Posted on 01/17/2020 2:13:54 PM PST by nickcarraway
In the past five years, almond milk consumption in the United States has exploded over 250 percent. The lower-calorie, vegan milk alternative is a staple in grocery stores and coffee shops across the country now, but its booming popularity comes at a heavy environmental cost. According to a new report from the Guardian this week, the titanic and growing demands of the California almond industry are placing a huge strain on the hives of bees used to pollinate their orchards, wiping out billions of honeybees in a matter of months.
“My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” Dennis Arp, a commercial beekeeper, told the Guardian. Like many of his peers, nearly half of Arp’s income comes from renting out his hives to pollinate almonds. But now, he says, he loses 30 percent or more of his bees a year, a number that’s on par for many beekeepers in the U.S. One survey of commercial beekeepers found that 50 billion honeybees were wiped out in just a few months during the winter of 2018–19.
The high mortality rate among bees who pollinate almonds, beekeepers believe, is due in part to the enormous quantities of pesticides used on almonds — far more than any other crop in California, whose Central Valley region is responsible for more than 80 percent of the world’s almond supply. What’s more, almond pollination is especially demanding for bees, because they need to wake up from their annual period of winter dormancy one to two months earlier than usual to begin. Then, once they start, massive numbers of bees are concentrated in small geographic areas, making it easier for diseases to spread among them.
As Patrick Pynes, an organic beekeeper who teaches environmental studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, told the Guardian, “The bees in the almond groves are being exploited and disrespected. They are in severe decline because our human relationship to them has become so destructive.”
In order to improve the pollination process, groups have launched programs to help protect bees and signal to consumers which products have been made with “bee-friendly” methods. The nonprofit “Bee Better,” for instance, partners with almond growers to increase biodiversity for bees in their groves by planting wildflowers, mustard, and clover between the rows of almond trees.
Still, even the most bee-friendly almond groves have a heavy environmental footprint. Almonds are an especially thirsty crop. As Mother Jones reported back in 2014, it takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond, an astounding demand in a regularly drought-stricken state.
Maybe try out oat milk for a while instead?
One would think that cow's milk would have no carbs or sugar.
No farmer would spray pesticides on his almond trees while rented bees were working. Not if he intended to stay in business.
Word would get around and he would never again be able to hire a beekeeper.
The story is just more BS from the enemedia...
If we need to make our own steel for the sake of national security we also need to produce food for the same reason.
^^^^^^^^^
This!
Kroger has shelf stable ultra pasteurized milk.
I’m sure it’s the Evil Orange Man’s fault. Impeachment 2 in 5,4,3,2,1...
Because they look through eyes that are evil, all they can see is that evil.
The free market adapts to circumstances regarding bees as well as most other things.
This is just another phony scare to get everybody, er, buzzing...
Baloney! The problem is NOT evil fruit. The problem is greedy business with an eye on mega profits planting trees where they weren’t intended to grow thats putting the strain on bees having to leave the hives too soon, or the bees running out of food too soon so that they’re forced to leave the hives too soon. There’s good money in honey. None of the problems cited in the article makes almonds evil. Evil is in the souls of men and the decisions they choose to make.
Husband detests skim milk. Still prefers whole milk but vanity wins. I use 30 cal almond for cooking when he is not around and no complaints. We do use buttermilk and whole cream and half n half cream. Butter also. Still on the side of the cows and hope Dairy Farmers stay in business forever.
Since baby cows need carbs, including sugars (from lactose), one would think quite the opposite.
Many of us chose to eat healthy-organic produce, free range meat, eggs, etc-I’m fortunate enough to live in a rural area where I can grow my own food-or buy locally grown food at the grocery store and butcher shop that I know is pesticide, GMO and hormone free-I do NOT know if the Argentine beef, Canadian wheat, Ukrainian corn-or even the veggies from Cali and Mexico are not infused with those chemicals-I’ll keep eating what ranchers and farmers here grow and raise-and if the SHTF, I’m pretty sure there will be problems getting anything-even food-that is imported-so no thanks...
I grew up on a small family ranch that family members still own and operate-it was not fancy, but it was/is not a ghetto by any means...
I don’t know about that. Wasn’t Charleston Heston’s famous line at the end of the the 1970’s classic Soylent Green: “Soylent green and vodka are people!!”?
There would probably be alot more almond milk out there, if the almond nipples weren’t so small and hard to find.
Powdered milk is a great alternative. I’ve not heard one environmental complaint yet about the powder trees they get the milk powder from causing any problems.
So what could the solution possibly look like? I'm really straining my brain here.....hmmmmm....
If you don’t think eating is important to the populace and therefore the economy, I think you should quit while you’re WAY behind.
make your own nut milk. just boil water and whatever nuts and the resulting liquid is basically what almond milk is. Ridiculously over priced water from boiled nuts.
You don’t have a clue what you are talking about, do you? You look at agriculture and see only the farm end of it contributing 1.1% of its direct contributions. But you don’t see the ancillary contributions, for example in trucking, retail sales etc, which are a combined 5.4% of the GDP, etc. Remove it and you’d make a huge hole in the economy. Just growing food may be a small but not insignificant portion of the GDP (think about it every working person in the USA taking FOUR 24 hour days of the calendar year to working in agriculture to produce it), but we do NOT need to be dependent on imported food for our survival, and your suggestion just confirmed the claims made by others about the sheer stupidity of your position.
The nemesis of honey bees is mites, which suck the fat from bees bodies much like fleas suck blood from newborn puppies. Science gave us miticides to protect bees but just like fleas, the mites developed resistance. So science fought back with Amatraz.
But what if amatraz kills the bee by the same process as the hive mites are killed only slower - throwing the switch on the bee's immune system and making them hyper-sensitive to pesticides? Researchers at Penn State seem to think it does, which brings us back not to growers or almond consumers, or water requirements of trees, but to the lowly mite and the never-ending battle of man against the ruthless and destructive forces of 'mother' nature.
“...Most tree fruit growers will remember amitraz as Mitac which was used heavily for pear psylla control in the past. This product was routinely used for synergizing organophosphate and pyrethroid insecticides in crops like cotton where key pests had developed resistance, because it shut down the enzymes insects used to detoxify pesticides.
“This raises concerns about amitraz being used to treat mites in honey bee hives. While it may be effective in controlling varroa mites now that they have quickly developed resistance to the organophosphate coumophos and the pyrethroid fluvalinate, adding this synergist to a hive basically shuts off a bee's immune system to pretty much any pesticide with which it later comes into contact. In addition, work presented by Dr. Jeff Pettis, from USDA-ARS in Beltsville, MD indicates that amitraz interferes with mating in honey bees....
https://extension.psu.edu/pollinators-and-pesticide-sprays-during-bloom-in-fruit-plantings
Save the bees! I can support this.
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