Editor’s Desk: Buzzkill episode 5—Bats, blue agave, and the future of tequila

By Theodore Ross

The newest episode of Buzzkill, released today, travels to Jalisco, Mexico, to learn about the role that a single endangered species of bat plays — or should play — in the production of tequila. The Mexican long-nosed bat, reports Buzzkill’s Elliott Woods, is:

[A] gray-brown, nectar-eating bat that’s about 3 to 4 inches long. They’re really tiny. And they may just save the tequila industry someday. You probably don’t think of bats when you think of tequila, but that spirit comes from a plant called agave tequilana, also known as blue agave. Over the last century, industrial monoculture practices have caused a catastrophic loss of genetic diversity on Mexico’s blue agave plantations.

One of the most important points we make in Buzzkill is that the way people farm has to change to protect pollinators and the global food system. The tequila industry has, over time, mostly stopped planting seeds from pollinated plants. Today, nearly all of the blue agaves in Jalisco — the Mexican state that produces 98 percent of the world’s tequila — comes from a handful of cloned “mother” plants and not from pollination. It is an inherently unstable system, one that can only continue to exist through intensive use of chemical pesticides and herbicides, which are also destabilizing.

As Elliott reports, monoculture plantations that are dependent on cloning in tequila country could be one plague away from annihilation:

This is not some abstract threat. It’s already happened more than once. Between 1993 and 1999, a pest infestation wiped out an estimated 25 percent of the agaves in Jalisco. Dozens of distilleries were forced to close down, and the industry fell into a yearslong slump. The cycle repeated again in 2010, when a fungal infection killed off an estimated 35 percent of blue agaves in Mexico. 

This episode also looks at what can be done to address the problem. Elliott introduces us to Rodrigo Medellin, “a legend in the world of endangered species conservation,” who is also known as “the Bat Man of Mexico.” Rodrigo is the founder of the Bat Friendly project, which requires tequila producers to allow a small percentage of their agaves to live out their lives and be pollinated, rather than cutting them back for cloning.

“If you let 5 percent of agaves in one hectare, you are feeding 100 bats in one hectare,” Rodrigo says. “That is a hell of a lot of bats.”

“Bats and Blue Agave” is the fifth of Buzzkill’s six episodes. I hope you’ll give it, and the rest of the series, a listen. I think there’s nothing else quite like it out there. I hope you’ll also consider making a donation to FERN to support this kind of work. It’s unique and necessary, and we can’t do it without you.