepers uproot themselves and their winged charges to travel to California each year? The state houses about 500,000 beehives, meaning that more then 1 million come in, from as far away as Maine. What’s the incentive?

These days, US beekeepers typically make more money from renting out their bees for pollination than they do from producing honey. “Without pollination income, we’d be out of business,” Brandi told me. Income from the two sources varies year to year, but pollination income has grown over the years even as honey revenues have fallen, depressed by competition from imported honey. In 2012, for example, US beekeepers brought in $283 million from honey, versus an estimated $656 million from pollination.

And California’s almond growers have to shell out big money to draw in their pollinators—between $165 and $200 per hive, vs $45 to $75 a hive a decade ago, according to the Fresno Bee. That’s around $309 million, if we assume as average price of $182 per hive, the midpoint of the Bee‘s range.

What’s the impact on overall honeybee health, which has been under heavy pressure over the past decade? There are two potential downsides.

The first is from pesticides—insect growth regulators and fungicides—bees encounter in their travels around almond groves. During the 2014 California almond bloom, between 15 percent and 25 percent of beehives suffered “severe” damage, ranging from complete hive collapse to dead and deformed brood (the next generation of bees incubating in the hive), the Pollinator Stewardship Council estimated. The die-off caused an uproar, and many beekeepers pointed a finger at pesticides—and they probably had a point, as I showed here.

This year, Brandi told me, some beekeepers reported losses, but they weren’t nearly as severe or widespread as the ones in 2014. In the wake of the 2014 troubles, the Almond Board of California released a set of “best management practices” for protecting honeybees during the bloom that, Brandi said, may have influenced growers to avoid particularly harmful pesticide applications. Given that almond growers utterly rely on—and indeed, pay heavily for—honeybees for pollinating their crop, it seems logical that they’ll avoid poisoning them when possible. There will also be tension, though, as long as almond trees are planted in geographically concentrated and vast groves. Large monocrops provide an ideal habitat for pests like fungi and insects, and thus a strong incentive to respond with chemicals. There’s also the possibility that concentrating such a huge portion of the nation’s bees in such a tight geographical area facilitates the spread of viruses and other pathogens.

The second threat to bee health from pollinating California’s massive almond bloom comes from long-distance travel. This one lies at the heart of the beekeeping industry’s itinerant business model. Does it compromise bee health to pack hundreds of hives onto a flatbed truck for cross-country trips? The stresses go well beyond the occasional truck wreck. Scientific American explains the rigors of apiary highway travel like this:

The migration…continually boomerangs honeybees between times of plenty and borderline starvation. Once a particular bloom is over, the bees have nothing to eat, because there is only that one pollen-depleted crop as far as the eye can see. When on the road, bees cannot forage or defecate. And the sugar syrup and pollen patties beekeepers offer as compensation are not nearly as nutritious as pollen and nectar from wild plants. Scientists have a good understanding of the macronutrients in pollen such as protein, fat and carbohydrate, but know very little about its many micronutrients such as vitamins, metals and minerals—so replicating pollen is difficult.

A 2012 paper, coauthored by USDA bee researcher Jeff Pettis, found that long-distance travel may indeed have ill health effects—the researchers found that “bees experiencing transportation have trouble fully developing their food glands and this might affect their ability to nurse the next generation of workers.”

Brandi, for his part, dismisses travel as a factor in the overall decline in bee health. “Bees have been traveling back and forth across he country for years,” he said—since long before the colony collapse disorder and other health troubles began to emerge a decade ago, he said. He said bee travel has actually gotten less stressful over the years as beekeepers have upgraded to smoother-riding flatbed trucks. He said other factors, including pesticides, declining biodiversity, and mites (a bee pest) are likely more important drivers of declining bee health.

Meanwhile, California almond country’s massive appetite for pollination isn’t likely to dissipate anytime soon. According to the latest USDA numbers, acreage devoted to almonds expanded by 5 percent in 2014, and growers continue laying in yet more groves this year, Western Farm Press reports. Land devoted to almonds has grown 50 percent since 2005—and every time farmers add another acre of trees, they need access to two additional bee hives for pollination.

So why don’t more beekeepers simply move to California and stay put, to take advantage of the world’s biggest—and growing—pollination gig? I put that question to longtime bee expert Eric Mussen of the University of California-Davis. He said the state is already home to 500,000 of the nation’s 2.7 million hives. The almond bloom is great for a few weeks, but in terms of year-round foraging, “California is already at or near its carrying capacity for honeybees,” he said—the areas with the best-quality forage are already well stocked with bees.So satisfying the world’s ever-growing appetite for almonds will continue to require an annual armada of beehive-laden trucks.

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Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

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