EPISODE 1
Teresa Cotsirilos: You
know what’s kind of a modern day miracle?
Supermarkets. I mean, sure, the prices can suck and the self-checkout machine’s always busted, but the average American
supermarket carries over 30,000 different products. You’ve got oranges from
Brazil, next to tomatoes from Mexico, next to mangoes from Peru. These
seemingly endless amounts of food.
Always there, always fresh
and available, and stacked into neat little pyramids under fluorescent
lights.
Wife: Let’s
pick up a few things for dinner.
What if all that food just
disappeared?
Wife: Hit the
produce first. We get some kale.
Teresa:
Actually, we can’t.
Wife: We
can’t get kale.
I’m Teresa Cotsirilos. I’m
a staff reporter at the Food & Environment Reporting Network.
That’s kind of a mouthful,
so we usually just go by FERN. We investigate where our food comes from and
what our decisions about growing it and eating it mean for the planet. So right
now my wife and I are shopping at our local grocery
store. But there’s a catch. We have to shop as if
pollinators — all the birds, bats, and bees that quietly support our food
system — just didn’t exist anymore.
Uh, no, we can’t get
zucchini.
Wife: We
can’t get zucchini.
Teresa: We
can’t get zucchini.
Wife: Okay.
Well, what about broccoli?
Teresa: Um, no.
No broccoli.
Wife: What
about just tomato sauce?
Teresa: Okay,
so long as there isn’t any garlic or onion or basil in the sauce. Like
basically any flavor. It’s so boring.
Okay, so this dinner is
going to be rough, but at least I’m doing what I do best. Annoying my wife to
make a point.
Wife: So we have plain pasta, tomatoes, and chicken.
Teresa: I think
that’s …
Wife: You
think that’s our dinner?
Teresa: I think
that’s our dinner.
Wife: Wait,
maybe we can get a drink in the wine aisle.
Teresa: And we
can’t have that either.
Wife: We
can’t have wine?
Teresa: No
wine, no tequila.
Wife: What
world is this?
Teresa: I guess
we could technically live like this.
But, man, would it suck if
we had to. And as much fun as we’re having, this goofy grocery store challenge
is actually illustrating a massive ecological problem
that’s complex and deadly serious. From the Food & Environment Reporting
Network, this is Buzzkill, a podcast where we take on the pollinator crisis.
What it is, how we’re making it worse, and what we can do to stop it.
Right now, there are about
350,000 different pollinator species on this planet. We’re talking bees,
butterflies, ants, moths, birds, bats, in some cases, even mosquitoes. Together
these pollinators have developed this symbiotic relationship with many flowering
plants, so the plants can produce seeds and fruit.
The survival of entire
ecosystems rests on these creatures’ tiny shoulders. But bee and butterfly
species across the world are declining, and an estimated four in every 10 of
them are at risk for extinction. That’s according to an international governmental
group studying the pollinator crisis. Now, some of this is due to climate
change, which is among the biggest threats to pollinators’ survival.
As greenhouse gas
emissions fuel extreme weather events, butterflies and bees are getting starved
by droughts, battered by storms, and roasted in the heat. But climate change
isn’t the only existential threat that we need to worry about.
Archive news clips: Today,
wild plants and animals are running out of places to live.
There’s a desperate plea
for global support to protect the world’s animals and plants. It comes …
The scientists you’re
about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction.
Teresa: Welcome
to the biodiversity crisis. The problems with pollinators are really just a particularly scary subset of this larger
crisis. Because an estimated third or more of the food crops that humans grow
and rely on need pollinators to reproduce. And like the climate crisis, we know
who’s to blame for the biodiversity crisis. Us. Industrial food production,
which depends on pesticides and other chemicals, has fueled rampant pollution
and habitat destruction.
So, you know, that’s a
buzzkill. But we can help with that, because it’s not too late to fix this.
Over the course of this limited series, we’re going to provide a road map for
how to bring agriculture into better balance with our environment. Because we’re
not doing enough for the birds and the bees. And when we have taken action, well, we haven’t exactly gone about it the
right way.
What if I told you that a
lot of these save the bee efforts are doing more harm to the environment than
good? We do need to save the bees. The question is, which ones? Reporter Rowan
Jacobsen takes it from here.
This is Buzzkill, Episode
1. Save which bees?
Rowan Jacobsen:
Portland, Oregon, is a city of coffee shops, food carts, and environmental
activism. Maybe you remember the TV show Portlandia, poking fun at Portland’s
culture.
Portlandia clip: Do you
remember the ’90s and people were singing about saving the planet and forming
bands?
Yeah.
There’s a place where that
idea still exists as a reality.
Where is it?
Portland.
Oregon?
Yeah.
Rowan: Walk
its leafy streets and you’ll find lush organic landscaping, net zero tiny
houses, and a lot of backyard beehives.
Mandy Shaw: Oregon
just got a pollinator license plate and so I got mine, but I had to, you know,
be fancy and get the vanity plate.
Rowan: The
kind of place where you’d find a Pollinator Paradise license plate and a
beekeeper who couldn’t get one fast enough for her car.
Mandy: Um, of
course I have my bees here. This is my hive house. I used to keep chickens and
decided it wasn’t for me after doing it for a few years.
Rowan: Meet
Mandy Shaw. She lives in a suburb right outside the city of Portland.
Mandy: And so I decided to move my bees into this little
structure.
Rowan: The
structure houses thousands of bees and is 10-by-12 with a corrugated slanted
roof.
Mandy: And it
keeps them dry, and it’s just kind of a nice condensed
space for them.
Rowan: The
walls are made of screen material, like for your windows.
Mandy: Because
when you have bees in your backyard and you want to also enjoy it as a living
space, you have to control their flight paths.
Rowan: In case
you haven’t already noticed, Mandy nerds out on bees.
Mandy: I love
beekeeping. I crave the ritual of putting on my suit and veil. The lingering
smell that the smoker leaves in my hair and clothing for long after it has gone
out. The heavy scent …
Rowan: In
fact, she has a podcast.
Mandy: This is
Beekeeper Confidential, a show about the curious lives of bees and their
beekeepers. I’m your host, Mandy Shaw.
Rowan: Mandy
says she started out like a lot of people, as a hobbyist. We’ll get back to the
hobbyists in a bit. But for now, we’re going to stick with Mandy.
Mandy: I
started getting into pollinator gardening, of course. I was starting to look at
honeybee keeping, but that year, a swarm of bees landed in a tree in my front
yard, and it was so amazing and awesome, and we called a beekeeper to come and
get them. And that experience for me was one of those moments in your life
that, you know, it’s like a sign. You got to do this. It was so cool. So the next …
Rowan: She got
her first colony of bees and just took off from there. She joined beekeeping
associations for both Portland and the state of Oregon. Now she teaches other
people how to get started in beekeeping.
