Editor’s note: This story contains racist and crude language.

ITHACA, N.Y. — Ithaca City School District (ICSD) superintendent Luvelle Brown and Board of Education President Sean Eversley Bradwell, who are both Black, said they received racist and threatening messages in the days after an anti-affirmative action group filed a lawsuit against the district.

The lawsuit, which garnered national news attention, alleges discrimination by the school district against white students. The lawsuit cites a poster advertising the school’s annual Students of Color United Summit, which invited students of color to attend. The school district later sent an email stating that all students were welcome to attend the event.

Bradwell first mentioned the threats during a school board meeting on June 11, which took place after a tense final budget hearing. 

“Some of those stories were picked up by various organizations, which resulted in significant amounts of threats to the superintendent, as well as myself,” Bradwell said. “Death threats, vulgar language, voicemails, things that would make one wonder why would you volunteer for a position [on the school board] if you’re going to have your family or your lives threatened.”

During the June 11 meeting, Bradwell said district officials had been in contact with local law enforcement regarding the threats.

In an email, Brown provided two audio recordings of voicemail messages sent in the days since May 28, when news of the lawsuit broke.

The messages appear to have been sent shortly after the story was picked up by Fox News and other national outlets on June 5, extracted metadata shows.

The caller on the first voicemail calls Brown a “racist-ass fucking n*gger.” The man also uses multiple slurs in reference to Black, Asian and gay students.

The man, who described himself only as a “concerned citizen,” threatened to have ICSD “shut the fuck down” and said Brown will be “out of a fucking job” if he has “anything to do with this.”

The caller who left the second message called Brown “another racist Negro” and made fun of his name before delivering a slew of insulting stereotypes about Black people.

Brown also cited the threatening messages as part of his rationale for not renewing his contract as superintendent beyond June 2028.

Brown described his work heading the district as “physically taxing, communally taxing, emotionally taxing, and personally taxing” adding that he had received “multiple messages of hate and threats in response to leadership decisions made with the best intentions” within the past few weeks.

The messages also came amid heightened scrutiny and local criticism of the superintendent and board members during this spring’s tumultuous school budget debate. The messages Brown provided, however, do not explicitly mention the budget and it is unclear if the two callers were local.

The Ithaca Voice filed a public records request to obtain any other threatening messages received by district personnel and school board members in the days since the lawsuit. ICSD is still working to fulfill the request.

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LEXINGTON, Neb. — Naidid Aguilera was feeling stuck.

Stuck at her job at a Tyson meatpacking plant. Stuck in a central Nebraska town after emigrating from Mexico roughly 15 years earlier with her husband. Instead of working in her dream role as an elementary school teacher, she spent her days hauling cow organs for inspection. 

Then she learned about one group’s effort to expand access to high-quality child care here, specifically for families who speak little English, through free training and help navigating state licensing laws. The classes would be entirely in Spanish, eliminating one of the single-biggest hurdles for expanding care in this town of 11,000, where 2 out of 3 residents are Hispanic. For years, it had just one Spanish-speaking child care provider.

As Aguilera dialed the phone to sign up for classes, she recalled feeling overcome with emotion because she had believed her goal of working with children was left back in Mexico.

“The only question they really asked me was why I would want to pursue a child care license,” Aguilera said through a Spanish interpreter. “My response was, ‘I want to do more than where I’m at right now at Tyson and move further in life. I’m looking for another opportunity.’”

Through the local advocacy of several organizations, the community will have nine Spanish-speaking providers by this summer — including Aguilera. Although Lexington still has a waiting list of 550 children in need of care, the town’s child care gap has been cut by nearly 100 children with the addition of new providers, according to local data. 

A nonprofit group called Communities for Kids, partnering with other organizations, began training providers after community surveys revealed the town’s need for Spanish-language child care. The group, founded in 2017, helps develop quality early care and education programs in Nebraska communities that don’t have enough of them.

“If you can’t communicate, or your culture is different, trusting a white English-speaking woman with your child — that’s a lot of trust,” said Shonna Werth, Communities for Kids’ assistant vice president of early childhood programs.

At the time, with only one bilingual provider, most Hispanic families were shuffling their children among neighbors or family members for care. It was the only way for Spanish-speaking parents to communicate with a provider directly.

Some parents employed by the local meatpacking plants worked split shifts to ensure their children were with someone they could communicate with.

“You wonder, ‘Where are those kids? What experiences are they having?’” Werth said. 

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free. 

There’s a lack of Spanish-speaking or bilingual early childhood education providers across the nation, said Tania Villarroel, early childhood senior policy analyst for UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization. One of the barriers to growing the child care workforce is the process of getting certified.

“It’s a resource to speak Spanish, but if you don’t have good English skills, it can also be really hard to get those degrees,” Villarroel said. “It benefits Latino children to have a Latino provider because they have the same lived experience, same heritage — it’s easier for them to connect to families, to get more family engagement.”

Recent research from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families found that Latino families across the United States consider multiple factors when trying to find child care, like schedule flexibility and whether the provider offers culturally responsive care for their children.

“Some [places] serve only Hispanic children, and they have Hispanic providers. But then other sites have no Hispanic children, and probably no Hispanic representation. So we see this sort of segregation going on,” said Julia Mendez, a researcher for the center. “There’s the families who are seeking the care and the families can’t find what they need, because it’s not available.”

Mendez said it’s common for home-based care to be of lower quality for Hispanic families, becauseif their providers don’t speak English, they have fewer opportunities for professional development or credentialing.

Boosting the quality of Lexington’s child care — not just its accessibility — was crucial, Werth said. She joined two local child care advocates, sisters Stephanie and Maricela Novoa, to implement the free training. Maricela Novoa is an early learning bilingual specialist providing assistance to early childhood educators through the Nebraska Department of Education. Stephanie Novoa, a realtor, also works with Communities for Kids and volunteers as a special advocate with the courts.

