Pollinators are essential to the lifecycle of most flowering plants, and they play a role in improving the quality of crop yields on a farm. USDA-NRCS recently hosted a webinar to discuss their conservation efforts to support pollinators and explained the importance of pollinators in agriculture.

Izzy Hill, USDA’s honeybee and pollinator research coordinator, and Dr. Elissa Olimpi, a post-doctoral researcher at Virginia Tech, provided both background information and results from various studies to support USDA’s efforts in supporting pollinators in ag.

Pollinators, including wild bees, insects, birds, bats and honeybees, are essential to U.S. agriculture. “There are over 100 crops and 40 seed crops that depend on pollinators here in the U.S., at least in part,” explained Hill.

In terms of the value of U.S. food production, “we wouldn’t starve without pollinators,” assured Hill, “but we would be lacking many of the foods that are incredibly nutritionally important to us.”

Just like humans need pollinators to maintain the strength of agriculture, pollinators need our help to maintain their populations. Olimpi noted, “Pollinators face steep declines from a variety of stressors,” such as pesticides, climatic stress, pathogens, genetics and breeding.

USDA has continuously worked on ways to support these pollinators, and one way has been through funded pollinator habitat enhancements to supplement pollinator resources. Olimpi said, “By supplementing pollinator resources, these practices also protect pollination services.”

Plant diversity will ensure flowers are in bloom for as long as possible to provide nectar and pollen throughout the growing season. Photo by Courtney Llewellyn

The two types of practices used to support pollinators are through wildflower planting (planting a diversity of species for pollinators to use as floral resources) and creating and/or restoring the semi-natural habitat (grasslands, forests, shrublands and wetlands) of an area.

Olimpi summarized two projects done by the NRCS Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) and the FSA Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) focusing on prioritizing private lands for USDA-funded pollinator habitat enhancements. Before the experiments, the team predicted that pollinator habitat enhancements would be more beneficial “in landscapes where the expected conservation benefits are greatest” – specifically, in simple landscapes that consist of 1% to 20% semi-natural habitat. In a simple landscape, there is enough existing habitat for pollinators that there are species present “but there’s not so much semi-natural habitat that adding a little bit more won’t make a difference,” Olimpi said.

Additionally, pollinator habitat enhancements would be “most beneficial in regions that are the most vulnerable to the loss of pollination services.” This vulnerability can be seen through supply and demand of pollinators in the area and the potential of pollinator mismatch. A pollinator mismatch occurs when a crop that is highly dependent on pollinators, such as blueberries, is in a habitat with a low abundance of pollinators.

Throughout these projects, Olimpi concluded that the NRCS pollinator practices they focused on contribute 2.5% to all semi-natural habitats and 3.9% to the national supply of pollinators (specifically wild bees). These two data points support the idea that the “contribution of practices to pollinators is very high relative to the contribution of semi-natural habitats.” Overall, the NRCS pollinator practices prove to be impactful.

Olimpi believes that pollinator conservation practices should be implemented as long as they are locally appropriate and use a diversity of native plant species. These practices are “more than just planting flowers,” she said, but “holistically thinking about how to provide resources for pollinators.”

To learn more about how the USDA is working to support and protect pollinators, visit nrcs.usda.gov. To see some of the practices that can be utilized, visit nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/PollinatorPractices_2017.pdf.

by Kelsi Devolve