What Can You Plant in Your Garden? Food for Bees

Honey bees feel the effect of California drought due to lack of normal supply of wildflowers. At this time of the year, millions and millions of colonies of bees are working hard to pollinate our crops in the Central Valley of California. Find out where our crops come from. See what you can do in your garden!

Due to the drought, California hills are not covered by wildflowers. As you travel up and down the Valley floor, you have seen the brown hill or dirt. No colorful wildflowers are available for the bees to forage. So beekeepers are forced to provide the bees with their natural diet. That's extra expense for them. Just like the farmers and the ranchers who end up spending more to feed their cattle, beekeepers end up spending more to maintain their bees' health. And less crop polllination means less income for the beekeepers.

Big Data Comes to California Farmers with Much Sorrow

That was the news that farmers and everyone who grows some crops were talking about during this year's Tulare World Ag Expo. The representatives of major Ag companies were on the site to present the info about how Big Daga technology can be used to produce great crops. Farmers came from all over the world to check the big tractors and other ag-related products and equipment. Seed manufacturers such as Monsanto and Dupont are pushing the farmers to adopt the new Big Data tech. All the farmers did not roll down and accept the presentation provided by those seed manufacturers.

Farmers are not ready to share their planting techniques with those big seed producers. They fear that they could be used against them. Who is to blame them? A refusal to share and adopt the Big Data will keep their seed costs down. Seed producers are urging farmers to implement data-driven 'prescriptive planting' tech suggesting how densely row of seeds should be planted. Among the critics, we find the American Farm Bureau Federation that stated that those seed companies stand to win from the higher crop returns and planting denser fields