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.