[Pollinator] Growing Insects: Farmers Can Help to Bring Back Pollinators

Mon Feb 3 08:38:52 PST 2014

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Report

<http://e360.yale.edu/feature/growing_insects_farmers_can_help_to_bring_back
_pollinators/2735/>
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/growing_insects_farmers_can_help_to_bring_back_
pollinators/2735/

Growing Insects: Farmers Can 
Help to Bring Back Pollinators 

With a sharp decline in pollinating insects, farmers are being encouraged to
grow flowering plants that can support these important insects. It's a
fledgling movement that could help restore the pollinators that are
essential for world food production. 

by richard conniff

For the last few years, Richard Rant has agreed to let researchers introduce
strips of wildflowers among the blueberry plants on his family's farm in
West Olive, Michigan. It's part of an experiment to see if the wildflowers
can encourage pollinating insects and, in a small way, begin to reverse the
worldwide decline in beneficial insects. It's also a pioneering effort in
the nascent movement to persuade farmers to grow insects almost as if they
were a crop. 

Japan macaque

Ashley Bennett, MSU

Native plants among crops can attract pollinators like this sweat bee on a
calliopsis flower.

That movement is being driven by news that is disturbingly bad even by
gloomy environmental standards. Insects pollinate 75 percent of the crops
used directly for human food worldwide. They contribute $210 billion in
agricultural earnings. But honeybees are now so scarce, according to a new
study from the University of Reading, that Europe is 13.6 million colonies
short of the number needed to pollinate crops there. Nor can farmers count
on natural pollinators as a backup system. A 2011 study sampled four North
American bumblebee species and found that they have declined by as much 96
percent over the past century. In China, the loss of wild bees has forced
farmers to hand-pollinate apple blossoms using paint brushes. 

The broad decline in beneficial insects has also affected species we take
for granted as part of our cultural heritage. Just last week, researchers
announced that monarch butterfly numbers, already at record lows, once again
fell by half in the annual count at overwintering sites in Mexico, with the
iconic monarch migration now "at serious risk of disappearing." 

So far, the movement to get farmers to grow beneficial insects amounts, in
the United States, to no more than a few hundred thousand acres of
pollinator plantings, mostly subsidized by state and federal governments.
Through its Natural Resources Conservation Service, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) now partners with the Xerces Society and other
conservation groups to get the message out to farmers and help them with the
technical issues of how to grow beneficial insects, and how to get paid for
doing it. USDA also recently added a pollinator component to the farmland
set-asides it pays for through its Conservation Reserve Program. Similar
programs are also under way as part of the European Union's
"agri-environment" schemes, Australia's Landcare program, and the United
Nations International Pollinator Initiative. 

The experiment on Richard Rant's blueberry farm - part of a research study
by Michigan State University entomologist Rufus Isaacs - is an example of
what can happen when such efforts work well. The study results are not
expected to be published until later this year. But for Rant at least,
planting for pollinators has seemed to work. He noticed that the wildflower
patches were humming not just with bees and other pollinators but also with
wasps, ladybugs, lacewings, and predacious beetles known to attack the sort
of insect pests that damage blueberries. On his own, he started to add
flowering cover crops - buckwheat, soybeans, mustard, alfalfa, and clover -
in the 10-foot-wide gaps between blueberry rows, so that something nearby
would be flowering throughout the growing season. 

As fewer harmful insects turned up in his monitoring traps, Rant gradually
cut back on spraying insecticides, from 10 or 12 times a season to as few as
two or three in some years. The 80 percent saving on insecticides, he says,
was easily worth $5,000-6,000 a year, "not even factoring in the labor and
diesel for running the tractor." He also cut by more than half the number of
honeybee hives he needed to rent during the pollinating season - a big
savings because rental prices have soared as honeybee populations have
collapsed. Rant is now so hooked on the idea of farming insects that he
wishes out loud for something to flower directly under his blueberries, so
the beneficial insects wouldn't have to travel as far. 

But other farmers have not yet taken up the idea, and the acreage being
protected or enhanced for beneficial insects is still trivial in the context
of the global expansion and intensification of agriculture. In the United
States, acreage protected by the Conservation Reserve Program, for instance,
has continued to shrink dramatically, both because of congressional
cost-cutting and because the federal mandate for ethanol fuel has driven up
the price of corn and encouraged farmers to plow under their marginal land
for row crops. Just from 2008 to 2011, according to a study by the
Environmental Working Group, that expansion ate up 23.6 million acres of
grassland, wetland, and shrubland - an area larger than Indiana - which used
to produce beneficial insects naturally.

Add in the dramatically increased dependence on herbicides to eliminate
weeds, and Orley R. "Chip" Taylor of the University of Kansas figures that
monarch butterflies - the poster child of beneficial insects - have lost 167
million acres of habitat across North America since 1996. In many places,
the milkweed they need to produce the next generation simply does not exist
anymore. 

