Survey: Fruit And Vegetable Growers Support Pollinators

These wildflowers, planted near a California almond orchard, can be extremely effective in aiding pollinators. (Photo credit: Katharina Ullmann, Xerces Society)

These wildflowers, planted near a California almond orchard, can be extremely effective in aiding pollinators. (Photo credit: Katharina Ullmann, Xerces Society)

There’s a sound most growers like to hear when walking into a blooming field or orchard: the buzz of bees working flowers. More than 150 of the crops grown in the U.S., including blueberries, apples, cherries, almonds, melons, pumpkins, and caneberries, depend, at least to some extent, on pollination to produce large, marketable and high-yielding crops.

Larry Bodtke is a second generation blueberry farmer whose family farm, Cornerstone Ag, LLC, grows almost 1,000 acres of blueberry in Southwest Michigan. Like many growers, getting consistent, reliable pollination is a top priority for him.

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“When I think of managing blueberries, pollination is right up there near the top because all the other things that we do [won’t matter] if the berry doesn’t get pollinated,” says Bodtke. “We get better yields and better sized berries if we get good pollination.”

Depending on the crop and spring weather, pollination can be tricky. Rain, wind, and cold temperatures can limit the number of good pollination days and flash blooms can make it difficult to get managed bees out in time for bloom. The shorter than normal bloom in this year’s almond crop was particularly challenging, especially for almond growers in California’s southern Central Valley.

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“Bees are still being delivered to orchards as beekeepers try to finish their deliveries before bloom progresses too far,” wrote Mel Machado, Director of Member Relations for Blue Diamond Almonds, in his February bloom report.

On top of that, reports show that beekeepers continue to suffer high colony losses and that wild bees, such as bumble bees, mason bees, and sweat bees, which also pollinate crops, may be in short supply in the areas where they are needed most.

How do growers respond to these challenges? For Larry Bodtke, it means minimizing the impact of pest and disease management on bees and maintaining woodlots and wildflowers that provide food and nesting sites for bees, “Anything that we can do to help increase those populations, that can help us get better pollination, we’re certainly going to look at.”

Bodtke is not the only grower thinking about ways to support bees and the pollination they provide. A national survey conducted by Dr. Kelly Garbach, a professor at Loyola University Chicago, suggests that most of the blueberry, almond, and tree fruit growers surveyed are being careful about how they manage their farm.

“A large number of growers choose the active ingredient that is least harmful and time pesticide applications to minimize impacts on bees. Some are helping bees by maintaining permanent habitat like woodlots, wildflower meadows, or hedgerows and flowering cover crops,” Garbach says. “It’s inspiring to see the high proportion of growers that are making an effort to protect bees through their practices.”

The survey included growers of pollinator-dependent crops in selected counties in four states – Florida, Michigan, Oregon, and California. “We received close to 2,000 responses and have a great snap-shot of farms, ranging from very small to large, commercial operations with 7,000 acres in production,” Garbach says.

Pollinators - Chart-1- Reduced Risk Management Practices

The survey is a part of the Integrated Crop Pollination Project, a national research effort identifying the most important managed and wild pollinators for a handful of specialty crops and testing management practices to support those pollinators. “We wanted to know more about pollination practices and pollinator management that are being used on specialty crop farms,” she says.

The majority of surveyed blueberry and almond growers are modifying insecticide sprays to mitigate negative impacts on pollinators (see chart, above). Modified spray practices included changing the timing of sprays to avoid exposure to bees by spraying outside of bloom time or, if pest management action was needed, spraying in the late afternoon when bees are less active.

The results match Tom Peerbolt’s experience working with large-scale berry growers in the Pacific Northwest as a senior consultant for his company, Peerbolt Crop Management.

“Modifying the timing of pesticide applications to minimize impacts on bees, reducing the number of sprays to protect beneficials, and making an effort to choose active ingredients that have the least impact on bees or other beneficial insects are routinely viewed as best management practices and used by the large majority of growers I work with,” Peerbolt says. “Pollinator protection is a very high priority [for these growers]. They’d be threatening their own livelihood if they weren’t doing these things — publicity from bee kills, harming their hive supplier, using pesticides carelessly — these all just carry major risks of negatively impacting an operation that outweigh any short-term benefit whatever that might be.”

Adoption of these pesticide mitigation practices were highest in Michigan blueberry, according to the survey. At Cornerstone Ag, Larry Bodtke notes that, “One of the shorter term things that we do [to protect bees] is try to alter our spray schedule. Obviously we don’t use any chemicals that are harmful to the bees while they’re out working in the fields.”

Recognizing the important role pollinators play in crop production and the realities growers face in terms of pest and disease management, university Extension offices and other groups are working to document best management practices for protecting bees while managing for pests and diseases in different crops. In 2015, Michigan State University released an Extension bulletin, “Minimizing pesticide risk to bees in fruit crops,” and the Almond Board of California released its “Honey bee best management practices for California almonds” the year prior.

Pollinators - Chart2 - Encouraging With Farm Practices

Managing Farms For Pollinators

“Protecting bees from pesticides is a fantastic first step, but both wild and managed bees also need places to put their nests, and access to pollen and nectar when crops are not in flower,” explains Mace Vaughan, Pollinator Program Co-Director for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation (see above chart). There are an estimated 3,600 species of wild bees in North America. Many of these bees nest below ground, in old wood, or in the pithy stems of plants such as caneberries, rose and cattails.

According to Garbach’s survey, some growers protect natural areas on their property or use cover crops to encourage wild pollinators, and others install nesting boxes or leave untilled soil for ground nesting bees. California almond growers are among the highest in employing reduced-risk pest management practices, but rank low in use of farm practices to encourage wild pollinators.

Bob Curtis, Director of Agricultural Affairs for the Almond Board notes that, “This is a good confirmation of where we stand on practices to support pollinators and providing supplemental forage. We’ve got about 20% of growers now adopting these practices according to this survey and that falls in line generally with our experience. It’s also heartening to see that, as we move into the future, more and more growers…are thinking about how they can they change their practices.”

Multiple agencies, non-profits, and research partners with the Integrated Crop Pollination Project are working with almond growers in California to plant wildflowers and flowering shrubs for bees next to orchards, including the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Xerces Society, Project Apis m. and researchers at University of California, Davis. The work is not without its challenges, notes Vaughan.

“We recognize that with the ongoing drought, the seed we plant can’t count on the historic rains to get established, and California almond growers have limited access to water,” he says. For this reason, we’re testing drought-tolerant native wildflowers in the bee forage mixes we are planting across the state.”

Back in Michigan, Larry Bodtke finds additional benefits to keeping some natural areas for bees, “From a long-term perspective, we try and keep some woods around our fields or at least tree-lines. Those are good for several different reasons – it’s good for nesting [bees] and it also helps keep the wind down a little bit, and that’s good for bee flight and cold winter winds.”

What Next?

Given the response to the first survey, Garbach plans to conduct a follow up survey this winter to learn more about grower perspectives on pollination management practices. She explains, “We’re especially interested in understanding factors that help catalyze use of on-farm habitat —like planting flowering or flowering cover crops — that can support pollinators.”

Peerbolt thinks that having a better sense of the economics of those practices would help. “There’s a lot of desire and motivation for blueberry growers to manage pollinators as effectively as is possible, but there just aren’t enough ways to be able to assign economic as well as environmental benefits to the various options.”

Other researchers on the Integrated Crop Pollination Project are working with growers to determine the costs and benefits of different practices. Dr. Rufus Isaacs, a professor at Michigan State University and the project director of the Integrated Crop Pollination Project, says that they expect their first results on this topic next year.

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