Mandy: So,
I’ll go and speak at events or I’ll go and teach
workshops and share what I have learned so that other people, you know, have a
better head start on it. Because beekeeping is actually not
so simple as putting the bees in the hive and waiting for honey.
Rowan: Lately,
there have been a lot of new people looking to get started in bees. In the past
five years, the number of hives in the country has
risen by about one million. And a lot of that rise is due to hobbyists. Some of
these hobbyists are out in the country, but a growing number are in cities,
keeping bees on their rooftops or in small garden plots.
News anchor:
Interest in beekeeping is growing. Every year, Bartosz has more hives to
inspect. I’m a beekeeper. It’s really a nice hive. He’s seen the number of
apiaries grow from 250 to more than 360.
News anchor: Eric Mussen studies bees at the University of California-Davis.
He says urban beekeeping is spreading from rooftops to backyards. Even the
White House has its own hive. Boy, it’s really, really caught on.
Rowan: Some of
these new beekeepers are just in it for the honey. But for a lot of people, the
interest in bees isn’t so much about the bees themselves, but the fact that so
many bees are dying. And all of this, the interest in beekeeping, the rise in
hives, it all dates back to the mid-2000s when a
mysterious syndrome began decimating honeybee colonies that are used to
pollinate our crops.
News anchor: This
might be one of the most interesting, disturbing, and puzzling stories …
Rowan: Farmers
who use these colonies for the production of fruits
and vegetables were hit hard.
News anchor: In
parts of the country, there is still a critical shortage of bees. A rash of
mysterious disappearances of honeybee colonies has many bee growers scratching
their heads. It’s a complex problem that’s killed off about 45 percent of
commercial bee colonies, likely the result of pesticides, parasites, and
disease.
Rowan: The
sudden die-off of all these honeybees got a name. Scientists called it colony
collapse disorder, CCD.
News clip: It
appears to be just an overwhelming number of stresses all at one time. The
adult bees fly out of the hive and just don’t come back.
Rowan: There
are a number of factors contributing to the decimation
of these colonies. It’s everything from invasive mites, viruses, and gut
parasites to stress on the bees caused by pollution. CCD forced a lot of
Americans to wrestle with the basic fact of life. Most plants won’t make fruit
unless their flowers get pollinated with pollen from another plant of the same
species. That transfer is usually handled by bees, whose furry bodies are
perfectly suited to the task.
As bees fly from flower to
flower, sipping up the sugary nectar, they get covered in sticky pollen grains.
And some of those pollen grains get deposited in the next flower.
News clip: The
good stuff, the cucumbers and the melons and the strawberries and the apples
and all of those things are directly dependent upon
the honeybee.
Rowan: Let’s
dispel a myth about CCD right here. A lot of people think that if we don’t save
the bees, we won’t have enough food. Not true. Most of our calories come from
grains, like corn, wheat, and rice. And they don’t need pollinators. But the
colorful stuff that makes our meals healthy and delicious does.
Juicy blueberries. Crunchy
almonds. Bright orange pumpkins. All those fruits, nuts, and vegetables depend
on bees. And one bee in particular, the domesticated honeybee. There are 20,000
species of bees in the world, and most of them are not domesticated. They’re
solitary, living in holes in the ground. There’s the black furry bumblebee, the
gentle mason bee, and the teeny tiny sweat bee.
Those are all wild bees.
But the honeybee is a domesticated bee. It was brought here by European
settlers in the 17th century. Honeybees typically live in colonies of 50,000
individuals, and they happily live in wooden boxes. And that makes them the
best pollinators in the game and a priceless partner in food production.
News clip: And
what it means to the agricultural economy is about $15 billion a year in
agricultural production for the United States.
Rowan: The
industrialized agriculture system in the U.S. is built around monocrops using
lots of pesticides. It’s the most efficient way to make the most food for the
least amount of money. In these kinds of farms, there are very few good places
for pollinators to thrive. Large farms are a kind of biological desert. So,
what do we do? When the crops are about to bloom, farmers pay commercial
beekeepers to truck hives of honeybees into the fields. It’s industrial
pollination for an industrial food system.
The problem is, when
colony collapse disorder struck, millions of those honeybee hives died. As
scientists raced to discover the cause, people panicked about the future of the
food supply. “Save the bees” became a powerful cultural rallying cry. There were
school curriculums and T-shirts, practically whatever you can think of.
The rallying cry found its
way to the halls of government, where at least 24 states have considered or
passed pollinator-related legislation.
News anchor: A law
that went into effect this year lifts some of the restrictions that local
governments can impose on beekeepers. It’s one way the state is getting
involved to help protect bees.
Rowan: And
Sesame Street got involved, too.
Sesame Street: Mr.
Ryan? Yes, Elmo? Elmo wants to know, what can we do to help the bees?
Rowan: A lot
of people besides Elmo asked themselves that question. And as people learned
about honeybees, they also became attached to these little creatures. And
that’s one of the reasons we have so many backyard beekeepers in places like
Portland. The more people knew about them, the more they wanted to do
something, anything, to save the bees. Which actually turned
out to be kind of a bad idea.
Mandy: If I’m
at an event where I’m educating the public about honeybees, I will say the best
way to help bees is not become a beekeeper.
Rowan: Ask
Mandy Shaw if you should get some hives to help the bees. You might be
surprised at her answer.
Mandy: The
best way to help bees is to plant more flowers, because that’s what they
need.
Rowan: Mandy
isn’t the only one saying that. More and more people who truly understand this
issue now believe that saving the bees isn’t going to actually
save the bees. And they are telling people to think twice before getting
a hive.
Farmers definitely
need commercial beekeepers and domesticated honeybees to help pollinate
their crops. But putting a hive on your block doesn’t help farmers. In fact,
it’s probably doing more harm than good.
Gail McGinnis: This is
not a species going extinct. It’s a livestock animal. It’s like saying the cows
are in trouble.
Rowan: That’s
Gail McGinnis. She’s a biodiversity and pollinator researcher in Canada. I
spoke to her about something that the average person probably doesn’t know.
Bees do surprisingly well in cities.
Gail:
Landscape is so heterogeneous in cities. Like, they can find our cavity-nesting
bees, so the ones that don’t nest in the ground, you can find them in little
holes in fences, and they find places to live in cities.
