This Secret to Massive Yields Could Rock the Farming World

According to a new study, it lies in an unpatented technique...

Heather Callaghan
Activist Post

What will ultimately feed the world? Is it really genetic engineering? Is it biodiversity?

What can maintain and stoke that diversity - I mean, make it really flourish with bountiful food using less land?

Of course, using this discovery might mean severing ties with monolithic Big Ag and chemical corps whose actions could block this dream from becoming reality. Monoculture fans need not apply.

Typical pollination from species like honeybees might be enough to generate a crop, but can we do better? Yes!

New research from North Carolina State University demonstrated that blueberries produced more seeds and larger berries if they were visited by more groups of different bee species. In other words - not just honeybees. Combining their power with that of other species led to astounding results.

Amazingly, this allowed farmers to harvest significantly more pounds of fruit per acre.

The researchers looked at blueberries in North Carolina because it is an economically important and well-understood crop that relies on insect pollination.

Dr. Hannah Burrack, an associate professor of entomology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research said:

We wanted to understand the functional role of diversity - And we found that there is a quantifiable benefit of having a lot of different types of bees pollinating a crop. [emphasis mine]

And for each bee group introduced, the yield growth and profit appeared to be exponential.

First, the researchers zeroed in on the five different bee species in the regional blueberry fields: honeybees, bumblebees, southeastern blueberry bees, carpenter bees and a functionally similar collection of species that they termed small native bees.

They even tested a mathematical algorithm that found an increase of $311 worth of yield per acre for each additional new species of pollinators. Example: one group would be typical yield, if two bee groups pollinated the field it would boost the yield by $311 per acre; for three bee groups, the boost becomes $622 per acre and so on!

So what is the sum value of each bee group to North Carolina blueberries?

Burrack says:

For North Carolina blueberries as a whole, we calculate the benefit of each group to be approximately $1.42 million worth of yield each year.

Holy blueberries, Batman! Holy bees, more like it. Then again, maybe that's not a lot of dough in ag terms, but think of the yield for the farmer, and think of all the extra food. Not to mention, what it could do for beekeepers and farmers markets.

Colleague and co-author Dr. David Tarpy said:

We think the benefit stems from differences in behavior between bee groups, in part depending on the weather.

Different bees for different weather - an important factor during difficult changing weather patterns.

For example, southeastern blueberry bees work well regardless of inclement weather, whereas honeybees only perform at their best on calm, warm, sunny days.

Burrack adds:

This can make a big difference, since blueberries bloom in March and April in North Carolina. That means the weather can swing from great to awful, as we saw this year. 

We've shown that there is a real financial benefit associated with biodiversity. The next step is to figure out how to foster that diversity in practical terms.

Some research allegedly points to having native, flowering plants near blueberry fields to increase native bee populations over time, but the researchers wish to see what role crop management can play in fostering bee diversity at crop sites - whatever that entails...

This is incredibly good news but more and more studies, including this one from Harvard, are demonstrating that neonicotinoid pesticides are largely responsible for major bee declines. So in order for this bee-diversity finding to rock the world, their health needs to come first - and as you can see, the bees pay it forward to us many times over.

Could this secret be why giant biotech and chemical corps like Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta undermine studies that implicate their pesticides in Colony Collapse Disorder? And...why they rush to pull the strings behind more studies to "help the bees"? To make matters worse, they blame the farmers when their seeds and chemicals finally show negative consequences - but the farmers are left holding the empty bag.

Do we really want to live in a shriveling monoculture where patented robobees are the only ones able to pollinate - for the right price? Knowing the above would rock agriculture because it would decentralize the monopolistic power system and place it back in the right hands. It would breathe new life into local agriculture and the local economy.

The paper, "Bee species diversity enhances productivity and stability in a perennial crop," was published May 9 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. Lead author of the paper is Shelley Rogers, a former graduate student at NC State who received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support this work.

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