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

[douglas9]

Bees are essential to the functioning of America’s titanic almond industry – and billions are dying in the process

Dennis Arp was feeling optimistic last summer, which is unusual for a beekeeper these days.

Thanks to a record wet spring, his hundreds of hives, scattered across the central Arizona desert, produced a bounty of honey. Arp would have plenty to sell in stores, but more importantly, the bumper harvest would strengthen his bees for their biggest task of the coming year.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp’s revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative than renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California’s fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world’s almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp’s hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. “My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” he says.


https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybees-deaths-almonds-hives-aoe

[Voltaire2]

1. So is my oat milk obsession like sending donkeys to war?

[Farmer-Rick]

2. The agriculture chemicals used on almonds are deadly.

Last edited Thu Jan 9, 2020, 12:34 PM - Edit history (1)

And to make it worse they use sweepers and blowers that kick up all the dust, pesticide, round up and fungicides that has fallen into the dust. The sweepers are to pick up the nuts off the round up drenched dry dusty ground. That dust is deadly.

https://www.mynspr.org/post/what-pesticides-are-sprayed-almond-orchards-and-are-they-harmful-those-who-live-nearby#stream/0

https://www.almonds.com/blog/about-almond-board/almond-harvest-sun-and-sweepers

Eating animal free products will not stop the destruction of our environment. We have to stop mass production, mono-crop, chemical drenched industrial farming in all its forms. From GMO Round up drenched wheat, soy, corn and rice to cheap nuts, it's the industrialization under negligent and corrupt corporations that is destroying our environment. Just eating vegetative matter, is not going to stop the destruction of the earth and oceans.

[Iwasthere]

3. Grow sharable gardens not lawns

Boycott poisonous laden crops

[Farmer-Rick]

4. Yes.

You would be amazed how much food you can grow without chemicals.

[hunter]

6. Have you ever seen California's central valley dairy farms?

The almond orchards don't seem so bad in comparison.

Urban, mostly vegan lifestyles have the smallest environmental footprint, but only when human populations are not increasing. That's just the way it is. We can't all live Mother Earth News lifestyles when there are seven and a half billion of us.

I support vegan milk alternatives to whatever extent they displace factory farm dairy production.

We drink soy milk in our house. That probably has a smaller environmental footprint than either cow milk or almond milk.

[Farmer-Rick]

7. Yeah but the Round up and deadly pesticides don't just hurt you and your family

If we just produced healthy organic vegetables and pasture raised livestock without concern for profit, our country and the earth would be better off.

It is the need to make a profit that forces on us poison laced almond milk (Did you see how it raised the autism rate in children in the links I posted?). Why can't farmers be like city workers, paid to farm but won't starve their family if they don't make a profit?

There is a dairy down the road from my farm. I get my milk from them. Yeah there's some mud but in their pastures there is all sorts of wildlife. They are an organic farm and raise their own feed and pasture their cows and sell calfs. I drive by it every time I go to town. It never smells; it's far cleaner than my barns. They tell me their goal is to make the best milk possible not make huge profits.

They recently started a program to increase the number of spiders in their pastures to reduce flies and increase bird activity. Why can't all dairy farms be like this? Because of the need to make a profit.

This country can make a choice, either healthy farms and environments along with healthy food, or throw our farmers onto the fickle capitalist markets and watch greed, profits and chemical laced foods overtake our grocery stores. We obviously made our choice and give huge subsidies to only the most profitable corporate farms.

It can be different. We can feed our families using organic methods but we woukd rather make a few people filthy rich.

[Calculating]

8. There's just plain too many people

If there were significantly fewer people we could do a lot of things in a more Earth friendly fashion. Instead everything has to be mass produced because we have billions to feed.