>Peter's and Allen's posts are valid in asking for the
>name of a large commercial pollinator who is all organic and makes a
>living from it.
I'm not really seeing your point, Bill. Can you explain a little more
carefully? The first thing that occurs to me is that there's no market, no
premium, no demand for organic pollinators, right? So what's the point?
Why do organic? Because you believe in it? I worked for a pollinator for
a year. It's hard work, especially the loading, unloading, the moving, the
trucking, etc. Does anybody enjoy driving big trucks through the middle of
the night? People don't truck bees across the country for the good of
creation. They do it for the money. And if it's about the money, why
bother with things that don't help the bottom line? It's like asking ADM
how many of the farmers that supply them with corn for their commodity corn
syrup happen to be organic. The answer is obvious.
On the other hand, I know two beekeepers from these parts that went to
almonds the last couple years, and both of them use "organic" (by OMRI-type
standards) mite controls. One uses an essential oil homebrew, the other
used formic. Neither of them adheres to rigid standards, because neither
of them is a pharisee; they're commercial beekeepers, they're practically
oriented.
My point, though, is that organic is a values thing. That's a simple
truth, isn't it? If it's a values thing, isn't it significant if those
values are consistent with distant monocultures or lots of trucking or high
input management or mass marketing, etc? I'm not saying it's black and
white, and I'm not saying these things are incompatible, but if organic is
a values thing, it should be shaped by those values, and one way or
another, we should expect organic business models to look different.
If we're looking for a standard business model for a successful organic
beekeeper, I think we're way off if we're talking about a conventional
beekeeper minus the disqualified inputs. If we even need to have a
standard type, I'd suggest a small farmer that keeps a few dozen hives on
his own farm in permanent yards, labor-intensive and input-frugal, making
his money from honey and keeping the pollination benefits for himself and
for a free gift to his neighbors, mostly direct marketing to his community,
and making enough profit to keep pace with other modest, local farmers and
tradesmen. Such a beekeeper may not be very statistically significant when
it comes to proving things, but I think he's a pretty good model of organic
success. Most of all, I wouldn't want to rule out a model like that.
Eric
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