The training in Lexington began in 2021 with a program called the “Professional Learning Series,” which included 55 hours of classes on the licensing process or required skills for high-quality early childhood education. The series was taught exclusively in English – and did not attract Spanish-speakers.

Another series followed in 2022, and this time, there was a professional interpreter and headsets available for translation. The class was held every Tuesday night from August through November at the local YMCA, with free child care and food available.

“We were kind of building that foundation of [making] sure there are things that if they want to get licensed, this will be useful for them if and when they ever get there,” Werth said. “Like, let’s not just do training for the sake of training, but training that has a dual purpose. They’re building their education and their skills so that they can have better interactions with the kids they are caring for or as parents, because not all of them are on that trajectory of being a child care provider.”

Related: Our child care system gives many moms a draconian choice: Quality child care or a career

Werth said when the classes first opened, the goal was to reach five or six participants. Twenty showed up.

“Midway through the classes, participants would bring a neighbor or a friend. And so we had to close the class because it was a small room,” said Maricela Novoa. “It was just that word of mouth, that trust piece — this is safe, this is good. This is something that you’ll value.”

Next was a 10-week business class in 2023, followed by courses on parenting and safety that were provided in English with a Spanish interpreter.

Aguilera said she remembers many long days last spring working at the meatpacking plant, then attending classes in the evening.

“The classes were one after another, but at the same time that was nice because it was just all over at once,” Aguilera said. “I was tired, but it was very worth it.”

Werth said it was slow-going to license the nine women, especially when they ran into language barriers.

“Stephanie and I met with six or eight participants one night. They all brought their licensing packets, and we sat down with them to help them just try to work through that. And [it] took hours to do, which should not be the case,” Werth said.

It took several hours more to help participants navigate an online class. Most of them had little experience working with technology other than their phones. Werth recalled the library closing around them one evening as they helped participants use computers for the first time.

Maricela Novoa said the lack of Spanish materials or Spanish-speaking representatives is a constant hurdle for future providers. Even now, a Lexington resident could call a state agency for help but not get anyone on the phone who can speak Spanish.

“It does get tiring, because you’re the only person in the room saying, ‘Hey, is this available in Spanish?’ when there’s a new resource available,” Maricela Novoa said. 

Mendez, of the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, said her organization calls these obstacles “administrative burden.”

“It’s true across the board that any barrier, like a language barrier, can keep people out,” Mendez said. “With administrative burden, you have to learn what the resources are, but first, you have to know about them. And then you have to navigate the systems to try to figure out how to get the credential or the support that you’re looking for.”

Related: In-home child care could be solution for rural working parents

Just a few years ago, Miriam Guedes was the only Spanish-speaking child care provider in Lexington. She started a daycare on her own after being a paraprofessional at the public school district’s preschool for 19 years.

She obtained her license by herself — an uphill battle, she said, with all the paperwork in English — but soon wanted to do more, although she didn’t know how. 

Guedes, whose business is attached to her house, said people started knocking on her door asking if she had room for more kids, but she could take only eight at a time. 

“People were coming in, asking for more and more and more,” she said.

She learned about the free training being offered through Communities for Kids and signed up. The training gave her business experience and the skills to expand her certification, allowing her to care for 12 children at once at her center, “Blooming Daycare.” Now she’s a mentor to Aguilera and the other women who are getting licenses.

Aguilera opened her own child care business, “El Niño Del Tambor Daycare” early this spring. The name means “little drummer boy.” It’s in her basement, recently renovated to include cribs, small chairs and a table, organizers filled with colorful books and crafts, an alphabet rug and more. Her new license is taped to a marker board at the entrance.

She enrolled her first child mid-March and now has four children in her care, in addition to two of her own children. Aguilera said she could easily see herself hiring an assistant and taking on more children in the near future.

It’s something that changed her life for the better, she said.

“When I first started taking in kids, I kind of broke down a little bit because it came full circle,” Aguilera said. “I didn’t have the opportunity to stay home with my kids. And now I get to do this. I’m so happy.”

This story about child care solutions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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ITHACA, N.Y.  — A local authority approved millions of dollars of additional tax breaks across three projects without holding what appears to be legally required public hearings.

The Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency (IDA), which has the power to authorize tax breaks for developers, is required by state law to hold a public hearing before its seven-member board of directors votes on whether to provide a project with more than $100,000 of financial assistance.

The requirement to hold a public hearing applies whether the vote is on an initial tax break agreement or an amendment to an agreement, according to the New York State Authorities Budget Office (ABO), the state agency charged with promoting accountability and transparency in Industrial Development Agencies. 

While public hearings are consistently held before a vote on an initial agreement, the IDA’s board members appear to have bypassed the public hearing requirement before approving an additional tax break at least five times, according to a review The Ithaca Voice conducted of the 62 active projects listed on the Tompkins County IDA’s website. 

The five additional tax breaks issued without a public hearing total about $2.9 million.

In a statement, Heather McDaniel, the president of the nonprofit Ithaca Area Economic Development which administers the IDA, disagreed that the IDA was supposed to hold a public hearing in order to increase previously authorized tax incentive agreements. 

“Currently, State regulations do not explicitly require an additional public hearing.” McDaniel said in a statement.

She said the Tompkins County IDA “prides itself on providing incentives that support projects that are in the public interest. We are open and transparent with our processes.”

McDaniel’s statement appears to conflict with that of state officials, as well as legal experts and a former IDA board member.

An ABO spokesperson said in an email that IDAs “must hold a public hearing prior to providing any financial assistance to any project, including an amendment of financial assistance to an existing project, in an amount of more than $100,000.”