Gary Nabhan, the Arizona ecologist and co-author of Forgotten Pollinators,
argues that the U.S. public is willing to pay for the recovery of beneficial
insects, even if Congress might not be. He cites a
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12065/abstract> 2013 study
in which Americans indicated that they were prepared to make household
contributions that would total up to $6.6 billion just to protect the
monarch butterfly migration. "But consumers, conservation advocates, and
farm groups are still unclear on which mechanisms are the best way to invest
in pollinators and other beneficial insects that affect their own food
production and health." 

It can be expensive. Getting the right wildflower seed mix and preparing a
site can cost as much as $1,500-2,000 an acre, according to Mace Vaughan,
pollinator program director for Xerces. Depending on the state, government
programs could pick up 50-75 percent of the cost, but that still requires a
big investment by farmers. 

Wildflower plantings aren't the only technique available to farmers. At the
University of California at Berkeley, research by Claire Kremen has
demonstrated that hedgerows of native shrubs and wildflowers also produce a
big bump in pollinator abundance and variety, with the effect spilling over
100 meters into adjacent fields. But getting to the break-even point for a
hedgerow can take eight years, and only then can the farmer expect to see
any gain. And that's with government subsidies included, Kremen says. Some
farmers are experimenting with simpler techniques - for instance, providing
bamboo tubes, or boards with holes drilled into them, as habitat for leaf
cutter bees, orchard mason bees, blue orchard bees, and other wild
pollinators. 

Polyculture, the opposite of monoculture, could also produce a broad
recovery of pollinators, but it would require major changes in modern
agriculture. It already works on a small scale in California's Salinas
Valley, says Kremen. Growers there are geared to supplying farmers' markets
and tend to "have a few rows of this, a few rows of that," with maybe 20
different crops growing on a 10-acre plot. 

But that's a much harder sell in California's Central Valley, where
large-scale intensive farming means there may be a crop flowering nearby one
week, but no flowers for five miles in any direction two weeks later. So
bumblebees and other native pollinators are scarce there. A practical
solution might be to organize plantings of conventional crops in smaller
contiguous zones, so that something is flowering nearby nonstop from spring
through fall. But that would require adjusting the conventional pesticide
regimen and rethinking a food distribution system that's now geared to
monoculture farming. And those kinds of changes are likely only if farmers
see that profits depend on it. 

"What we need now," says David Kleijn of the University of Waginengen, "are
studies like the ones that [Michigan State's] Rufus Isaacs is doing" with
blueberry farmers, "showing that if farmers take up biodiversity schemes
they will actually benefit from it, without the general public having to pay
for it." 

Simply paying a farmer to produce pollinators doesn't really engage him in
conservation, says Kleijn. "But if he can show his neighbors that by
improving habitat for pollinators on his land, he was able to increase his
yield by five percent, that's something he can brag about. We need to use
these psychological aspects much more in the way we deal with biodiversity."

Marketplace-driven incentives, like the "Conservation Grade" program in
Britain could provide an alternative means of paying for pollinator
recovery. The cereal company that runs that program pays farmers to set
aside 10 percent of their land, and it stipulates a precise planting
protocol for pollinator habitat, bird habitat, and so on. For their trouble,
farmers get a markup on their crop and the buyer sells the product to
consumers under a premium wildlife-friendly label. 

But so far, those kinds of programs seem to function only on a limited
boutique scale. It will take some far more ambitious enterprise to face up
to what has become a global challenge. 

"This is really different from other things conservationists have encouraged
the public to do in the past," says Gary Nabhan. "It's not like saving
pandas or gray whales. It's not about pristine habitats. It's more nuanced
and complex. It's about interactions and ecological relationships, not just
species: You can't save monarch butterflies without saving milkweeds. So
people don't immediately get it." 

Some people, particularly farmers, may struggle just to conceive of the
words "beneficial" and "insect" together in a sentence. In that sense, says
Nabhan, getting farmers and the general public engaged in pollinator
recovery could be a turning point for the conservation movement, and even
more so for modern agriculture. 

POSTED ON 03 Feb 2014 IN 

richard conniffABOUT THE AUTHOR
 <http://e360.yale.edu/author/Richard_Conniff/38/> Richard Conniff is a
National Magazine Award-winning writer whose articles have appeared in Time,
Smithsonian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications. He
is the author of several books, including The Species Seekers: Heroes,
Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth. In previous articles for Yale
Environment 360, he has examined the role of
<http://e360.yale.edu/feature/people_or_parks_the_human_factor_in_protecting
_wildlife/2707/> community-managed areas in preserving biodiversity and
explored
<http://e360.yale.edu/feature/urban_nature_how_to_foster_biodiversity_in_wor
lds_cities/2725/> how cities can foster biodiversity.
 <http://e360.yale.edu/author/Richard_Conniff/38/> MORE BY THIS AUTHOR

C 2013  <http://e360.yale.edu> Yale Environment 360

_______

Scott Hoffman Black

Executive Director

     The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation

Chair

     IUCN Butterfly Specialist Group

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