By Adam Rabiner
2019’s The Pollinators is an appropriate film with which to mark Plow to Plate’s return as an online film series. It is a relatively recent film, coming out the same year as Covid-19, the disease that halted our in-person meetings. It revisits the many themes of our series – the unsustainability of modern agriculture practices, the harm to soil and our environment, and the more promising alternative practices that may restore some balance. The framework with which it approaches these subjects is that of the bee, in this case, a set of compound eyes made up of thousands of individual lenses. As much as the bees, the film addresses its issues from the perspective of their tireless caretakers, the beekeepers, who could have hung up the towel during the height of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in 2005-2008, but instead doubled down and managed their losses through splitting hives and raising new queens.
You get a sense of the tireless work of these beekeepers in the opening scene of trucks, tractor trailers and forklifts moving hundreds of hives stacked on wooden pallets in the dim pre-dawn light before most of us are even awake. Sometimes the beekeepers have only two-days’ notice to move their bees, often across hundreds or more miles. The convergence of these bees and their keepers in California’s Central Valley is the world’s greatest pollination event. “Over 2 million hives from around the U.S. are put on flatbeds and trucked out to pollinate more than 1 million acres of almond orchards.” Bees also pollinate apples, blueberries, cherries, and many other fruit, vegetable, nut and seed crops, contributing more than $20 billion to the U.S. economy, not to mention their production of honey and other salable hive products. Beekeepers, the un-stung heroes of this story, are as busy as their bees, often moving them up to 22 times per year, mostly at night.
During the light of day, you can see that many of these bees are having a hard time. A pile of dead bodies accumulates outside of some hives in a mass graveyard, many dragged and dropped there from by their sisters during routine housekeeping. This sad fate is not attributable to a single cause but an accumulation of threats and stressors that include: a relatively new class of neonicotinoid insecticides which take years to degrade that affect insect nervous systems, herbicides and fungicides, Varroa mites that feed on bee larvae and pupae, as well as adult honeybees, and in some cases malnutrition as once fertile Midwestern flowery grasslands have become food desserts of soybeans and corn, industrialized landscapes peppered with fracking rigs.
Bees are the proverbial canaries in the mine shaft. Humans are shafted as well, since bees are harbingers of destructive changes to the environment that extend beyond their species to ours. The film chronicles the long and sad modern agricultural history that sacrifices diversity for monoculture crops. Once numerous farms and farmers who had practiced complex and intermarried plant and animal husbandry adopted new systems that valued simplicity and efficiency only. In a Darwinian battle of the fittest, only the strongest survived and the number of farmers and farms today is a fraction of what it was one hundred years ago. The soil, treated to round after round of Roundup Weed and Grass Killer, has degraded and become unhealthy.
Yet, just as CCD is no longer the mystery that it once was in the early part of this century and has been properly diagnosed as a syndrome of various stressors, so too have we begun to figure out the problems with industrial scale agriculture. We now know that the vaunted goal of total control has come at the cost of fragility, externalities, and unsustainability. And a new way of thinking is making the case for alternative healthier regenerative farming methods that include crop rotations, cover crops, more limited use of chemicals, and integrating crops and livestock through foraging. This new mindset is taking hold beyond the farming community. Urban beekeepers are setting up hives on rooftops, shoppers at local farmers markets are asking questions about where their food is coming from, homeowners are learning to live with wildflowers springing up from their previously pristine green lawns, and consumers are beginning to embrace less than perfect produce sold by companies such as Misfit Market. Parents are taking their kids to Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in Westchester, New York, and places like it, to learn about making “healthier choices for themselves and the planet” – and hopefully eating a great meal at the restaurant, as well.
2019’s The Pollinators is an appropriate film with which to mark Plow to Plate’s return as an online film series. It is a relatively recent film, coming out the same year as Covid-19, the disease that halted our in-person meetings. It revisits the many themes of our series – the unsustainability of modern agriculture practices, the harm to soil and our environment, and the more promising alternative practices that may restore some balance. The framework with which it approaches these subjects is that of the bee, in this case, a set of compound eyes made up of thousands of individual lenses. As much as the bees, the film addresses its issues from the perspective of their tireless caretakers, the beekeepers, who could have hung up the towel during the height of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in 2005-2008, but instead doubled down and managed their losses through splitting hives and raising new queens.
You get a sense of the tireless work of these beekeepers in the opening scene of trucks, tractor trailers and forklifts moving hundreds of hives stacked on wooden pallets in the dim pre-dawn light before most of us are even awake. Sometimes the beekeepers have only two-days’ notice to move their bees, often across hundreds or more miles. The convergence of these bees and their keepers in California’s Central Valley is the world’s greatest pollination event. “Over 2 million hives from around the U.S. are put on flatbeds and trucked out to pollinate more than 1 million acres of almond orchards.” Bees also pollinate apples, blueberries, cherries, and many other fruit, vegetable, nut and seed crops, contributing more than $20 billion to the U.S. economy, not to mention their production of honey and other salable hive products. Beekeepers, the un-stung heroes of this story, are as busy as their bees, often moving them up to 22 times per year, mostly at night.
During the light of day, you can see that many of these bees are having a hard time. A pile of dead bodies accumulates outside of some hives in a mass graveyard, many dragged and dropped there from by their sisters during routine housekeeping. This sad fate is not attributable to a single cause but an accumulation of threats and stressors that include: a relatively new class of neonicotinoid insecticides which take years to degrade that affect insect nervous systems, herbicides and fungicides, Varroa mites that feed on bee larvae and pupae, as well as adult honeybees, and in some cases malnutrition as once fertile Midwestern flowery grasslands have become food desserts of soybeans and corn, industrialized landscapes peppered with fracking rigs.
Bees are the proverbial canaries in the mine shaft. Humans are shafted as well, since bees are harbingers of destructive changes to the environment that extend beyond their species to ours. The film chronicles the long and sad modern agricultural history that sacrifices diversity for monoculture crops. Once numerous farms and farmers who had practiced complex and intermarried plant and animal husbandry adopted new systems that valued simplicity and efficiency only. In a Darwinian battle of the fittest, only the strongest survived and the number of farmers and farms today is a fraction of what it was one hundred years ago. The soil, treated to round after round of Roundup Weed and Grass Killer, has degraded and become unhealthy.
Yet, just as CCD is no longer the mystery that it once was in the early part of this century and has been properly diagnosed as a syndrome of various stressors, so too have we begun to figure out the problems with industrial scale agriculture. We now know that the vaunted goal of total control has come at the cost of fragility, externalities, and unsustainability. And a new way of thinking is making the case for alternative healthier regenerative farming methods that include crop rotations, cover crops, more limited use of chemicals, and integrating crops and livestock through foraging. This new mindset is taking hold beyond the farming community. Urban beekeepers are setting up hives on rooftops, shoppers at local farmers markets are asking questions about where their food is coming from, homeowners are learning to live with wildflowers springing up from their previously pristine green lawns, and consumers are beginning to embrace less than perfect produce sold by companies such as Misfit Market. Parents are taking their kids to Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in Westchester, New York, and places like it, to learn about making “healthier choices for themselves and the planet” – and hopefully eating a great meal at the restaurant, as well.