The Rise of the Bee Bandits
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noemamag.com
In addition to points made by others here, I wonder also about our general drop in bees and other insects.
I am astonished this one crop hogs so many resources and I don't know how to feel about it. I like almonds and would like to someday learn to make homemade marzipan like my mother made when I was a child (sweetened almond paste, basically).
Almonds get vilified for their water use in California and, meanwhile, people are also hating on the meat industry and promoting veganism. It seems to me nuts are an important part of a vegetarian diet and should be even more important to a vegan diet.
I have a lot of half formed questions but no real answers, questions that have rattled around my brain for some time without ever quite gelling.
I still eat a fair amount of nuts, often peanuts, which are lower in oxalate. I appreciate cashew (and coconut!) as an alternative to almonds that are still high in fat, like for making ice cream out of. I think one reason almonds and almond milk have been so popular is their pleasantly high fat content.
I don't have any particular intuition for how much water these other nuts take to produce.
Coconuts are a drupe, which I had to look up and didn't know.
For example, I did a split about twelve days ago, and the new hive started making queens. Now this was a very aggressive hive, so we wanted to re-queen it, so about eight days in we went back and destroyed every emergency queen cell, then two days later we went back and gave them a new queen that we purchased -- one bred specifically for mite resistance and which is not africanized. If we hadn't done this then that hive would be about to get a new queen naturally (and that queen would then kill all the other about-to-hatch queens).
Though, even if they make a new queen, there will be a brood break. A brood break is a time period during which no new eggs are laid. Here it would be about three weeks, and maybe a few more days. It takes time for the new queen to hatch, get mated, and start laying. If this happens at the height of a honey flow then the hive will be made much weaker because the workers live just six weeks in that time of the year. Beekeepers tend to force a short brood break in the fall to forestall the mites, but this is a bit much.
I don't have enough experience to say for sure, but I would expect that stealing queens will typically cause loss of maybe 50% of hives -- more or less depending on the time of the year. Also, if the beekeeper inspects hives weekly (a big if, especially if the beek has thousands of hives) they will notice that the hive is queenless and will probably re-queen it sooner than the time it takes the hive to make a new queen, thus reducing the loss rate. Commercial queens are about $45, but they're not available year-round. A commercial beekeeper might even raise their own queens for themselves, so they might have better availability. So hive loss rate might be lower, though still, it's not cheap, and it's labor intensive to inspect every hive weekly.
Beekeepers who produce queens for sale breed them for various attributes, such as mite resistance, gentleness, and productivity (of honey). The queens that they use for the first stage (for making the eggs that will be grafted) are quite valuable. Though it's still not worth stealing unless you can set up a similar operation, which means there wouldn't be very many suspects.
(There are also beekeepers who artificially mate queens to better control for male genetics. That is a very labor-intensive process, and those queens are correspondingly more expensive, but the main queens probably aren't any more valuable than in the process I described above.)
Seems it'd be worthwhile for the beekeepers to invest in a bunch of game cameras and set them up every time they setup their hives unattended. They could at least get some faces, vehicle images, and possibly license tags, which would be a big head start in tracking the thieves. Mobile-connected cameras would be even better. IDK how dense license plate readers are in the Central Valley, but if there are even a few, they could likely catch perps within hours, even yellow-handed.
Seems crazy to not apply at least a bit of technology when you are leaving valuable animals worth $five to $seven figures by the side of a field.
In addition to almond farms, there are all sorts of alfalfa and feed crops produced with a high water weight that get shipped overseas or to other states. Whatever mechanisms most states have in play to manage their water resources are completely inadequate, and they should probably be overhauled. The only reason almonds and other water intensive crops are grown is because there's an exploitable difference in the valuation of the product and the cost of one or more resources required for production.
The problem can be regulated and rectified, but the people with money have a big advantage.
What exactly is the problem and how can it be rectified? Sure, we could make farmers pay actual costs and eliminate subsidies. We will also massively cut production because local farm can't compete with overseas crop prices. It's also possible the rich countries buyout crops from the poor and create famines or the breakdown of free trade (or we abandon the US version of free trade and tax imports to match domestic prices).
California has a smaller water budget than before. Use has to be cut from somewhere, and to date, those cuts have been disproportionately borne by the 10% that goes to urban users.
There should be a fixed amount of water every farm and household gets for free, and after that, a market rate for it. (This is complicated by the history of Western water rights.)
> will also massively cut production because local farm can't compete with overseas crop prices
The world doesn't have that much arable land [1]. America has most of it (and somewhat uniquley, a growing share), and moreover, it's bang next to the world's largest consumers. Those are difficult built-in advantages to fuck up. (I'm not even counting the various federal agricultural subisides and trade protections.)
This was the main part I was talking about. The only way most farms get by is due to subsidies. There aren't many trade protections that I'm aware of. For example, honey is completely undercut by overseas sources, organic labeling is based on the production site regulations which can be less strict than domestically, we can't export most pork due to ratraphine use, etc.