Rowan: Cities
are filled with flowering plants. Think of all those garden boxes and pots in
front of restaurants. They can be a pretty good habitat for native or wild
bees. Unless, of course, they face tons of competition from, well, all those
domesticated honeybees people are putting in their
backyards.
Gail: We
don’t need to be keeping honeybees in cities. To me, it’s nonsensical.
Rowan: Gail
started looking into this a few years ago while conducting research at
Concordia University in Montreal. It was at that time that she noticed an
alarming trend. The number of domesticated beehives in the city had exploded in
just seven years, from less than 250 to nearly 3,000, in part because …
Gail: It’s
kind of the Wild West, urban beekeeping. There’s nothing prohibiting the number
of hives, where you can put them …
Rowan: 3,000!
That’s nearly a 1,200 percent jump. So Gail wondered,
what are all these honeybee hives doing to the wild bees that live in
Montreal?
Gail: So we caught wild bees, we identified them to species and
looked at their abundances. And then we also looked at, um, the floral
resources, too.
We looked at the amount of
pollen in clover flowers at each of these sites to get an idea of, okay, like
how much are these honeybees taking and is there enough pollen left for other
bees?
Rowan: What
Gail and her team found was that areas with the most honeybees living in them
had pushed out the wild bees and had the lowest amount of clover pollen.They also found that the
number of wild bee species in the city had dropped from 163 to 120 over the
same span of seven years.
Gail: That led
us to believe, okay, there’s a negative relationship here between the honeybee
abundance and our wild bee species abundance.
Rowan: So in 2023, Gayle’s study was published. There were op-eds
and articles in publications like the Washington Post and Smithsonian citing
her study. And people began to wonder, are we saving the right bees?
Gail: Keeping
honeybees in the city does nothing to help crop-pollinating honeybees. It
doesn’t make any sense.
Rowan: And how
about the wild bees? Do we need them, or are they cute but expendable?
Gail: Oh my goodness, they’re not expendable. Our wild
pollinators, I say this too, even in cropping environments, we could be
harnessing the power of our wild pollinators. A lot of our wild pollinators
have evolved with our native plant species, and they’re better pollinators than
honeybees. And so if we actually start to conserve
habitat for wild pollinators, even in agricultural land, we can get better
pollination, we get better biodiversity, we can create these win-win
scenarios.
Rowan: But are
farmers ready to take on this change?
With the rise of urban
beekeeping, honeybees may play a role in the decline of wild bees in cities.
But we need to put this in perspective. Cities only take up about 3 percent of
the land in this country. And agriculture takes up about half.
Eric Lee-Mäder: Farming is the single largest land
use on Earth.
Rowan: That’s
Eric Lee-Mäder. At the time of this interview, he was
the codirector of the pollinator program at the Xerces Society, a leading
conservation group. Mäder is an expert in designing
new pollinator habitats. He’s also an advocate for pollinators. He speaks for
the bees.
Eric: And
more broadly, biodiversity declines. So if we want to
reverse pollinator declines, we have to work first and foremost in agriculture.
Rowan: When we
talk about agriculture, we’re really talking about big farms. The ones that
feed millions of people in the U.S. and abroad. So how do you go about
conserving pollinator habitats when you’re dealing with farms of this
scale?
Well, Buzzkill senior
producer Alyssa Jeong Perry and I headed to Oregon’s Willamette Valley to find
out. The Willamette Valley is known for raising high-value crops, like
hazelnuts, wine grapes, and blueberries.
Rowan: We
wanted to see what a pollinator-friendly industrial farm would look like. And
Eric knew where to find one.
Eric: This’ll
be it.
Rowan: So he hopped in the car with us. And we made our way down
the interstate out to the valley. As we drove, we passed strip malls with
fast-food chains and big-box stores. Eric pointed out a Target store beside one
of the freeway exits.
Eric: Just as
an aside, this Target store is the site of the largest mass bumblebee poisoning
ever documented.
News anchor: Last
week we told you about the 50,000 bees that died in a Wilsonville Target
parking lot.
Rowan: Back in
2013, the linden trees in the parking lot were suffering from an aphid
infestation. And a tree care company was brought in to fix the problem.
Eric: They
applied a potent systemic insecticide to these trees, and the plants absorbed
that insecticide, and were producing pesticide-laden nectar. And shoppers
showed up one day and saw bumblebees twitching all over the parking lot and
literally raining down from the trees like raindrops.
Rowan: This
kind of tragedy happens all over the world, and it’s just one of many ways
we’re reducing insect populations worldwide.
Eric: We’re
losing bees because of habitat problems. There’s also the introduction of
diseases into wild bee populations. And then there’s the questions around
climate.
Rowan: As
insect populations collapse, so do the ecosystems that depend on them for
pollination. And that can trigger a full-blown biodiversity crisis. First, the
bugs go, then the plants go, and that’s bad for everyone.
Tape: This
says 3.4 miles left of that. Is that right?
Rowan: After
about two hours, we finally pull into Halls Ferry and Humbug Farms. They’re two
farms owned by a large producer that focuses on sustainable agriculture. This
is a modern industrial-scale operation. There’s no farmhouse or red barn or
white picket fence. There are metal garages full of trucks and other farm
equipment, and they basically grow two crops, blueberries and hazelnuts.
Tape: Good to
meet you, Tyson. Hi Tyson, I’m Rowan. Rowan. With FERN. Good to meet you,
Rowan. You, too. Hi, I’m Alyssa.
Tyson Davies: So on this farm, there’s about a thousand acres of
blueberries, about 15 varieties.
Rowan: That’s
Tyson Davies, who works for the company that owns these farms. The farms were
one of the first in the country to be certified by the Xerces Society for being
sustainably managed for pollinator health.
Tape: It’s a
fancy truck. Yeah.
Rowan: We hop
into Tyson’s electric truck and hit the road. Halls Ferry and Humbug Farms
together make up one of the largest organic blueberry farms in the country. And
their produce, fresh and frozen, is available in supermarkets nationwide.
Tyson: So these are two of the flagship farms in the Northwest for
the company Agriculture Capital.
Rowan: Agriculture
Capital is a private equity fund, so we’re not talking about a bunch of
hippies. But they are attempting to do something powerful. Get the world’s
investors to put big money into restorative agriculture. Tyson tells us that
the farm was designed with wild pollinators in mind. At first glance, we don’t
see anything out of the ordinary. There are neatly planted rows of blueberry
bushes, all flowering on the spring morning. But, if you look closer, there’s a
small patch of trees and bushes along the edge of a big plot of blueberry rows.
About 5 percent of the farm, maybe 40 to 50 acres, has been kept wild.
Alyssa: Can you
tell us what we’re looking at?
Tyson: Yeah.