The spokesperson said the ABO’s comment is not intended to be a “formal legal opinion” since the agency is not authorized to issue them.

An article written by three attorneys and published in August 2020 in Tax Notes, a publication that serves tax professionals, affirms the public hearing requirement.

In December 2019, then-IDA member Jennifer Tavares also acknowledged the public hearing requirement. Minutes from an IDA meeting that month show Tavares said a “new public hearing would be triggered if there was a change in benefits to the project larger than $100,000,” while she discussed amending a tax incentive agreement with other board members.

The Aurora, a 141-unit market-rate housing development on Ithaca’s Northside, represents the most recent case where the IDA failed to hold what appears to be a legally required public hearing. The project received an amendment in May to the original tax break it was given in November 2020. As a result, the tax breaks supporting the project increased from about $6.6 million to $7.4 million.

IDAs have the authority to give out local property, sales and mortgage tax exemptions in the pursuit of economic development. In order to receive a tax break, project developers need to attest that they could not complete the project without the incentive they applied for. They must also submit financial documentation.

The Aurora is the last project to complete the three-phase Carpenter Park development, also known as Cayuga Park, near the GreenStar Food Co-op along North Meadow Street. 

Park Grove Realty, the Rochester-based development company behind the project, has already constructed the Cayuga Health medical office facility and a 42-unit affordable housing building as a part of the Carpenter Park site.

Representatives from Park Grove told the IDA’s Board of Directors at their May 8 meeting that “economic headwinds” in the post-COVID economy made it necessary to receive a larger tax break in order to construct the Aurora.

The Aurora’s price tag jumped from a projected $47.1 million to $60.4 million, according to Park Grove. The developers said they also planned to reduce the number of units in the building from 161 to 141 to reduce costs, according to information submitted to the Tompkins County IDA. 

Tim Crilly, director of development for Park Grove Realty, urged the Tompkins County IDA’s board of directors to approve the additional tax break during the May 8 meeting. 

“We’re before you today, we want to get in the ground, we want to get this thing done as quickly as possible,” Crilly said.

In the past, the IDA has held public hearings when it amends a tax break agreement for a project if it involves a significant change to the building’s use or overall size.

Some IDA board members voiced concern that a public hearing would push back construction by another month, and that they wanted to see the long-delayed Aurora project completed. 

IDA board member John Guttridge, noted the Aurora couldn’t finalize its financing agreements until the IDA approved the increase to the tax break agreement. During the meeting, Guttridge asked if there was any legal requirement for a public hearing. 

The IDA’s legal counsel, Russell Gaenzel, told board members there was no “bright-line rule” in state law that would require a public hearing to increase the tax break the developers of the Aurora were seeking. 

The IDA could hold a public hearing for the Aurora project if the board desired, he said, but the decision should be driven by the developers’ time constraints.

The IDA’s board of directors ultimately decided not to hold the hearing.

Construction began on the Aurora job site just days after the project received the increase in its tax break from the IDA. 

While public hearings may see poor attendance — and IDA members have no obligation to act on specific recommendations from the public — they are commonly recognized as an important opportunity for public engagement and act as another layer of transparency.

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The students were the last to know.

On April 29 – just a week before finals – Wells College announced that it would close. The last-minute decision by the 156-year-old liberal arts college in upstate New York sent students rushing to find new colleges for the fall. And it threw newly accepted students, who had already put down deposits, into a frantic scramble to see if the colleges they had turned down would take them back. Faculty members, having missed the academic hiring cycle, were left facing unemployment.

But there is mounting evidence that Wells administrators knew for months that the college would close, even as they made public assurances that all was well.

Wells quietly made student transfer arrangements with another college last fall, according to Wells’ accreditor. And Wells agreed earlier this year to convert the land-use zoning for the campus from institutional to mixed use, which would allow the buildings and land to be used, and sold, for non-educational purposes.

Wells joins a parade of colleges that have been closing this year at a rate of one per week, as enrollment dips and pandemic-era aid dries up. The process is never easy, throwing students’ lives into chaos, ending employment for faculty in a field where jobs are scarce and, in some cases, adding extreme stress to small-town economies. But abrupt closures put this process on steroids.

“What concerns me here is that there’s no accountability,” said Anna Anderson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center and a Wells alum. “The students were given just days to pack up and leave … if an institution that’s this respected can do something that’s so horrible, what’s to stop others from doing the same thing?”

Wells has struggled with enrollment declines and budget crunches for years, but recently administrators had assured faculty and local leaders that it was in fine shape.

In late February, two months before announcing the closure, Wells president Jonathan Gibralter wrote to the board of trustees of the Village of Aurora, where the college is located, that rumors about the college shutting its doors were unfounded.

“Let me assure you that we are accepting enrollment deposits for the fall semester — our fall to spring retention rate for our students is higher than it has been in several years,” Gibralter wrote in a statement. “We are hiring staff and we are developing an operating budget for the next fiscal year. We are full steam ahead.”

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

One week before the college’s board of trustees voted to close, Wells posted a message on its Facebook account encouraging new students to visit the college for an “admitted students’ day.”

Faculty members say they were never told that the college was in danger of closing, even though they asked regularly about the state of the college at monthly faculty meetings.

“When the budget was presented to us, if you looked at the numbers, it was pretty grim,” said Laura McClusky, who has been a professor at Wells for 23 years. “But if you listen to the narrative, it was, ‘We’re doing great. Retention is up, the number of applications is up.’”

Even as administrators were assuring faculty that the college was in good shape, Wells was already making arrangements as early as last November with other institutions for them to become what’s known as a “teach-out” partner. That designation signals to a student that an accreditor has approved a college as an appropriate place to continue their education when their current college closes.

