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186 points pseudolus | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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GeekyBear ◴[] No.44434645[source]
The standard practice for commercial crops is to bring in commercial hives of bees for pollination season that are shipped together via truck from crop to crop and region to region.

https://sweetharvestfoods.com/the-commercial-honey-bee-trave...

That sounds like a great opportunity to spread the resistant parasites from hive to hive and region to region.

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Spivak ◴[] No.44434899[source]
Unless we change our farming practices there isn't much else you can do. You have acres and acres of land that are completely dead (as far as pollinators are concerned) for almost all of the year and then suddenly every plant blooms all at once and then goes away.
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humblebeekeeper ◴[] No.44435014[source]
This is what so few people realize -- farming, as it's practiced in the US, is basically mining.

It might appear to be lush nature, but the places we farm are deserts in many ways. We kill insect life, birds, mammals, and other supporting species. We remove most of nutrients from the soil and replace them chemically. A commercial orchard might as well be an Amazon datacenter from an environmental standpoint.

If we want to change things, we need to fundamentally alter the way we grow food. It will be a bit harder -- we'll need regenerative methods, less reliable methods, more human labor, more weed prone, etc. -- but we can build food production into something that's much more sustainable and ecologically sound.

Some farmers are already doing this, or experimenting with it, and I think there's at the very least a growing soil health mindset among small farmers.

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pstuart ◴[] No.44435073[source]
And the only way for that change to happen is to bake in monetary incentives that help drive it, whilst doing so in a political climate that is just fine with the way things are.
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1. humblebeekeeper ◴[] No.44436501[source]
I disagree. We can also continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally. We can decide that collective and community health and wellbeing are more important than individual success. It's a more difficult road, but the capitalist mode of "just tweak the financial curves" is not the only way we can approach this problem. Just the most well supported today.
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2. pstuart ◴[] No.44450470[source]
We absolutely should continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally, but without buy-in by the owners of the system it will always be just that: "local"