So right now we’re standing on one of my favorite
parts of the entire farm. You can really see probably hundreds of acres of
blueberries from here. But if we look over to our left-hand side here, we can
see about three acres of native habitat that we planted along the side of this
lake.
Rowan: It’s
all plants that are native to the region.
Tyson: From
native rose to Douglas spirea, mock orange. Um, so there’s some plants that are
four feet tall, there’s some plants that are 16 feet tall. And so a good home to all kinds of native pollinator species in
here.
Rowan: The
wild habitats are home to wild bees and other pollinators. They protect them
through the winter and provide food when the blueberry plants aren’t flowering.
There’s also a line of
wild shrubs running along the access road that leads to the farm.
Tyson: These
farms were designed with a pollinator corridor that runs the entire length of
the farm. So that’s about five miles from end to end. And that was done
because, at that point, we understood and knew that native pollinators,
specifically bumblebees but many other, um, native pollinators in Oregon, are really good at pollinating blueberries.
Rowan: The
design is based on the hedgerows you find bordering traditional farms all over
the world. Many of those hedgerows got started centuries ago, when farmers left
borders of woody vegetation around their fields to serve as living fences. As
those hedges mature, they become hotbeds of biodiversity.
Hundreds of species use
them or live in them, including insects that feed on crop pests, and bees that
provide pollination. That makes them an easy way for farms to improve the
environment without sacrificing productivity.
Alyssa: Um, if
you guys see bumblebees, I don’t think we can leave without seeing ... The
story is about native bees.
Rowan: We came
to this farm to see what habitat for wild pollinators looks like on
agricultural land. But as Alyssa, our producer, tried to capture the sound of
wild bumblebees, we were confronted with one of the realities of modern day farming. We are surrounded by honeybees right
now.
Tyson:
Yep.
Rowan: Along
the access road were boxes of honeybee hives.
Alyssa: These
were shipped in though, right?
Tyson: Yes,
exactly. So we stock about three hives per acre, and
that depends on the variety of blueberries, the age of the blueberries, um, so
we’ll bring in quite a few hives for this thousand acres. You know, when, when
you only have a limited pollination window, like we have in the Northwest, and
you really want to optimize pollination, it can be difficult to pull back on
hives. It’s more of an insurance policy at this point.
Alyssa: Oh, I
hear one.
Rowan: Let’s
be clear here, the wild habitat is not just for show. In fact, it’s done a lot
of good. According to Agriculture Capital, within the first few years of
implementing hedgerows, the habitat has resulted in a sixfold increase in the
number of wild pollinators on the farm. And the number of beneficial insects
that prey on crop pests has more than doubled, allowing producers to spray a
little less. As another bonus, the bumblebees and the hedgerows fly at lower
temperatures than honeybees, so in a cool, wet year, they provide important
backup pollination. But yeah, most of the time, even a pollinator-friendly farm
like this one can’t get by without managed honeybees.
In other words, if you
thought it would be easy to redesign our agricultural system around wild bees,
think again.
Claire Kremen: If you
have a very large monoculture crop, when it blooms, it produces just a huge
number of blooms that all need to be visited. And the tiny amount of habitat
that is occupying the hedgerow doesn’t support enough pollinators to make that
really work out.
Rowan: That’s
Claire Kremen. She’s a renowned expert in
biodiversity and crop pollination at the University of British Columbia. And
the way she looks at it is that the problem with wild bees is a numbers game.
When your entire year’s production of blueberries is dependent on a two-week
bloom window, there’s no substitute for the pollinating power of millions of
honeybees.
She’s actually
looked into how much land it would take to provide enough wild bees to
do the job.
Claire: It was
a frighteningly large amount. Like, if you wanted to get all your pollination
needs met by wild pollinators, we found that you needed about 30 percent of the
surrounding habitat within the surrounding two kilometers of the farm to be
natural habitat.
Rowan: We’re
not going to get to a place where a third of the land around a mega farm is
natural habitat. It just wouldn’t make sense financially in today’s industrial
agricultural landscapes.
Claire: It’s
more about economies of scale, so profitability. It’s about convenience, um,
it’s about the, the supply chain. Those who collect the, the products off the
farm and, and get them to factories, they’re driving up with big trucks, they
want to fill up their truck easily, um, with, you know, a single commodity,
that’s, that’s what’s easiest.
Rowan: That
keeps food prices low, or at least a lot lower than they’d otherwise be. And
the pressure of the market means that system is hard to change. Even devoting
just 5 percent of its land to wild habitat puts this farm at a disadvantage
against its big competitors. But researchers like Claire think there’s another
solution.
Claire: The
largest farms are not necessarily the most productive ones, neither are the
smallest ones. There’s sort of an intermediate that is more productive.
Rowan: Claire
says the sweet spot is 200 to 300 acres. Such farms are actually
better at producing a lot of food per acre, while being wild
pollinator-friendly.
And by growing a mix of
different crops with different bloom times, they can get by with fewer
pollinators.
Claire: It
would look like a giant mosaic of these small to medium-sized farms, and they’d
be very diversified, uh, so be growing a lot of different things either within
the field or in multiple fields within their operation.
Rowan: Meaning
no more biological deserts.
Claire: You
know, most sides of a field would have a hedgerow or some kind of tree
planting. They would have patches of natural habitat integrated within them so
that we would get towards this 10 to 20 percent of natural habitat. I think
these would be beautiful farming landscapes.
Rowan: Me,
too. That’s a beautiful vision to strive for. A patchwork landscape of smart,
human-sized farms, in which food production and, yes, saving the bees, go hand
in hand. We’re not going to get there today. Maybe not even tomorrow. But
working toward it in meaningful ways, like advocating for government policy
that encourages it, or supporting businesses that function this way, is
probably a better goal than getting a colony for your yard.
We want to encourage
people to seek change for pollinators. We have to. But
we need to make sure that doing a good thing is also doing the right thing.
Teresa Cotsirilos: This
episode was reported by Rowan Jacobsen with additional reporting by Alyssa
Jeong Perry and me, Teresa Cotsirilos. Buzzkill is a production of the Food
& Environment Reporting Network and is distributed by PRX. Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross,
Brent Cunningham, and Tom Laskawy are Buzzkill’s executive producers.
Alyssa Jeong Perry is our
senior producer. The music arrangement and audio engineering were done by Sound
Sanctuary. Our theme song is by Sandra Lawson Ndu. Naomi
Barr is our fact checker. Special thanks to Berkeley Bowl. Funding for this
podcast is provided in part by the BAND Foundation. And I’m your host, Teresa
Cotsirilos.
Thanks for listening.