“There seems to be evidence that they were preparing at that time,” said Nicole Biever, who is the chief of staff at Wells’ accreditor, Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

At the same time, the Village of Aurora’s ad hoc zoning committee was working alongside Wells administrators on a proposal that would convert most of the college’s campus from institutional to mixed-use zoning. The move would allow the use, and sale, of buildings for purposes not related to the college. The village board of trustees voted in favor of the change in March and has submitted the plan to the state for approval.

Wells officials acknowledged its previous agreements with other institutions.

“The College, over the course of many months, prepared itself should the Board make the difficult decision to close the institution,” Kristopher LaGreca, Wells vice president of marketing and communications, said in an email. “The Board and senior leadership worked out confidential agreements with other institutions to support our students in the event of a closure.”

In response to questions about the re-zoning, LaGreca said that Wells had “continuously looked to divest in non-academic properties in order to bridge gaps in annual budgets.”

He added that the decision to close was “centered on what was best for our students, our prospective students, and their families.”

“Wells College faces significant financial challenges,” Gibralter wrote in a letter announcing the closure. “We conducted a comprehensive review of the institution’s financial health and future sustainability, including an independent analysis, which has led to the necessary conclusion of closure.”

Related: Colleges are now closing at a rate of one a week. What happens to the students?

The college told faculty earlier this semester that there was a new articulation agreement with the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, which would bring in online students. But the deal collapsed and with it went the hope of an enrollment boost.

Members of the board of trustees declined, or didn’t respond to, requests for comment about why the decision was so last-minute, but the vote was not unanimous. The board has agreed to meet with faculty to explain the timeline next week, according to two faculty members with knowledge of the planned meeting.

Abrupt closures can make it much more difficult for students to earn a degree.

“You often see these domino precipitous closures, where students will go to a school that closes and then they’ll be funneled into the school that most wants their money,” said Jessica Ranucci, a supervising attorney for the New York Legal Assistance Group. “The school that most wants their money is a school that’s teetering on the brink, and then that school closes.”

Unfortunately, being an accreditor-approved teach-out college doesn’t necessarily mean an institution will stay open. Middle States had designated Wells as a teach-out school for Cazenovia College and Medaille University, both of which closed last year – forcing students who had just arrived at Wells in the fall to find a new college for the second time.

“To take on students from other places that have closed when you yourself might be closing is just horrible,” said Meghan McCune, a Wells alum and former trustee who is also a professor at Northern Michigan University. “Not to mention, faculty and staff. It’s really hard to find other positions, and it’s completely out of the academic cycle. There’s no way that most people are going to be able to find something. All the hiring is done now.”

Students were stunned by the announcement.

“You don’t think your school is going to close down when they’ve given you a lottery number to choose your room for next year. They’ve let you pick out your classes for next year. They’ve let you order your gowns for next year,” said Olive Blair, 20, who just finished her junior year and is the class president. “It was a shock to say the least.”

A paper proposal for a fall conference was due two days after the announcement was made and she spent the week scrambling to find another college where her credits as an art history major would transfer, not to mention ensuring that the finances would work.

Last year, 82 percent of Wells’ roughly 350 students had federal student loans and close to half received Pell grants, federal aid that goes to low-income students.

“It doesn’t make sense to me that they had to wait until the week before finals,” said Blair. “Did you just realize we don’t have enough money?  You can’t be that dysfunctional. Something must have been known prior to this.”

People with an inside track were well aware of the problems.

“It was the elephant in the room. We’ve been talking about it for 15 years,” said Bonnie Bennett, who was mayor of Aurora from 2010 until 2022. “But whenever anyone raised the issue of Wells closing, they would deny it. They would say, ‘You’re anti-Wells.’”

Related: Getting a college degree was their dream. Then their school suddenly closed.

Wells was put on probation in 2019 by Middle States, requiring that, among other things, it show evidence of “adequate fiscal and human resources” and proper financial planning. The following year, in the height of the pandemic, a letter was sent to alumni saying that the college could close if it didn’t raise money quickly. The fundraising appeal worked – alumni donated millions of dollars. The college also received $3.5 million between 2020 and 2022 from pandemic-related federal funds.

In light of the college’s financial struggles, some faculty members and students are upset about the money spent on President Gibralter’s compensation. In fiscal year 2019, just after Wells was put on probation, Gibraltar collected more than $78,000 in bonuses, bringing his total compensation to more than $386,000, according to federal tax filings. The following year, as the college was begging for donations, he took in more than $345,000 and in fiscal year 2021, the last year for which figures are available, his total compensation was more than $368,000. (The college declined to comment.)

CNYCentral first reported Gibralter’s bonuses.

Middle States took Wells off probation in the summer of 2021, despite enrollment having cratered to about 330 that year from about 420 the previous one.

An independent audit of the college in 2022 also showed that it had been dipping into its restricted endowment earnings. And it was discounting its tuition at an average of 70 percent in the 2021-22 academic year.

When asked why Wells was taken off probation, given its ongoing financial troubles, Biever said Middle States continued to monitor Wells over the next four years, sending teams to visit the college.

“In addition, the Commission required the institution to submit reports including financial information multiple times,” Biever said in an email. “When institutions submit reports, the Commission examines the evidence submitted by institutions and considers that information as part of the multi-level decision making process.”

After Wells announced it was closing, Middle States put it back on probation, citing the abrupt closure and its failure to make plans to ensure the well-being of its students. But the move will have no impact on current students or faculty.

Middle States has yet to approve any of two dozen teach-out colleges announced by Wells even though the college held a campus fair on May 3 with some of the institutions.

The New York State Department of Education said it wasn’t notified about the closure until the weekend before it was announced.

