M6.4 : Industrial Farming

·       Your thoughts about the vanishing of bees (what else have you heard/seen about this issue?)

The film triggers a lot of thoughts and interesting facts that I didn’t know before. I’m well aware of the benefits that bees bring to human from the honey that we use for food and healing purposes to the pollination of plants and flowers. Watching the film and seeing desperate and hopeless look on beekeepers’ faces left me thinking that this problem is a lot more serious than I thought it was. What can we do to track where the bees are taking off to? Do they just fly away from their hive and don’t return? Or they actually are dead but not somewhere near the hive? So many questions that are still unanswered. Another issue that emerged not too long ago that related to this is the spraying of the insecticide, which was intended to kill mosquitos that can cause Zika, accidentally killed more than 3 million of honeybees in South Carolina. This accident showed how vulnerable the bee population is when it comes to our excessive spraying of pesticide on the fields that ironically require the bees’ help for pollination. How can we protect the bees, our number one helpers, from dying? Can we have the best of both world, where we can kill the insects that harm our crops but still keep our bees alive and healthy?

·       Dirt!: The Movie 

The movie reminds us of how precious our dirt and soil are to our lives and how much we depend on it. The conservation of dirt is as important as the conservation of water. Farmers have a really big responsibility in this quest to conserve the dirt that we use for planting our crops to keep sustain us and all animals on earth. Bad farming practices are common in order to gain more crops and profits and farmers are likely to keep doing this unless the government steps in with regulations and laws in order to enforce prohibition.

·       Were you able to discover if there is a factory farm near you? Were you already aware of farms near you? What do you think about this? 

Using the factory farm map website, I found that there’s no factory farm near me or within my country of Santa Clara. It does make sense because the county is an urban region where majority of residents have nonagricultural jobs. Although, I did notice that the surrounding counties such as Merced and San Benito are high to extreme level of density showing that they’re farm factory counties.

·       Composting: Do you currently compost? Have you composted in the past? Do you know anyone who composts? Would you consider composting, after learning about its benefits from the movie? 

I have never compost before. I guess one of the reason is because we don’t grow anything at my house. But this get to me thinking that maybe we should encourage people to have a trash can for compost materials only in their kitchen even though they don’t compost and what the city can do is provide every home with a compost-only garbage cart so that every week they can take those compost materials and put them into good use. This can help provide good soil to local community gardens, or farms, or even encourage more people to grow plants and gardens at home.