Teresa Cotsirilos: You
know what’s kind of a modern day miracle?
Supermarkets. I mean, sure, the prices can suck and the self-checkout machine’s always busted, but the average American
supermarket carries over 30,000 different products. You’ve got oranges from
Brazil, next to tomatoes from Mexico, next to mangoes from Peru. These
seemingly endless amounts of food.
Always there, always fresh
and available, and stacked into neat little pyramids under fluorescent
lights.
Wife: Let’s
pick up a few things for dinner.
What if all that food just
disappeared?
Wife: Hit the
produce first. We get some kale.
Teresa:
Actually, we can’t.
Wife: We
can’t get kale.
I’m Teresa Cotsirilos. I’m
a staff reporter at the Food & Environment Reporting Network.
That’s kind of a mouthful,
so we usually just go by FERN. We investigate where our food comes from and
what our decisions about growing it and eating it mean for the planet. So right
now my wife and I are shopping at our local grocery
store. But there’s a catch. We have to shop as if
pollinators — all the birds, bats, and bees that quietly support our food
system — just didn’t exist anymore.
Uh, no, we can’t get
zucchini.
Wife: We
can’t get zucchini.
Teresa: We
can’t get zucchini.
Wife: Okay.
Well, what about broccoli?
Teresa: Um, no.
No broccoli.
Wife: What
about just tomato sauce?
Teresa: Okay,
so long as there isn’t any garlic or onion or basil in the sauce. Like
basically any flavor. It’s so boring.
Okay, so this dinner is
going to be rough, but at least I’m doing what I do best. Annoying my wife to
make a point.
Wife: So we have plain pasta, tomatoes, and chicken.
Teresa: I think
that’s …
Wife: You
think that’s our dinner?
Teresa: I think
that’s our dinner.
Wife: Wait,
maybe we can get a drink in the wine aisle.
Teresa: And we
can’t have that either.
Wife: We
can’t have wine?
Teresa: No
wine, no tequila.
Wife: What
world is this?
Teresa: I guess
we could technically live like this.
But, man, would it suck if
we had to. And as much fun as we’re having, this goofy grocery store challenge
is actually illustrating a massive ecological problem
that’s complex and deadly serious. From the Food & Environment Reporting
Network, this is Buzzkill, a podcast where we take on the pollinator crisis.
What it is, how we’re making it worse, and what we can do to stop it.
Right now, there are about
350,000 different pollinator species on this planet. We’re talking bees,
butterflies, ants, moths, birds, bats, in some cases, even mosquitoes. Together
these pollinators have developed this symbiotic relationship with many flowering
plants, so the plants can produce seeds and fruit.
The survival of entire
ecosystems rests on these creatures’ tiny shoulders. But bee and butterfly
species across the world are declining, and an estimated four in every 10 of
them are at risk for extinction. That’s according to an international governmental
group studying the pollinator crisis. Now, some of this is due to climate
change, which is among the biggest threats to pollinators’ survival.
As greenhouse gas
emissions fuel extreme weather events, butterflies and bees are getting starved
by droughts, battered by storms, and roasted in the heat. But climate change
isn’t the only existential threat that we need to worry about.
Archive news clips: Today,
wild plants and animals are running out of places to live.
There’s a desperate plea
for global support to protect the world’s animals and plants. It comes …
The scientists you’re
about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction.
Teresa: Welcome
to the biodiversity crisis. The problems with pollinators are really just a particularly scary subset of this larger
crisis. Because an estimated third or more of the food crops that humans grow
and rely on need pollinators to reproduce. And like the climate crisis, we know
who’s to blame for the biodiversity crisis. Us. Industrial food production,
which depends on pesticides and other chemicals, has fueled rampant pollution
and habitat destruction.
So, you know, that’s a
buzzkill. But we can help with that, because it’s not too late to fix this.
Over the course of this limited series, we’re going to provide a road map for
how to bring agriculture into better balance with our environment. Because we’re
not doing enough for the birds and the bees. And when we have taken action, well, we haven’t exactly gone about it the
right way.
What if I told you that a
lot of these save the bee efforts are doing more harm to the environment than
good? We do need to save the bees. The question is, which ones? Reporter Rowan
Jacobsen takes it from here.
This is Buzzkill, Episode
1. Save which bees?
Rowan Jacobsen:
Portland, Oregon, is a city of coffee shops, food carts, and environmental
activism. Maybe you remember the TV show Portlandia, poking fun at Portland’s
culture.
Portlandia clip: Do you
remember the ’90s and people were singing about saving the planet and forming
bands?
Yeah.
There’s a place where that
idea still exists as a reality.
Where is it?
Portland.
Oregon?
Yeah.
Rowan: Walk
its leafy streets and you’ll find lush organic landscaping, net zero tiny
houses, and a lot of backyard beehives.
Mandy Shaw: Oregon
just got a pollinator license plate and so I got mine, but I had to, you know,
be fancy and get the vanity plate.
Rowan: The
kind of place where you’d find a Pollinator Paradise license plate and a
beekeeper who couldn’t get one fast enough for her car.
Mandy: Um, of
course I have my bees here. This is my hive house. I used to keep chickens and
decided it wasn’t for me after doing it for a few years.
Rowan: Meet
Mandy Shaw. She lives in a suburb right outside the city of Portland.
Mandy: And so I decided to move my bees into this little
structure.
Rowan: The
structure houses thousands of bees and is 10-by-12 with a corrugated slanted
roof.
Mandy: And it
keeps them dry, and it’s just kind of a nice condensed
space for them.
Rowan: The
walls are made of screen material, like for your windows.
Mandy: Because
when you have bees in your backyard and you want to also enjoy it as a living
space, you have to control their flight paths.
Rowan: In case
you haven’t already noticed, Mandy nerds out on bees.
Mandy: I love
beekeeping. I crave the ritual of putting on my suit and veil. The lingering
smell that the smoker leaves in my hair and clothing for long after it has gone
out. The heavy scent …
Rowan: In
fact, she has a podcast.
Mandy: This is
Beekeeper Confidential, a show about the curious lives of bees and their
beekeepers. I’m your host, Mandy Shaw.
Rowan: Mandy
says she started out like a lot of people, as a hobbyist. We’ll get back to the
hobbyists in a bit. But for now, we’re going to stick with Mandy.
Mandy: I
started getting into pollinator gardening, of course. I was starting to look at
honeybee keeping, but that year, a swarm of bees landed in a tree in my front
yard, and it was so amazing and awesome, and we called a beekeeper to come and
get them. And that experience for me was one of those moments in your life
that, you know, it’s like a sign. You got to do this. It was so cool. So the next …
Rowan: She got
her first colony of bees and just took off from there. She joined beekeeping
associations for both Portland and the state of Oregon. Now she teaches other
people how to get started in beekeeping.