State Sen. Rachel May introduced a bill last week that would require colleges to provide notice of closure at least a year in advance, host public meetings about the decision and provide students with teach-out agreements at least six months in advance.

Students from closed schools usually don’t make it to graduation. Fewer than half of students at closed colleges end up transferring to other institutions, according to a 2022 study, and more than half of those who did transfer left their new college without graduating.

Faculty and staff are scrambling to find jobs, but at this point it’s almost impossible for them to find an academic position for next year. They will lose their health insurance coverage at the end of June (they have an option to pay a COBRA to extend the coverage). The college has said it doesn’t have the money to give them severance payments, although some faculty are wondering about the millions of dollars in assets in the property the college is sitting on.

“Someone would ask about the financial health of the college at every faculty meeting, but they never said there was any danger of closing,” said Andrew Hunt, who was a visiting assistant professor of theatrical design and technology at Wells. “That’s the complaint many of us have. You should have said something.”

This story about Wells College closing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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In January, with the almond bloom in California’s orchards a month away, beekeepers across the country were fretting over their hives. A lot of their bees were dead, or sick. Beekeepers reported losing as much as half their hives over the winter.  Jack Brumley, a California beekeeper, said he’d heard of people losing 80 percent of their bees. Denise Qualls, a bee broker who connects keepers with growers, said she was seeing “a lot more panic occurring earlier.”

Rumors swirled of a potential shortage; almond growers scrambled to ensure they had enough bees to pollinate their valuable crop, reaching out to beekeepers as far away as Florida, striking deals with mom-and-pop operations that kept no more than a few hundred bees. NPR’s All Things Considered aired a segment on the looming crisis in the almond groves.

By May, it was clear that California’s almond growers — who supply 80 percent of the world’s almonds — had successfully negotiated the threat of a bee shortage, and were expected to produce a record crop of 2.5 billion pounds, up 10 percent from last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But the panic, it turns out, was justified. The results of this year’s annual Bee Informed Partnership survey, a collaboration of leading research labs, released Wednesday, found that winter losses were nearly 38 percent, the highest rate since the survey began 13 years ago and almost 9-percent higher than the average loss.  

The panic underscored a fundamental problem with the relationship between almonds and bees: Every year the almond industry expands, while the population of honeybees, beset by a host of afflictions, struggles to keep pace.

“We are one poor weather event or high winter bee loss away from a pollination disaster,” Jeff Pettis, an entomologist who at the time was head of research at the USDA’s Bee Research Laboratory, said in 2012. And while the disaster Pettis warned of hasn’t struck yet, its likelihood grows each year.

There would be no almond industry without the honeybee, which so far is the only commercially-managed pollinator available in sufficient numbers  to work California’s almond fields. The industry is in the midst of a boom, as Americans eat more almonds than ever. We consume more than two pounds per person each year in our granola bars, cereals, milks, and regular old nuts, fueling an $11-billion market.

It’s not clear that boom is sustainable. Though concern about a bee shortage seemed acute this year, the pollination market for almonds has been tightening for more than a decade. In 2005, fear of a pollinator shortage was so great that the government allowed wholesale importation of honeybees for the first time since 1922.

California’s almond industry spreads over 1.4 million acres of the Central Valley. During bloom, which typically unfolds over three weeks in February, these orchards require the services of some 80 percent of all the honeybees in the country.

Honeybee colonies, on the other hand, have been dying at high rates. Historically, colonies died mostly during the winter. So when the Bee Informed Partnership started tracking colonies in 2007, it only looked at winter losses, which have ranged from 22 percent to this year’s nearly 38 percent. Along the way, researchers realized that beekeepers had started losing a surprising number of bees in the summer, too, a season when all should be going well for bees. They started tracking annual losses in 2013, which have ranged between 33 percent and 45 percent. The loss for the year ending March 31 was 41 percent.

The threat to the bees is multifaceted and existential. The varroa mite, an invasive species of external parasite that arrived in Florida in the 1980s, literally sucks the life out of bees and their brood. Herbicides and habitat loss have destroyed the bees’ forage. An array of pesticides, including dicamba and clothianidin, have been found to damage the bees’ health in a variety of ways, weakening their immune systems, for instance, and slowing their reproductive rate.

The process of getting the bees to the almonds adds another stressor. Each January, the sluggish bees are prodded into action much earlier than what would be their normal routine. They are fed substitutes for their natural foods of pollen and nectar so they will quickly repopulate the hive to be ready for almonds. They are then loaded onto trucks and shipped across the country, plopped in an empty field and fed more substitute food while they wait for almonds to bloom.

“We’ve had to bend the natural behavior of honeybees around almonds,” said Charley Nye, who runs the bee research operation at the University of California, Davis.

One reason beekeepers are less inclined to talk about this distortion of nature is that almond pollination has become their biggest single money-maker of the year, accounting for about one-third of their annual income in 2016. No other crop pays as well as almonds, so if a beekeeper misses almond pollination, it could cripple his business.

“They’re not dead, but if they don’t make it to almonds, then from an economic standpoint, they’re as good as dead,” said Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper, back in January when the panic was in full bloom.

In 2018, California had 1.1 million acres of almond trees bearing nuts and another 300,000 acres of trees still too young to need pollination. Each acre of mature trees is supposed to be pollinated by two honeybee colonies. There are between 10,000 and 15,000 bees in a colony when they arrive in the almond fields, and for the last four years, the U.S. has averaged 2.67 million colonies right before almond bloom.

You can do the math, but like Nye says: “As the almond acres grow, the demand for colonies seems to be outpacing the number of colonies that exist.”  