Remove the protections and rhe industry collapses. This is the odd man out when it comes to politics as it's something supported by both sides. Cost of living is too high in the US to be able to export to many nations. The major consumers would look to the cheaper nations before us, leading to strict export controls, further supporting price increases. We saw a bit about this with the wheat export restrictions and famine fears in some countries.
The water allocations should be fixed. It's possible that eliminating crops not suitable for the area could be another fix (rice and almonds) without having to dive too much into the allocation side.
Despite the rhetoric of "preserving the family farm," the vast majority of farmers do not benefit from federal farm subsidy programs and most of the subsidies go to the largest and most financially secure farm operations.
Small operators can participate in crop insurance. But they pay for that, just like you and me.
Yes a lot of the money goes to the biggest farms. There are some programs specifically for smaller operations too. There are also state level grants, programs, and subsidies in most states. There are even programs for distressed loans.
The existence of small programs is true. But negligible in big picture - one or two pennies from the pocket of the consumer annually.
"one or two pennies from the pocket of the consumer annually."
Small producers take about 10% of commodity crop subsidies (not counting other types), which is about $1B per year. So no, not pennies per person. A better measure would be on a per acre basis.
I had the small producer at 1%. I'll have to look again.
At least in my experience, a lot of small farms are taking advantage of state-level programs, equipment grants, etc more than stuff like the CCC (which is more an indirect benefit to the small producers, but where a lot of the money goes). The equipment grants/loans can be tricky since you may only need one every decade or so, so it's not showing up in every year's reporting. For example, the dairy farm down the street recieved an environmental grant (state level I believe) for manure processing equiptment and lagoon. They are a medium sized operation - family run, under 200 acres, under 200 cows. Without the grant they couldnt afford the equiptment and they'd be closed down. I know several small farms that take advantage of wildlife/environmental/price-control crop programs where they make more money - no need get insurance since it's not for harvest, no need for fertilizer, etc. But of course what's really making ends meet for the small farms is that someone in the family needs a "real" job for a stable base income and health benefits.
This is really the core of my frustration - if you're a CA resident, and don't live in the central valley or work in the agriculture business, what possible benefit to you is supplying most of the world's supply of almonds? Water, especially in the southwest, is an increasingly scarce and valuable resource. Why would california residents want to subsidize the rest of the world's almond consumption? (Honestly I think they don't, but the political reasons behind this are complex and depressing and way off track of the subject matter of this thread)
I'm sure they pay taxes that fund something or other they can point to as somehow being a net benefit to "the economy" or some high level abstraction. The politics should be simple - California's got a whole lot of cities and population in places where a reliable and predictable source of clean water is a matter of life and death, and it should be a trivial calculation of necessity. What is needed by those places, minus a sensible and responsible buffer, is set aside, calculated dispassionately and without regard to almond farmers or any other interests. Once those calculations are made, offer fair allowances of water from what remains. If some years there are no allowances, then maybe you shouldn't run an almond farm in California. People should win out over corporations almost every time.
The trouble with these issues is that yes, they are complex, and that it's somehow acceptable for politicians to use the complexity to fog up the narratives and we give them the latitude to make bass ackwards decisions like favoring the almond farmers. Deny them the complexity and insist on the simple solution - people first, corporations can figure their shit out with whatever's left, and no more.
all of what you wrote is well said, I just think in the current california political climate (which is a little strange and different from the rest of the country, and not at all what people outside california imagine it is) what you said is essentially impossible as long as politicians are for hire by corporations. Anyone lobbying for this has no chance to get in a position to make any meaningful change.
The best hope for change is a proposition passing - california constitution allows basically any prop to make the ballot and they must be enacted into law if they pass. It’s one of the great things about the way CA govt works. The people can overrule through referendum essentially any law (except when the state unconstitutionally removed the secession prop) or part of the constitution. Not all places give voters that much power in how the state is run.
However, unfortunately, drought policy in CA has amnesia and every time we have a massive water year like this year everyone thinks severe drought is never going to happen again. For a state that is so seemingly climate conscious, they’re shockingly blind to the realities that climate change will bring to the state’s water supply. We won’t try to address this until it’s such a severe emergency that people are dying in the street (or even worse to them - corporations losing money! oh no!) imho.
How to rectify? The simplest is to charge/tax farming with scarce water for export. The next is to allow metro purchase of water rights (already happening).
To put that into perspective, that is almost twice as much water as California's cities use in total [1].
[1] https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/... 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban
Unless there's rule or pricing changes, it ain't gonna stop. Near every country has the golden crop, that produces so much more money than the rest.
Wheat exports for $250 per ton of wheat. This month almonds export at $3,783 per ton. (This is actually down quite a bit from before and is resulting in fewer almonds being grown this year.)
In other words, given that farmers have a roughly fixed allotment of water to work from, if you completely banned all almond growing from CA, farmers would just use that same water on other plants and water usage would not change at all.