Mandy: So,
I’ll go and speak at events or I’ll go and teach
workshops and share what I have learned so that other people, you know, have a
better head start on it. Because beekeeping is actually not
so simple as putting the bees in the hive and waiting for honey.
Rowan: Lately,
there have been a lot of new people looking to get started in bees. In the past
five years, the number of hives in the country has
risen by about one million. And a lot of that rise is due to hobbyists. Some of
these hobbyists are out in the country, but a growing number are in cities,
keeping bees on their rooftops or in small garden plots.
News anchor:
Interest in beekeeping is growing. Every year, Bartosz has more hives to
inspect. I’m a beekeeper. It’s really a nice hive. He’s seen the number of
apiaries grow from 250 to more than 360.
News anchor: Eric Mussen studies bees at the University of California-Davis.
He says urban beekeeping is spreading from rooftops to backyards. Even the
White House has its own hive. Boy, it’s really, really caught on.
Rowan: Some of
these new beekeepers are just in it for the honey. But for a lot of people, the
interest in bees isn’t so much about the bees themselves, but the fact that so
many bees are dying. And all of this, the interest in beekeeping, the rise in
hives, it all dates back to the mid-2000s when a
mysterious syndrome began decimating honeybee colonies that are used to
pollinate our crops.
News anchor: This
might be one of the most interesting, disturbing, and puzzling stories …
Rowan: Farmers
who use these colonies for the production of fruits
and vegetables were hit hard.
News anchor: In
parts of the country, there is still a critical shortage of bees. A rash of
mysterious disappearances of honeybee colonies has many bee growers scratching
their heads. It’s a complex problem that’s killed off about 45 percent of
commercial bee colonies, likely the result of pesticides, parasites, and
disease.
Rowan: The
sudden die-off of all these honeybees got a name. Scientists called it colony
collapse disorder, CCD.
News clip: It
appears to be just an overwhelming number of stresses all at one time. The
adult bees fly out of the hive and just don’t come back.
Rowan: There
are a number of factors contributing to the decimation
of these colonies. It’s everything from invasive mites, viruses, and gut
parasites to stress on the bees caused by pollution. CCD forced a lot of
Americans to wrestle with the basic fact of life. Most plants won’t make fruit
unless their flowers get pollinated with pollen from another plant of the same
species. That transfer is usually handled by bees, whose furry bodies are
perfectly suited to the task.
As bees fly from flower to
flower, sipping up the sugary nectar, they get covered in sticky pollen grains.
And some of those pollen grains get deposited in the next flower.
News clip: The
good stuff, the cucumbers and the melons and the strawberries and the apples
and all of those things are directly dependent upon
the honeybee.
Rowan: Let’s
dispel a myth about CCD right here. A lot of people think that if we don’t save
the bees, we won’t have enough food. Not true. Most of our calories come from
grains, like corn, wheat, and rice. And they don’t need pollinators. But the
colorful stuff that makes our meals healthy and delicious does.
Juicy blueberries. Crunchy
almonds. Bright orange pumpkins. All those fruits, nuts, and vegetables depend
on bees. And one bee in particular, the domesticated honeybee. There are 20,000
species of bees in the world, and most of them are not domesticated. They’re
solitary, living in holes in the ground. There’s the black furry bumblebee, the
gentle mason bee, and the teeny tiny sweat bee.
Those are all wild bees.
But the honeybee is a domesticated bee. It was brought here by European
settlers in the 17th century. Honeybees typically live in colonies of 50,000
individuals, and they happily live in wooden boxes. And that makes them the
best pollinators in the game and a priceless partner in food production.
News clip: And
what it means to the agricultural economy is about $15 billion a year in
agricultural production for the United States.
Rowan: The
industrialized agriculture system in the U.S. is built around monocrops using
lots of pesticides. It’s the most efficient way to make the most food for the
least amount of money. In these kinds of farms, there are very few good places
for pollinators to thrive. Large farms are a kind of biological desert. So,
what do we do? When the crops are about to bloom, farmers pay commercial
beekeepers to truck hives of honeybees into the fields. It’s industrial
pollination for an industrial food system.
The problem is, when
colony collapse disorder struck, millions of those honeybee hives died. As
scientists raced to discover the cause, people panicked about the future of the
food supply. “Save the bees” became a powerful cultural rallying cry. There were
school curriculums and T-shirts, practically whatever you can think of.
The rallying cry found its
way to the halls of government, where at least 24 states have considered or
passed pollinator-related legislation.
News anchor: A law
that went into effect this year lifts some of the restrictions that local
governments can impose on beekeepers. It’s one way the state is getting
involved to help protect bees.
Rowan: And
Sesame Street got involved, too.
Sesame Street: Mr.
Ryan? Yes, Elmo? Elmo wants to know, what can we do to help the bees?
Rowan: A lot
of people besides Elmo asked themselves that question. And as people learned
about honeybees, they also became attached to these little creatures. And
that’s one of the reasons we have so many backyard beekeepers in places like
Portland. The more people knew about them, the more they wanted to do
something, anything, to save the bees. Which actually turned
out to be kind of a bad idea.
Mandy: If I’m
at an event where I’m educating the public about honeybees, I will say the best
way to help bees is not become a beekeeper.
Rowan: Ask
Mandy Shaw if you should get some hives to help the bees. You might be
surprised at her answer.
Mandy: The
best way to help bees is to plant more flowers, because that’s what they
need.
Rowan: Mandy
isn’t the only one saying that. More and more people who truly understand this
issue now believe that saving the bees isn’t going to actually
save the bees. And they are telling people to think twice before getting
a hive.
Farmers definitely
need commercial beekeepers and domesticated honeybees to help pollinate
their crops. But putting a hive on your block doesn’t help farmers. In fact,
it’s probably doing more harm than good.
Gail McGinnis: This is
not a species going extinct. It’s a livestock animal. It’s like saying the cows
are in trouble.
Rowan: That’s
Gail McGinnis. She’s a biodiversity and pollinator researcher in Canada. I
spoke to her about something that the average person probably doesn’t know.
Bees do surprisingly well in cities.
Gail:
Landscape is so heterogeneous in cities. Like, they can find our cavity-nesting
bees, so the ones that don’t nest in the ground, you can find them in little
holes in fences, and they find places to live in cities.
