Importance of Pollinators

Jay Vroom, farmer and president and CEO of CropLife America discussed the incredibly important role of pollinators with me. "An essential part of modern agriculture is the management of bees for the most part and reliance on other pollinators to help crops that need assistance that are not self pollinating to accomplish their work and to produce food that is estimated to represent upwards of one third of our diets and worth billions and billions of dollars worth of crop output. It's a huge value to farmers who are trying to produce that kind of crop. It's in every state, the places where we have more specialty intensive crops systems like California, Arizona and Florida. These are places that attend to be warmer and more conducive to multiple crops and intensive agriculture. The importance of honeybees is all the greater in terms of economic impact. As we have intensified some crops like the virtual explosion in the production of almonds in California, we have created a demand for managed pollination services that require over half of all the managed honeybees in the entire country to go to one state for a period of six or eight weeks to help support the pollination of one crop."