The tight market has forced growers and brokers to expand their search for bees. “It used to be that we only dealt with operations that managed at least a thousand to 3,000 hives,” said Pettis, the former USDA entomologist. “Now people are pulling bees from smaller and smaller operators. They’re pulling bees literally out of people’s backyards and putting them on trucks to pollinate almonds. And while we used to only move bees from west of the Mississippi River, now we go all the way to Florida and New York state.”

Growers are also hedging their bets by securing more bees than they actually need, a strategy that only exacerbates the tight market.

The intel used to gauge the number  of bees in the country is surprisingly imprecise. The bee count offers just a small snapshot in time and relies on beekeepers’ responses to a poll. The numbers are approximate, with undercounts more likely than overcounts. Yet the trend lines are clear: Unless something changes, at some point in the near future we won’t have enough bees.

Limiting colony losses is one way to change the trend. The honeybees’ biggest threat is the varroa mite. The USDA, Project Apis m., and both beekeepers and bee producers are currently conducting trials of a varroa-resistant bee that will work for commercial beekeepers. Also, researchers have been working for years on a backup to the honeybees for early-season crops like almonds. This bee, the blue orchard bee, is in the early stages of commercial production, and it will be years before it could make significant inroads in replacing some of the honeybees.

Meanwhile, there are signs that almond growers are becoming more amenable to bee-friendly practices such as modifying pesticide use and planting flowers in their orchards that would provide alternate forage for the bees while they wait for the almond bloom. Nye said some growers are getting “a little more sensitive to the job the honeybees are doing; they seem to be investing more in pollinators.”

Ultimately, a big part of the solution may be to reevaluate the number of colonies deployed per acre. “Those standards were set many, many, many years ago,” said Bob Curtis, a pollination consultant with the Almond Board of California, and a lot has changed since then.

For the last 12 years, almond groves have produced one-third more nuts than they did in the dozen years before that. Some orchard management practices have changed in that time, but growers also began requesting, and paying a premium for, stronger hives that contain more bees. Today, most of the colonies that go to almond groves contain twice as many bees as they did in decades past. Whether the higher production rate of the almond trees is due to more bees per colony, different management practices, or some combination of factors is hard to say.

Curtis said the Almond Board is undertaking new studies to determine if the stocking rate could be adjusted, which would ease the pressure on embattled beekeepers to keep up with the surging almonds.

A lower stocking rate would also ease the stress on the bees themselves, but it wouldn’t stop them from dying in excessive numbers. Reversing that trend will require dramatically different approaches to everything from how we farm to how we use our land — things not likely to change anytime soon. The disaster Pettis warned of remains a very real possibility. Honeybees continue to be in a fight for their lives.

America’s “fescue belt,” named for an exotic grass called tall fescue, dominates the pastureland from Missouri and Arkansas in the west to the coast of the Carolinas in the east. Within that swath, a quarter of the nation’s cows — more than 15 million in all — graze fields that stay green through the winter while the rest of the region’s grasses turn brown and go dormant. 

But the fescue these cows are eating is toxic. The animals lose hooves. Parts of their tails and the tips of their ears slough off. For most of the year, they spend any moderately warm day standing in ponds and creeks trying to reduce fevers. They breathe heavily, fail to put on weight, and produce less milk. Some fail to conceive, and some of the calves they do conceive die. The disorder, fescue toxicosis, costs the livestock industry up to $2 billion a year in lost production. “Fescue toxicity is the most devastating livestock disorder east of the Mississippi,” said Craig Roberts, a forage specialist at the University of Missouri (MU) Extension and an expert on fescue.

By the early 20^th century, decades of timber-cutting and overgrazing had left the ranching region in southern states barren, its nutrient-rich native grasses replaced by a motley assortment of plants that made poor forage. Then, in the 1930s, a University of Kentucky professor spotted an exotic type of fescue growing in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, which seemed to thrive even on exhausted land. Unlike most native grasses, Kentucky-31, as it was called, stayed green and hearty through the winter. Ranchers found the species remarkably resilient and, if not beloved by cattle, edible enough to plant. Over the next 20 years, much of the country’s southern landscape was transformed into a lush, evergreen pasture capable of supporting a robust cattle industry. 

As early as the 1950s, however, ranchers began to notice tall fescue’s disturbing effects. One study from that time showed that cattle had to be fenced out of other grasses before they’d touch fescue. When they did eat it, the cows saw only one-sixth of their normal weight gain and lost eight pounds of milk production a day. 

Between the cells in fescue grows an endophyte, a fungus living symbiotically inside the grass. The endophyte is what makes the fescue robust against drought and overgrazing, but it’s also what makes it toxic. When scientists engineered a version of fescue without the fungal endophyte, in 1982, its hardiness disappeared and ranchers saw it die out among their winter pastures. Farmers learned to live with the health impacts of the toxic version, and today it remains the primary pasture grass across 37 million acres of farmland. 

It’s a longstanding problem, and it’s spreading. Warming temperatures from climate change are now expanding the northern limit of the fescue belt, and the grass is marching into new areas, taking root on disturbed land, such as pastures. Northern Illinois and southern Iowa could already be officially added to the fescue belt, Roberts said, introducing toxicosis to new farming regions.

“It’s becoming not just present but part of their normal pastures,” he said, noting that he increasingly gets calls from farmers in this region who are wondering what to do.

As more ranchers find themselves facing the challenges of toxic fescue, there are two strategies emerging to finally solve the decades-old problem, though in diametrically opposed ways. One involves planting a modified version of tall fescue — called “friendly fescue” — in which the toxic endophyte has been replaced by a benign one that still keeps the grass hearty and green all winter. Another would abandon fescue altogether and restore the native grasses and wildflowers that once dominated the region, helping to revitalize natural carbon sinks and fight climate change.