Rowan: Cities
are filled with flowering plants. Think of all those garden boxes and pots in
front of restaurants. They can be a pretty good habitat for native or wild
bees. Unless, of course, they face tons of competition from, well, all those
domesticated honeybees people are putting in their
backyards.
Gail: We
don’t need to be keeping honeybees in cities. To me, it’s nonsensical.
Rowan: Gail
started looking into this a few years ago while conducting research at
Concordia University in Montreal. It was at that time that she noticed an
alarming trend. The number of domesticated beehives in the city had exploded in
just seven years, from less than 250 to nearly 3,000, in part because …
Gail: It’s
kind of the Wild West, urban beekeeping. There’s nothing prohibiting the number
of hives, where you can put them …
Rowan: 3,000!
That’s nearly a 1,200 percent jump. So Gail wondered,
what are all these honeybee hives doing to the wild bees that live in
Montreal?
Gail: So we caught wild bees, we identified them to species and
looked at their abundances. And then we also looked at, um, the floral
resources, too.
We looked at the amount of
pollen in clover flowers at each of these sites to get an idea of, okay, like
how much are these honeybees taking and is there enough pollen left for other
bees?
Rowan: What
Gail and her team found was that areas with the most honeybees living in them
had pushed out the wild bees and had the lowest amount of clover pollen.They also found that the
number of wild bee species in the city had dropped from 163 to 120 over the
same span of seven years.
Gail: That led
us to believe, okay, there’s a negative relationship here between the honeybee
abundance and our wild bee species abundance.
Rowan: So in 2023, Gayle’s study was published. There were op-eds
and articles in publications like the Washington Post and Smithsonian citing
her study. And people began to wonder, are we saving the right bees?
Gail: Keeping
honeybees in the city does nothing to help crop-pollinating honeybees. It
doesn’t make any sense.
Rowan: And how
about the wild bees? Do we need them, or are they cute but expendable?
Gail: Oh my goodness, they’re not expendable. Our wild
pollinators, I say this too, even in cropping environments, we could be
harnessing the power of our wild pollinators. A lot of our wild pollinators
have evolved with our native plant species, and they’re better pollinators than
honeybees. And so if we actually start to conserve
habitat for wild pollinators, even in agricultural land, we can get better
pollination, we get better biodiversity, we can create these win-win
scenarios.
Rowan: But are
farmers ready to take on this change?
With the rise of urban
beekeeping, honeybees may play a role in the decline of wild bees in cities.
But we need to put this in perspective. Cities only take up about 3 percent of
the land in this country. And agriculture takes up about half.
Eric Lee-Mäder: Farming is the single largest land
use on Earth.
Rowan: That’s
Eric Lee-Mäder. At the time of this interview, he was
the codirector of the pollinator program at the Xerces Society, a leading
conservation group. Mäder is an expert in designing
new pollinator habitats. He’s also an advocate for pollinators. He speaks for
the bees.
Eric: And
more broadly, biodiversity declines. So if we want to
reverse pollinator declines, we have to work first and foremost in agriculture.
Rowan: When we
talk about agriculture, we’re really talking about big farms. The ones that
feed millions of people in the U.S. and abroad. So how do you go about
conserving pollinator habitats when you’re dealing with farms of this
scale?
Well, Buzzkill senior
producer Alyssa Jeong Perry and I headed to Oregon’s Willamette Valley to find
out. The Willamette Valley is known for raising high-value crops, like
hazelnuts, wine grapes, and blueberries.
Rowan: We
wanted to see what a pollinator-friendly industrial farm would look like. And
Eric knew where to find one.
Eric: This’ll
be it.
Rowan: So he hopped in the car with us. And we made our way down
the interstate out to the valley. As we drove, we passed strip malls with
fast-food chains and big-box stores. Eric pointed out a Target store beside one
of the freeway exits.
Eric: Just as
an aside, this Target store is the site of the largest mass bumblebee poisoning
ever documented.
News anchor: Last
week we told you about the 50,000 bees that died in a Wilsonville Target
parking lot.
Rowan: Back in
2013, the linden trees in the parking lot were suffering from an aphid
infestation. And a tree care company was brought in to fix the problem.
Eric: They
applied a potent systemic insecticide to these trees, and the plants absorbed
that insecticide, and were producing pesticide-laden nectar. And shoppers
showed up one day and saw bumblebees twitching all over the parking lot and
literally raining down from the trees like raindrops.
Rowan: This
kind of tragedy happens all over the world, and it’s just one of many ways
we’re reducing insect populations worldwide.
Eric: We’re
losing bees because of habitat problems. There’s also the introduction of
diseases into wild bee populations. And then there’s the questions around
climate.
Rowan: As
insect populations collapse, so do the ecosystems that depend on them for
pollination. And that can trigger a full-blown biodiversity crisis. First, the
bugs go, then the plants go, and that’s bad for everyone.
Tape: This
says 3.4 miles left of that. Is that right?
Rowan: After
about two hours, we finally pull into Halls Ferry and Humbug Farms. They’re two
farms owned by a large producer that focuses on sustainable agriculture. This
is a modern industrial-scale operation. There’s no farmhouse or red barn or
white picket fence. There are metal garages full of trucks and other farm
equipment, and they basically grow two crops, blueberries and hazelnuts.
Tape: Good to
meet you, Tyson. Hi Tyson, I’m Rowan. Rowan. With FERN. Good to meet you,
Rowan. You, too. Hi, I’m Alyssa.
Tyson Davies: So on this farm, there’s about a thousand acres of
blueberries, about 15 varieties.
Rowan: That’s
Tyson Davies, who works for the company that owns these farms. The farms were
one of the first in the country to be certified by the Xerces Society for being
sustainably managed for pollinator health.
Tape: It’s a
fancy truck. Yeah.
Rowan: We hop
into Tyson’s electric truck and hit the road. Halls Ferry and Humbug Farms
together make up one of the largest organic blueberry farms in the country. And
their produce, fresh and frozen, is available in supermarkets nationwide.
Tyson: So these are two of the flagship farms in the Northwest for
the company Agriculture Capital.
Rowan: Agriculture
Capital is a private equity fund, so we’re not talking about a bunch of
hippies. But they are attempting to do something powerful. Get the world’s
investors to put big money into restorative agriculture. Tyson tells us that
the farm was designed with wild pollinators in mind. At first glance, we don’t
see anything out of the ordinary. There are neatly planted rows of blueberry
bushes, all flowering on the spring morning. But, if you look closer, there’s a
small patch of trees and bushes along the edge of a big plot of blueberry rows.
About 5 percent of the farm, maybe 40 to 50 acres, has been kept wild.
Alyssa: Can you
tell us what we’re looking at?
Tyson: Yeah.
