my solution is to stay far away from almonds. i figured out a way to make a living without risking my bees and without being affected by world honey prices. i see lots of growing opportunities to regionally sell bees that are over wintered also. The industry is changing and shelf space once reserved for packer honey is being taken over by *local* sourced products. younger folks are being drawn into beekeeping whom will find their own niche.
when the risk to pollinate becomes greater then the rewards the system will eventually collapse. some people feel that as the credit fueled economy collapsed so to will the chemical and heavily subsidized Industrial Farming Machine collapse via its own unsustainable weight.
Even Eric Mussen is now questioning the sustainability of almond pollination in his jan/feb newsletter which I encourage everyone to read. Here's a guy with decades of experience at ground zero for almonds. Still feel like defending a system that appears to exchange honeybee health for lots of nuts ? Really I highly doubt that civilization will collapse without almonds in their diet. This has less to do with feeding people directly as it has to do with providing jobs in CA and income to out of state beekeepers.
The same fight appears to be going on over water in CA also. The agricultural system would appear to be at a breaking point in some regions of the USA.
Here's my solution for the day... ban all farming subsidizes, loans and grants for any operation or individual whom has more then 250K adjusted gross income. Reconfigure the agricultural welfare system to aid smaller producers including beekeepers. Develop incentives to promote sustainable agricultural systems over vast corporate controlled monocrops that hurt pollinators and water systems and also end the subsidizes for ethanol.
(for that matter ban all government assistance to any entity making more then 250K and give the tax dollars back to the small business person or farmer)
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