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Agriculture in the Americas did not reach the level of that in Europe or
Asia before the honeybee. Why?
Because Man and the honeybee do not follow nature's rules. You have a
continuous, transportable pollination source so can plant non-indigenous
crops and get good yields.In a native pollinator area, you are stuck
with what is there and the plants they naturally pollinate. You are also
stuck with the number of pollinators available so need to keep things
small. If you follow the NP arguments, they agree the scale must be
small for NP to work. Most of the NP crowd is also organic. Small is good.
Why no NP for mandarin oranges? Because they were not there in the first
place.You do need plants to pollinate and usually NP and the plants have
a symbiotic relationship A newcomer, like oranges in a semi-arid region,
will be ignored since the NP has all it needs with what was already
there.Plus, the NP may not be fitted to pollinate the newcomer. A NP can
be a bat. Doubt if they are interested in pollinating oranges.
It was not always agriculture and the honeybees that displaced NPs.
There was nothing there to displace. Think deserts transformed to
cropland by irrigation. Or fruit trees planted in prairies.If you wanted
everything to be just like it was when nature set down the plan, you
would have to eliminate NP along with the honeybees and revert to
grassland and desert.
Plant diversity is wonderful, and it is in BIG Agriculture more than you
might expect. Just do a search for soybean seed on the Internet and you
can get many different varieties. We are not mono-culture in the sense
of only one seed variety. We have large stands of a single variety, but
they are right alongside another that ripens earlier or later or has
some other feature that increased yields for the farmer.
I am more concerned with shifting to native pollinators and stands of
weeds that can harbor just the pathogens that we are supposedly worrying
about. Often, another plant will carry the killer of the agricultural
crop. Too often, when we think we are getting back to nature, we forget
just how cruel the result can be.
I have nothing against NP. My gardens and orchard teems with them. But I
am not feeding a nation and parts of the rest of the world.
Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine
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