Getting nowhere fast

My demotivational reading for today was this from Brigid Andersen (ABC News):

Scientists predict agricultural brain drain

Not so much the story itself, but the stories from other people who commented on it. For example, "Disgruntled" of WA says:

I'm an agricultural professional with a lot of agronomy experience, I have a PhD, some international experience, I'm not retiring age and I'm out of work in WA.

The constant three-year time frames of work, and gaps in employment get you down after a while. You can constantly scrabble for funds but that doesnt have much guarantee of success and occupies a lot of mental energy; energy I naively thought was going to be used to come up with innovative ideas and experimental designs. It has certainly driven depression in my case.

Unfortunately, universities contribute to the problem as all they seem to see is getting students through and into a job (any quasi-professional job) and then it's not their problem anymore. All I ever hear from them is good demand for graduates, but precious little follow-up on what the graduates are doing. I know from the year I graduated from that most are not professionals in the field now. As for an agricultural science as a PhD, I think youd have to be institutionalised for thinking it was going to be secure I can think of two examples right now of one PhD driving a taxi having given up, and another having to fill in by counting money for a security firm for at least 12 months between jobs not a great investment by Australia there. This is in WA, which off the top of my head grows 40% of our largest export crop and the state government has just been pushing to get rid of 100 jobs in the Dept of Agriculture and so no renewal of contract staff (and hence my complaints, I might add).

And then further down the page you can read Gav's comment:

So, you need 20-odd years of schooling to get the job, the pay is poor, and you're guaranteed to lose the job (or at least have to reapply for it) after 3 years regardless of how good you are...and people don't want to do this work?

On the other side, you spend three years training a high-level graduate, expensively, for unique skills, and then you just lose the employee?

Is there any simpler way to illustrate what's wrong?

Lack of job security, poor pay, constant scrabbling for funding... it all sounds familiar. It was the reason I didn't choose to study or take a career in science. Instead I studied history and philosophy of science (a humanities discipline) and while I was at uni anyway, took a second degree in fine arts majoring in jewellery. For the very same reasons I chose not to follow a career in science, I initially chose not to pursue a living out of jewellery either.

I have to say that my search for funding for my agriculture research project, managed pollination, is not going very well. There is interest but no money. My academic background disadvantages me in the funding game because I do not have honors or a research track record. Why is it that organisations complain so loudly about difficulty of finding people. Do they not hear us complaining how hard it is to get a foot in the door?

The brain drain is not the problem. The organisational culture that creates it is.

Farmers need Bees and Bees need Farmers

The first part of this proposition is obvious. Farmers need bees to grow seed and to pollinate their crops.

The second part is not so obvious. After all, bees take a beating when they pollinate crops like almond and kiwifruit. They must get supplementary feed because they expend more energy pollinating than they can get off the nectar they collect from the crop. Hives for pollination need to start strong because pollination work only makes them weaker. Surely bees would be better off without farmers?

In Australia the majority of beekeeping is migratory. Commercial beekeepers don't usually own the land their bees forage on, so they have to come to an arrangement with the land managers of good bee sites. Historically this has been government, in the form of National Parks and State Forests. But increasingly these land managers are closing off access to what were historically bee sites. Beekeepers are going to have to look to private land holders to get access to forage. I think their best bet is to look to farmers.

This is part of the reason why I'm so interested in planning for the transition to a post-varroa Australia. I see varroa as a major catalyst for getting farmers and beekeepers together to find out how they can mutually benefit from each other. This opportunity has been overlooked everywhere else in the world, as far as I can fathom, but then again Australia is unique in that a lot of our honey production comes from state-owned land and forests. It's been this way for so long that beekeepers are scared of losing these resources and can't seem to imagine their industry functioning without them.

How many beekeepers already have agreements with farmers to access private forests on their land, or reciprocal pollination arrangements for clover pasture or other good honey crops, is not well known. But these sorts of arrangements do already exist and there's no reason that they couldn't become more common. However until a crisis like varroa forces farmers and beekeepers to get together and discuss this idea on a bigger scale, beekeeper access to private land will probably only increase slowly.

I see a logical extension to these sorts of access arrangements in farmers actively managing part or even all of their land for pollinator nutrition and creating a floral resource for beekeepers to use for pollination recovery or even honey production. It's important to point out that both farmers and beekeepers would benefit from this. Managing road margins, windbreaks and foresty areas is something farmers already do. These areas have already been identified as good sites to start rebuilding biodiversity and ecosystems services on agricultural land. There's no reason why bee nutrition couldn't also be taken into account when restoring vegetation in these areas. In addition there are other opportunities for getting more honey flora on agricultural land. For example orchard managers could move to cover crops like clover

The opportunity is already there for farmers and beekeepers to recognise their mutual dependence and to put into practise some of these ideas to secure their future together. We should be encouraging this in Australia as a way of preparing for varroa and the transition to managed pollination, but overseas farmers and beekeepers should be talking about it as a way of fixing problems like bee population decline, the rising costs of pollination services, restoring farm biodiversity and access to nutritional bee forage.