For a variety of reasons — some economic, some cultural — neither solution has really taken hold with most fescue belt ranchers. But the debate embodies the agricultural industry in the era of climate change: As ecosystems shift and extreme weather makes farming even more precarious, ranchers are facing tough decisions about how to adapt their land use practices. What is best for business, and will that ultimately be what’s best for the land and for the changing climate? 

Friendly fescue hit the market in 2000, developed by Pennington Seed, Inc. It looks identical to toxic fescue and behaves almost identically, thus requiring little change to the ranching habits of fescue belt farmers over the last 70 years. 

It would seem an ideal fit for an industry focused on maintaining the status quo amid climate challenges. But ranchers have been slow to embrace it. For one thing, friendly fescue, formally known as “novel endophyte fescue,” costs twice as much as the toxic variety — $4 for a pound of seed versus $2. And replacing one grass with another is labor-intensive; a 2004 report by the University of Georgia said it would take ranchers who made the switch about three years to break even. Matt Poore, a professor of animal science at North Carolina State University, chairs the Alliance for Grassland Renewal, a national organization dedicated to eradicating toxic fescue. Yet Poore, who also raises cattle, has only converted 30 percent of his fields, preferring to do it slowly. “The fear of failure is a big deal,” he said. “You’re sticking your neck out there when you go to kill something that looks really good.”

Many ranchers would like to avoid the risk of total pasture makeovers, if they can. Until now, they have found ways to scrape by, relying on a parade of treatments that have come out through the decades, promising relief from toxicosis. 

They can supplement their cows’ diets with grain (an expensive remedy), or cut and dry their fescue and feed it to them as hay, which reduces its toxicity somewhat. They can dilute the toxicity of their fields by planting clover among the fescue, or clip the especially toxic seed heads before cows can graze them. They can try to genetically select cows with moderate fescue tolerance, which can salvage as much as a quarter of their losses. Poore counts over 100 such remedies. “If you do enough of those things you can tell yourself you don’t really have a problem,” he said. Meanwhile, the lush ground cover that fescue displays in winter is seductive.

A lack of trust, too, is a problem. In the early 1980s, when researchers introduced endophyte-free fescue, it was hailed as the answer to toxicosis, a way to save the industry. Ranchers trusted the scientists, and they lost a lot of money when that version withered in the fields. The sting of that debacle persists as researchers try to convince ranchers to trust friendly fescue. “The sins of the past have come back to haunt us,” MU’s Roberts said. “It’s going to take a while to overcome that screwup.”

Every March, Roberts and other scientists travel around the fescue belt giving workshops on friendly fescue to anyone who will listen. He tries to assuage ranchers who are worried about the expense and labor of pasture conversion. 

There aren’t good numbers on adoption rates because seed companies are guarded about how much they sell. But Roberts says he knows it’s rising. Some states promote it more than others, by offering cost-shares, for example, and hosting workshops like those Roberts leads.

It doesn’t help that endophyte-free fescue — the one that fails in the winter — remains on the market. The state of Kentucky even provides cost-share funding for ranchers who switch from toxic fescue to endophyte-free fescue. And several Kentucky ranchers said they were still unclear on the differences among toxic fescue, endophyte-free fescue, and friendly fescue. Farm supply stores often don’t even stock friendly fescue seed, as it’s less shelf stable.

Roberts noted that toxic fescue exudes fluids that “pretty much destroy the food web,” poisoning insects that quail and other creatures feed on. A 2014 study showed that climate change could increase the endophyte’s toxicity. Friendly fescue soil, by contrast, has more microbes than toxic fescue soil. And water quality is better with friendly fescue, too, since sick cows don’t have to congregate in streams and ponds to stay cool.

Despite the confusion and slow uptake, Roberts is optimistic, noting the 30 years it took for farmers to embrace the revolution of hybrid corn in the early 20th century. And he can point to some wins. Darrel Franson, a Missouri rancher who remembers the endophyte-free fescue debacle, nevertheless decided to take the risk, converting his 126 acres to friendly fescue. He loves the results. “It’s hard to argue with the production potential of tall fescue and the length of season it gives us,” he said.

Roberts’ employer, the University of Missouri, is betting that a modified version of exotic fescue will appeal to ranchers more than the idea of converting to native grasslands. “What we’re promoting is environmentally friendly as well as economically sound,” he said. “When you seed a nontoxic endophyte and add legumes [to dilute pasture toxicity], that works as well as anything, and we have a lot of data on it. It may take another 20 years for it to catch on, but it’s not going away. It’s too good.”

For decades, Amy Hamilton and her late husband Rex fought fescue toxicosis in Texas County, Missouri, the heart of the Ozarks. They watched their and their neighbors’ cows lose tail switches, hooves, and parts of their ears to gangrene. Finally, they’d had enough. 

But the Hamiltons didn’t reach for an artificially modified version of the exotic grass. Instead, in 2012, they converted 90 acres of pasture to native warm-season grasses, using their own money and cost-share funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS. The effects were immediate; the next year they documented increased conception and weaning rates in their cows and calves. Since then, they’ve converted another 75 acres. A former soil conservationist with a degree in agronomy, Hamilton’s mission became to annihilate fescue, on her property and across the fescue belt.

I visited Hamilton’s ranch in November 2022, where they run about 45 cows and 150 bison. She and her daughter Elizabeth Steele, who helps run the family’s native seed company, walked through a pasture where fescue grew 15 years ago. Now big bluestem, little bluestem, and sunflowers fill the main body of the pasture, and freshwater cordgrass and ironweed decorate a creek’s edge. Quail have returned for the first time in decades. 