So right now we’re standing on one of my favorite
parts of the entire farm. You can really see probably hundreds of acres of
blueberries from here. But if we look over to our left-hand side here, we can
see about three acres of native habitat that we planted along the side of this
lake.
Rowan: It’s
all plants that are native to the region.
Tyson: From
native rose to Douglas spirea, mock orange. Um, so there’s some plants that are
four feet tall, there’s some plants that are 16 feet tall. And so a good home to all kinds of native pollinator species in
here.
Rowan: The
wild habitats are home to wild bees and other pollinators. They protect them
through the winter and provide food when the blueberry plants aren’t flowering.
There’s also a line of
wild shrubs running along the access road that leads to the farm.
Tyson: These
farms were designed with a pollinator corridor that runs the entire length of
the farm. So that’s about five miles from end to end. And that was done
because, at that point, we understood and knew that native pollinators,
specifically bumblebees but many other, um, native pollinators in Oregon, are really good at pollinating blueberries.
Rowan: The
design is based on the hedgerows you find bordering traditional farms all over
the world. Many of those hedgerows got started centuries ago, when farmers left
borders of woody vegetation around their fields to serve as living fences. As
those hedges mature, they become hotbeds of biodiversity.
Hundreds of species use
them or live in them, including insects that feed on crop pests, and bees that
provide pollination. That makes them an easy way for farms to improve the
environment without sacrificing productivity.
Alyssa: Um, if
you guys see bumblebees, I don’t think we can leave without seeing ... The
story is about native bees.
Rowan: We came
to this farm to see what habitat for wild pollinators looks like on
agricultural land. But as Alyssa, our producer, tried to capture the sound of
wild bumblebees, we were confronted with one of the realities of modern day farming. We are surrounded by honeybees right
now.
Tyson:
Yep.
Rowan: Along
the access road were boxes of honeybee hives.
Alyssa: These
were shipped in though, right?
Tyson: Yes,
exactly. So we stock about three hives per acre, and
that depends on the variety of blueberries, the age of the blueberries, um, so
we’ll bring in quite a few hives for this thousand acres. You know, when, when
you only have a limited pollination window, like we have in the Northwest, and
you really want to optimize pollination, it can be difficult to pull back on
hives. It’s more of an insurance policy at this point.
Alyssa: Oh, I
hear one.
Rowan: Let’s
be clear here, the wild habitat is not just for show. In fact, it’s done a lot
of good. According to Agriculture Capital, within the first few years of
implementing hedgerows, the habitat has resulted in a sixfold increase in the
number of wild pollinators on the farm. And the number of beneficial insects
that prey on crop pests has more than doubled, allowing producers to spray a
little less. As another bonus, the bumblebees and the hedgerows fly at lower
temperatures than honeybees, so in a cool, wet year, they provide important
backup pollination. But yeah, most of the time, even a pollinator-friendly farm
like this one can’t get by without managed honeybees.
In other words, if you
thought it would be easy to redesign our agricultural system around wild bees,
think again.
Claire Kremen: If you
have a very large monoculture crop, when it blooms, it produces just a huge
number of blooms that all need to be visited. And the tiny amount of habitat
that is occupying the hedgerow doesn’t support enough pollinators to make that
really work out.
Rowan: That’s
Claire Kremen. She’s a renowned expert in
biodiversity and crop pollination at the University of British Columbia. And
the way she looks at it is that the problem with wild bees is a numbers game.
When your entire year’s production of blueberries is dependent on a two-week
bloom window, there’s no substitute for the pollinating power of millions of
honeybees.
She’s actually
looked into how much land it would take to provide enough wild bees to
do the job.
Claire: It was
a frighteningly large amount. Like, if you wanted to get all your pollination
needs met by wild pollinators, we found that you needed about 30 percent of the
surrounding habitat within the surrounding two kilometers of the farm to be
natural habitat.
Rowan: We’re
not going to get to a place where a third of the land around a mega farm is
natural habitat. It just wouldn’t make sense financially in today’s industrial
agricultural landscapes.
Claire: It’s
more about economies of scale, so profitability. It’s about convenience, um,
it’s about the, the supply chain. Those who collect the, the products off the
farm and, and get them to factories, they’re driving up with big trucks, they
want to fill up their truck easily, um, with, you know, a single commodity,
that’s, that’s what’s easiest.
Rowan: That
keeps food prices low, or at least a lot lower than they’d otherwise be. And
the pressure of the market means that system is hard to change. Even devoting
just 5 percent of its land to wild habitat puts this farm at a disadvantage
against its big competitors. But researchers like Claire think there’s another
solution.
Claire: The
largest farms are not necessarily the most productive ones, neither are the
smallest ones. There’s sort of an intermediate that is more productive.
Rowan: Claire
says the sweet spot is 200 to 300 acres. Such farms are actually
better at producing a lot of food per acre, while being wild
pollinator-friendly.
And by growing a mix of
different crops with different bloom times, they can get by with fewer
pollinators.
Claire: It
would look like a giant mosaic of these small to medium-sized farms, and they’d
be very diversified, uh, so be growing a lot of different things either within
the field or in multiple fields within their operation.
Rowan: Meaning
no more biological deserts.
Claire: You
know, most sides of a field would have a hedgerow or some kind of tree
planting. They would have patches of natural habitat integrated within them so
that we would get towards this 10 to 20 percent of natural habitat. I think
these would be beautiful farming landscapes.
Rowan: Me,
too. That’s a beautiful vision to strive for. A patchwork landscape of smart,
human-sized farms, in which food production and, yes, saving the bees, go hand
in hand. We’re not going to get there today. Maybe not even tomorrow. But
working toward it in meaningful ways, like advocating for government policy
that encourages it, or supporting businesses that function this way, is
probably a better goal than getting a colony for your yard.
We want to encourage
people to seek change for pollinators. We have to. But
we need to make sure that doing a good thing is also doing the right thing.
Teresa Cotsirilos: This
episode was reported by Rowan Jacobsen with additional reporting by Alyssa
Jeong Perry and me, Teresa Cotsirilos. Buzzkill is a production of the Food
& Environment Reporting Network and is distributed by PRX. Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross,
Brent Cunningham, and Tom Laskawy are Buzzkill’s executive producers.
Alyssa Jeong Perry is our
senior producer. The music arrangement and audio engineering were done by Sound
Sanctuary. Our theme song is by Sandra Lawson Ndu. Naomi
Barr is our fact checker. Special thanks to Berkeley Bowl. Funding for this
podcast is provided in part by the BAND Foundation. And I’m your host, Teresa
Cotsirilos.
Thanks for listening.
