Virtually no organic honey sold commercially in the U.S. comes from domestic hives, as commodity-crop farmers convert ever more grassland into cropland, leaving honeybees with fewer pesticide-free fields to forage, reports Civil Eats. North Dakota, for instance, which produces more honey than any other state, lost more than 100,000 acres of grassland over the past decade. Most of the organic honey consumed in the U.S. comes from Mexico, Brazil, and India.
“There’s a direct relationship between honey per hive produced in North Dakota and the amount of grassland in relation to acres converted to row crops,” said Clint Otto, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center. This means “a lot of herbicide and very little opportunity for habitat.”
According to the USDA’s most recent guidelines for organic honey (honey-specific standards have been in the works since 2001, but have yet to be finalized), hives must be surrounded by a 2.2-mile radius of untreated forage area. But according to a 2014 piece by FERN and The American Prospect, it’s becoming more difficult for beekeepers to keep their hives organic due to the turnover of neighboring grasslands into cropland that is sprayed with herbicides and pesticides. Between 2006 and 2011, 1.3 million acres of grassland were plowed to make room for corn and soybean fields in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska and Ohio.
Despite the overall decline in the domestic honey market—organic and non-organic—honey consumption has continued to climb. While U.S. honey production is two-thirds what it was in the early 1990s, the USDA estimates that consumption per person has doubled since to 0.9 pounds annually.
And Civil Eats suggest that local honey, even if it’s not organic, may be the best honey. Much of the organic honey sold in the U.S. has been heavily processed, which strips away nutrients and pollan. “The best honey you can get is … from where you live,” says Anthony Maxfield, a beekeeper on the north shore of Oahu, and president of the Hawai’i Beekeepers Association.