'Like sending bees to war': the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession

[BeckyDem]

Bees are essential to the functioning of America’s titanic almond industry – and billions are dying in the process

Annette McGivney in Flagstaff, Arizona

Wed 8 Jan 2020 01.00 EST

Dennis Arp was feeling optimistic last summer, which is unusual for a beekeeper these days.

Thanks to a record wet spring, his hundreds of hives, scattered across the central Arizona desert, produced a bounty of honey. Arp would have plenty to sell in stores, but more importantly, the bumper harvest would strengthen his bees for their biggest task of the coming year.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp’s revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative then renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California’s fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world’s almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp’s hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. “My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” he says.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybees-deaths-almonds-hives-aoe?CMP=share_btn_tw

[GeorgeGist]

1. Which is worse for the environment?

Cow's Milk or almond milk.

[BeckyDem]

2. There is much to consider, and with almond milk we need less water but there

are other obvious problems with it. Cows generate tons of methane. Rice milk requires a lot of water to produce.

We have serious challenges presently and ahead of us.

[Igel]

4. I find most of the discussion about water to be disingenuous.

For instance, in one discussion about meat it was pointed out how many hundreds of gallons each ounce of beef took--with the reporter saying most of that is from grazing. Compared to the smaller amount for some vegetable-based product.

Unstated was that few places irrigate their grazing land, so the cow food was mostly grass watered by rainfall. The grass would be there anyway. The smaller amount of water for the vegetable included plants that are typically irrigated, sometimes with ground water, sometimes with aquifer water.

If you drink almond milk made from California almonds it's a problem because during the drought those trees really caused the aquifer in the Central Valley to be hit hard--and with less drought, it's still taking a beating.

(Yes, the witty comeback is that cows often graze on BLM land in areas that are dry, and that causes irreparable harm to the ecosystem. I'm not saying that one's necessarily better for the environment than another, just that a narrow focus on water usage often leaves out more than it includes.)

[Karadeniz]

3. I've heard two comments on the subject. 1) the only one who needs cow's milk is a calf and

2) no one needs to be drinking milk after age 2.