Biosecurity needs a back-up plan

Biosecurity is incredibly important for keeping honeybee pests and diseases out of Australia, and the economic savings of keeping pests like varroa out for longer are demonstrated by Cook et al (2007) in their paper.

Biosecurity is non-negotiable and non-controversial. Nobody benefits more than anyone else out of good quarantine and border security. Everyone gets to run their businesses in a varroa-free environment. Everyone benefits from free feral bee pollination with lower food production costs. Biosecurity is such an obvious and public benefit that it makes sense that the government should fund it through tax.

However biosecurity will not guarantee the safety of the feral bee population. If it was possible to keep varroa out this way, New Zealand would not have varroa. Australia's border security is good, but not as good as New Zealand's, due to the fact that we are a larger country with much closer neighbours than NZ has. It is just a matter of time before varroa or something else that wipes out feral bees gets in and gets established. And that time is going to be a period of chaos for beekeepers and farmers alike, as beekeepers struggle to adapt to the new pest and keep their hives alive, and farmers struggle to find beekeepers to rent hives for pollination.

Realistically, there is no easy way that the government can step in and influence the transition from free feral bee pollination to managed honeybee pollination without benefiting some parties more than others. If the government offers a tax concession or incentive, that will benefit larger businesses over smaller. If they offer a flat rate grant, this will benefit smaller businesses over larger. Even if they offer incentives based on the size of a business, it will help preserve the status quo and instead of cushioning the blow to the affected industries, may simply stifle the development of more efficient business and management practices. At present the honeybee industry revolves around honey production. Simply giving incentives to honeybee businesses to keep them in business is not going to solve the problem of pollinating crops. Especially in a time when countries like India cannot feed themselves, it is vitally important that Australia ensures its own food security, that we can feed ourselves, and that we can improve our balance of trade by exporting food and supplying the world market.

Here is the problem: government interference in the market is bad. It's either unfair or favours the status quo, which is detrimental to everyone in the long run. But on the other hand, something needs to spur the pollination dependent and honeybee industries into action to plan for the transition to managed pollination. Any movement towards growers beginning to actively manage their pollination inputs and beekeepers getting involved in managed pollination will help prepare for the shock of varroa and make the transition easier for all concerned.

The last thing I want to see is a bunch of beekeepers who have worked hard and deserve an honourable retirement to be drafted into providing pollination services to a bunch of farmers who don't understand their pollination needs and resent having to fork out money for this extra expense and inconvenience. That is no way to operate a business or an industry. But that's probably what's going to happen if nobody takes the initiative to plan for an Australia without free pollination from feral bees. There will be much complaining, much resentment, much laying of blame. And all because the focus was on keeping varroa out, and nobody spent any time thinking about how to cope if varroa ever got in.

Government intervention is no substitute for resilience. Planning for life after varroa is about taking stock of the strengths and weaknesses of the affected industries as they stand at the moment, and working out ways to encourage growers and beekeepers to be prepared to adapt and deal with an Australia without feral bees, with a minimum of cost and disruption to all concerned. Realistically, resilience is up to the individual. To be successful after varroa, beekeepers and growers need to think about the problem and how it affects them now, not after varroa hits. Planned change is hard, but in the end forced change is even harder.

Key readings in managed pollination in Australia

• The beekeeping industry faces significant challenges aside from the threat of varroa (CIE 2005; House of Reps 2008).
• The longer varroa is kept out of Australia, the more money is saved (Cook et al 2007).
• The more preparation is done to bolster the pollination services industry, the more money will be saved if varroa or a similar devastating bee disease enters the country (Monck et al 2008).
• In the 2006-7 industry survey, only 36% of surveyed commercial beekeepers in Australia intended to begin or expand pollination service provision (Crooks 2008).
• Lack of training and people entering the honeybee industry is a recognised area of concern, but firm plans to address the barriers to entry have not been developed (House of Reps 2008; CIE 2005).

References

Centre for International Economics. 2005. Future directions for the Australian honeybee industry. Canberra: Centre for International Economics. http://www.honeybee.org.au/pdf/CIE_FINAL_REPORT.pdf.

Cook, David C, Matthew B Thomas, Saul A Cunningham, Denis L Anderson, and Paul J De Barro. 2007. Predicting the economic impact of an invasive species on an ecosystem service. Ecological Applications 17, no. 6: 1832-1840. 

Crooks, Sarah. 2008. Australian Honeybee Industry Survey 2006-07. Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. https://rirdc.infoservices.com.au/downloads/08-170.pdf.

 House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources. 2008. Report of the inquiry into the future of the Australian honey bee industry. Canberra: Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/pir/honeybee/report/fullreport.pdf.  

Monck, Michael, Jenny Gordon, and Kevin Hanslow. 2008. Analysis of the Market for Pollination Services in Australia. Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. https://rirdc.infoservices.com.au/downloads/08-058.pdf.

Managed pollination is complicated

I was very excited to talk to Danny Le Feuvre of Australian Bee Services last week. He told me many interesting things about the state of managed pollination in South Australia, and seeing as he is one of the founders of Australian Bee Services, a company that was established for the purpose of supplying managed pollination services to broadacre farmers, I think you could safely call him an expert.

