Food & Agriculture

Bees and meat consumption: a spurious correlation

Manu Saunders

I’ve seen and heard a few claims circulating that removing meat from your diet is essential to ‘save the bees’. This is misleading and draws a long bow between lots of random correlations to promote a particular agenda.

Sure, intensive meat production contributes to some big environmental problems and there are plenty of reasons to reduce your meat consumption. But there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support claims that eating meat is bad for bees.

Meat comes in many forms. From wild game to highly-processed ‘meat products’, from large-scale intensive feedlots to diversified low-intensity grazing systems, from locally-produced to high food miles. It is generally impossible to make blanket statements about all meat. Continue reading →

System Solutions: sustainable agriculture is about ecological interactions

Manu Saunders1 Comment

The latest IPCC report was released last week, with very similar findings to the IPBES report released earlier this year. Both reports analyse published research and provide evidence-based recommendations to guide policy-making. They corroborate what ecologists and environmental scientists have been showing for the last few decades via hundreds of thousands of studies across multiple disciplines.

In a nutshell, we need to change how we, as a species, interact with our environment. Most importantly, we need to change the way we manage and use land and natural resources. And there are many ways we can do this. Continue reading →

Agriculture vs. Environment: another false dichotomy

Manu Saunders5 Comments

Recently, protecting the environment has been portrayed as a hindrance to economic growth, a fluffy sideshow, or a bureaucratic obstacle to hardworking families. Ironically, the absolute opposite is true. It’s just another false dichotomy.

I grew up around Agriculture. Being a farmer was one of the first career choices I can remember as a primary school kid. I’ve hand-fed calves, shown prize dairy cattle at local shows, helped friends pick fruit, and worked as a governess on a remote beef cattle station. I did university twice, and ended up where I am today, because I learned first-hand from so many farmers that a healthy environment is essential to agricultural production.

So, very personally, I’m a bit upset that the Agriculture vs. Environment dichotomy has blown out of proportion. Continue reading →

Honey by any other name…

Manu Saunders1 Comment

Did you know that honey bees aren’t the only insect that can make honey?

Read my article at The Conversation:

Wasps, aphids and ants: the other honey makers

There are seven species of Apis honey bee in the world, all of them native to Asia, Europe and Africa. Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, is the species recognised globally as “the honey bee”. But it’s not the only insect that makes honey…..

© Manu Saunders 2018

Evidence-based Half Earth

Manu Saunders2 Comments

The argument that half our planet should be set aside for Nature has been in the news lately. A few years’ ago, E.O. Wilson wrote Half-Earth, his plan to save the biosphere by dedicating half the planet’s surface to nature. Other scientists have published supporting arguments, for example here and here.

The idea is commendable and inspiring. Modern human civilisation is having huge, sometimes irreversible, effects on natural processes and ecosystem function. In return, the outcomes of these effects are having terrible impacts on human wellbeing, e.g. climate change, loss of natural vegetation, plastic and agrichemical pollution etc.

To sustain life, we (all of us) really need to change the way we use our local and global environments.

So is the ‘half earth’ proposal realistic and effective for achieving this goal? Continue reading →

Bumblebees are frequent flyers – what are the impacts?

Manu Saunders

The Applied Ecologist

Addressing pollinator introduction policy and the effects introduced species can have on local ecosystems, Romina Rader, Manu Saunders and Tobias Smith discuss the recent Policy Direction, Coordinated species importation policies are needed to reduce serious invasions globally: The case of alien bumblebees in South America by Aizen et al.

Bombus Photo by A. Saez

Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) are large, iconic pollinators of many wild flowers and crops.  Their ability to buzz-pollinate flowers with poricidal anthers and their ease of husbandry has led to the domestication of several species as managed pollinators, particularly Bombus terrestris, a native to Europe.  In many countries, bumblebee colonies are now mass-produced to pollinate a range of different crops in greenhouses, polytunnels and open fields, with an estimatedannual value of €55 million. The recent Policy Direction by Aizen et al.  investigates the consequences of this rapid expansion by reviewing the current…

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Robo bees are back, but will they last?

Manu Saunders6 Comments

The robot bee story is back in the news. I covered some of the new research and associated media hype last year. The latest: a patent has been filed for building ‘pollinator drones’ and the media (both newsy and social) are in despair, as the end is clearly nigh.

But don’t worry. Here are a few challenges the pollinator drones will need to overcome before they can take over agriculture: Continue reading →

What is sustainable agriculture anyway?

Manu Saunders6 Comments

Sustainable agriculture is an ambiguous term. Because ‘sustainable’ simply means ‘maintained at the current level’, sustainable agriculture can be whatever you want it to be. It’s used more than it probably should be in scientific and political documents, because it’s a broad encompassing term that most people have heard. But it needs to be interpreted within the context it’s referring to, not on its own. Sometimes that context isn’t clear.

Modern agriculture is a leading driver of our current environmental problems, already pushing us beyond the safe limits of most planetary boundaries. But not all agriculture is equal. Very few studies, or their associated news  stories, clarify the subtle social and ecological differences between individual farms and landscapes.

Continue reading →

Pest and beneficial insects in apple orchards

Manu Saunders4 Comments

My latest paper is out. It’s a leftover from my last postdoc at Charles Sturt Uni where I was working on ecosystem services in SE Australian apple orchards with Gary Luck and PhD student Rebecca Peisley – see her blog posts on her work here.

Our main research question for the project was to calculate the net outcome, in terms of yield, of all the positive and negative effects of animal interactions across a growing season. You can read our previous paper on those results here.

In this new paper we looked at another interaction, the influence of landscape vegetation and orchard ground cover on different invertebrate groups. I really enjoyed this project as it was an opportunity to explore an idea I had been thinking about for a while. I first got interested in orchard ground cover during my PhD, comparing wild pollinators in almond orchards with and without living ground cover. Continue reading →