A Single Point of Failure

Farming for profit is notorious for boom and bust crises. Farmers chase demand, racing to plant thousands of new acres to high-margin crops. Then they go bankrupt when overproduction drives prices below the cost of production. Nowhere is this pattern clearer than California, the world capital of industrialized agriculture.

Grapes are a recent case in point. Massive overplanting in the 1990s has made it possible for the Bronco Wine Company to produce and sell millions of bottles of Charles Shaw wines. Also known as "Two-Buck Chuck," this good quality table wine sells for about the same price per liter as bottled water. 2005 saw the largest California grape harvest in history, exacerbating the glut. That's a great thing for ordinary people who like to drink wine, but it also means that the industry as a whole is stretched to the financial breaking point. As prices fall, small vulnerable wine-makers will go broke and growers will be forced to let their grapes rot on the vine.

During the boom, landowners in the Southern California town of Temecula jumped on the bandwagon, using imported water to grow wine grapes in the desert. If it is severe enough, industry contraction could bankrupt this new region's dozen winemakers forcing them to lay off their hundreds, perhaps thousands of mostly undocumented immigrant workers.

Crashes are just one of capitalist agriculture's weaknesses. Because commodity production for competitive markets forces the industry to maximize productivity, companies plant contiguous fields to a single crop. This allows for more efficient planting, maintenance, and harvesting. When a region is especially well-suited to a particular plant, monocultural production will spread over hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of acres. In Illinois, for instance, more than 13 million acres are planted to corn.

While industrial agriculture is efficient, it is also risky. Unlike wild ecosystems, which are relatively stable and resilient because they are complex and diverse. Monocultural production processes, relying on a single species and a standardized production methods, have multiples points of vulnerability. Failure at a single point can destroy an entire industry.

In California's Central Valley, 80% of the world's almonds are grown on 600,000 acres that yield more than a billion pounds of nuts per year. High prices have led to a quadrupling of output in just 20 years, and tens of thousands of additional acres will begin producing in the next five years. California growers grossed more than $3 billion in 2005.

The Valley's millions of trees are pollinated by billions of bees. More than 1.4 million hives, about 70% of the mobile hives in the country, are trucked to the Central Valley for the three-week almond bloom. Beekeepers provide pollination services for more than 100 food crops in the U.S. worth over $14 billion per year.

In 2005, bee colonies began to die by the thousands, partly because of of infestation by pesticide-resistant varroa mites, and partly because of something else. Competing theories blame viruses, fungi, pesticides, travel stress, and even an immune disorder that, like AIDS, makes bees vulnerable to secondary disorders. Some beekeepers have lost more than 90% of their hives.

There's no sign that "colony collapse disorder" is slowing. As a result, the demand for pollination services has become so intense that almond growers are flying in hives from Australia and New Zealand. If varroa mites cannot be controlled and the damage continues, the world may soon see a sudden shortage almonds, a nutrient-dense source of high-quality protein.