The biggest flash of insight I got from talking with him was the link betwen water availability and pollination. I know that water allocations are the talk of California right now, because of their potential impact on the pollination market but, you know, that's America, what could their water restrictions possibly have to do with us? This is the downside of being based in Sydney - the most obvious things fail to connect, because at the moment I'm sitting at home looking out over my nice green garden, thousands of kilometres away from the irrigation areas where Australia's food is actually grown. Luckily people like Danny are kind enough to talk to me and wake me up to these things.

Danny explained that in the Riverland region of South Australia, there is almost no feral bee population and the almond growers there are aware of the need for managed pollination and happy to pay to bring bees in. Beekeepers can get good honey off citrus, which is also widely grown in the Riverland, but in the case of citrus the relationship is not so straighforward. Citrus growers don't always want bees on their crop, and even when they are happy to have bees, they will pretty much never be looking for full pollination. There simply isn't enough water to support the maximum crop. And then there are the seedless varieties where bees are not welcome at all. Whatever the case, because beekeepers can get honey off citrus, growers are unlikely to want to pay them for pollination.

Water allocations are another reason why beekeepers might not want to be bothered providing pollination services. In dry years, the demand for pollination will be smaller, as will honey flow. There's no advantage to getting into pollination to smooth out the effect of bad honey years, because a dry year that's bad for honey will be bad for growers, too. If there's no income benefit to pollination, why bother investing the time and resources when you could just stick with what you know.

More and more I am wondering if companies like Australian Bee Services haven't got it right. Instead of convincing every single beekeeper to get into pollination, perhaps we need to encourage entreprenuers to get into bees. Setting up pollination companies, which employ people without a background in beekeeping and train them in-house, or create demand to get beekeeping training actually run at local TAFEs, might be a good way of revitalising the bee industry. It might be the next big step, like back in the 1950s and 60s when migratory beekeeping became the norm. Perhaps the era of the tiny beekeeping concern is ending?

Hopping on the bandwagon

I am reading some interesting stuff from North America (that is, USA and Canada) about beekeeping generally. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is still getting media coverage over there, and all sorts of grassroots actions have been popping up as a result of the increased awareness of the decline of honeybees and the importance of pollinators in agriculture and ecosystems.

Most excitingly, the idea that CCD is result of a complex set of environmental factors seems to be gaining currency, thanks to a recent article in Science by Ratnieks and Carreck, as reported here by Wired.

Citation: “Clarity on Honey Bee Collapse?” by Francis L. W. Ratnieks and Norman L. Carreck in Science, 8 JANUARY 2010 VOL 327.

While the ageing beekeeping industry is a problem in the USA, like Australia and other countries, there seems to be growing interest in beekeeping among retirees who are keen to do their bit to help save the honeybee (see this article in Bee Culture by Larry Connor from September 2009). This raises the vexed question of how to successfully train people to keep bees. It doesn't seem like there is any easy answer to this. In Australia the courses have been developed, but there is never enough demand at the same time and place to warrant running formal vocational training.

An increase in people wanting to keep backyard hives, coupled with the promotion of urban beekeeping, means trouble in the suburbs. Bees where you live can quickly turn into pests; if swarms establish themselves in people's houses, or garden water features become bee drinking holes, or bee droppings start showing up on people's cars, there is bound to be conflict. This article by James Tew in the November 2009 issue of Bee Culture explains the problems. From the article, it seems that the conflict mainly arises when a serious beekeeping enterprise is permanently located in an urban area. But as the article doesn't mention the size of the problem "bee yards" my conclusion might be wrong.

Initiatives like the Pollinators Park in the City of Guelph, Canada, are very interesting, and it would be nice to see more of this sort of activity around. Incorporating pollinator flora into the urban environment sets a good precedent for rural planning to follow.

Leaving the grassroots and getting back to the industry, Joe Traynor is a pollination broker in the USA, and his article in Bee Culture in September 2009 describes an interesting cycle of boom and bust in the almond pollination business. High almond prices contributed to the expansion of Californian almond plantings in the last decade, driving up demand and prices for pollination. Despite the real possibility that beekeepers did not actually pass on their real costs in setting pollination prices, the income received was more than sufficient to maintain the health of their hives and increase the number of hives available. This was the boom time: many beekeepers would travel over to California whether they had contracts or not, because they were confident that all their hives would be needed for pollination and they could get a good price even at the last minute. Then one year the prosperity of beekeepers and slower growth of the almond industry means that there is an oversupply of bees at pollination time. Beekeepers who went to California without contracts lost money and in some cases could not afford to get their bees home again. Bust, and big time. Add in other limiting factors like water restrictions in California almond regions, and suddenly the future seems very uncertain for beekeepers.

The above situation and the economics behind it really highlight the need for more study and planning to handle the transition into managed pollination. While there might be enough hives on paper to cover Australia's pollination needs, the willingness and ability of beekeepers to provide that pollination is not a given. In addition, being the last continent to get varroa (if and when we get it), Australia is in the unique position to be able to look at the experiences of others and learn, or even come up with entirely new ways of managing crop pollination for food security and the benefit of growers and beekeepers and the general public.