Unlike the Hamiltons’ neighbors’ pastures, however, this field was not green; most of the plants had gone dormant for winter. Hamilton reached through a thick mass of bluestem and pointed to two diminutive, green plants: wild rye and a sedge species, cool-season grasses that provide a native analogue to fescue — and, crucially, winter forage.

“This is what would have been here pre-settlement,” said Steele, referring to the land before Europeans arrived. “A functioning grassland with different plants serving different functions. Nature’s design is not for monocultures.” 

To understand the fescue-native debate requires an understanding of the ecological tradeoff between warm- and cool-season grasses. Simply put, warm-season grasses grow in the summer, harnessing the strong sunshine to grow tall and robust; then they go dormant in the winter. Cool-season grasses do the opposite, putting their evolutionary resources into frost-tolerance. As a result, they tend to be smaller than their warm-season counterparts, providing less biomass and less food per plant for the cows that graze them. 

Hamilton and Steele have decided to bet on biodiversity. Instead of a year-round monoculture of fescue, they have a biodiverse mix of warm- and cool-season grasses, along with wildflowers. It’s not as visibly lush as a fescue field, but the benefits to cattle health, soil health, and climate resistance make it worth it. “It is a kind of faith that these prairies evolved for the good of the native species that were here,” Hamilton said.

Even with the leaner cool-season grasses, their native fields produce twice as much forage as the old fescue fields and generate a much higher amount of organic matter, enriching the soil and allowing the pasture to hold more water. A soil-health specialist from NRCS tested their soil’s organic matter content before the 2012 restoration, then again five years later. The result was pastureland that holds up to a half gallon more water than a typical fescue field. 

In a warming climate with more extreme droughts — much of the Ozarks was in severe drought last year — that extra water storage can make a critical difference for cattle and soil health. The southeastern U.S., the heart of the fescue belt, faces a future of more intense drought and floods. The Hamiltons’ biodiverse style of ranching helps address both extremes, and they expect their native ecosystems will be more resilient to climate change.

“[The extra water] trickles into our stream through the year, as opposed to running off in a flood,” said Steele.

The roots of native grasses also reach three times deeper than fescue roots, making them drought-resistant as well as efficient carbon sinks. Grasslands are uniquely good at carbon sequestration. Unlike forests, they store more than 80 percent of their carbon underground, where it’s more safely sequestered than in aboveground trees where the carbon can potentially volatilize and return to the atmosphere. What’s more, intensive grazing of monocultures makes it hard to sequester carbon. A 2019 study, published in the journal Nature, showed that native, biodiverse, restored grasslands hold more than twice as much carbon as monocultures. The deep roots of the Hamiltons’ native species lock carbon deep underground, where it can take hundreds or even thousands of years to return to the atmosphere.

In the years since the Hamiltons converted their fields, the use of native warm-season grasses has gained momentum in the ranching industry. The University of Tennessee — firmly in the fescue belt — opened a Center for Native Grasslands Management in 2006 aimed at getting ranchers to incorporate native warm-season grasses (known as NWSGs) into pastureland. The Missouri Department of Conservation conducts workshops to familiarize ranchers with NWSGs. Research by the native grasslands center found that pastures of native switchgrass financially outperform fescue pastures. 

And Patrick D. Keyser, the center’s director, said native grasses significantly outperform fescue in climate resiliency. Fescue, he says, wants it to be 73 degrees and rainy every other day. “Think Oregon or Scotland,” he said. Native warm-season grasses in the fescue belt, on the other hand, can go weeks with blistering heat and drought without a problem. “To them, the worst climate projections that we’re getting really aren’t a big deal. From a resiliency standpoint, they absolutely win.” 

If replacing fescue with natives is moving slowly in general, replacing it with native cool-season grasses, to get year-round forage, remains nearly unheard of. As with friendly fescue, cost is partly to blame. Elizabeth Steele’s “cowboy math” estimates that a native conversion today would cost around $365 per acre, a scary number for ranchers. Proponents of native conversion also face a more complicated obstacle than cost as they seek buy-in from ranchers. The debate over how beef cattle are raised is caught up in the culture war over climate change. By some estimates, meat production accounts for nearly 60 percent of the greenhouse gasses generated by the food system, with beef as the leading culprit. Even as the concept of “regenerative ranching,” a method of cattle farming that tries to restore degraded soil and reduce emissions, has secured a toehold in the industry, “climate change” remains a political term in farm country, one that is largely avoided.

Ranchers like Amy Hamilton risk getting marginalized as “progressives.” So while she believes diverse native grasslands will make pastures more resilient to climate change, she doesn’t mention that when proselytizing to fellow ranchers. Instead she talks about increased water infiltration, more abundant wildlife, and improved soil health — things that matter to ranchers no matter their thoughts on climate change. 

She also tells them that native conversion pencils out. Hamilton doesn’t fertilize her pastures, and she rarely uses hay, as most ranchers do to supplement their cows’ fescue diet. And Steele estimates that, because native pastures produce more forage than fescue monocultures, increased forage and resulting weight gain makes up for the initial conversion costs in less than two years. “The more you emulate natural systems, the less money you have to spend on stuff like baling machines, herbicides, toxicosis effects, and fertilizer,” she said. That extra forage also allows ranchers to feed more cows. So if a rancher wants to expand their herd size, they can either expand their fescue acreage, for $3,000 an acre, or spend $365 an acre to convert the land they already have to natives. 

Saving money matters in the fescue belt. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 60 percent of farms in Texas County, Missouri, run a deficit, and every state in the fescue belt loses money on agriculture, except for Illinois, which is largely a crop state. 

“Agriculture is so hard that if you don’t do it with your pocketbook in mind, you can cause people to go broke. I don’t want to do that,” Hamilton said. Hamilton estimates that more than 100 other fescue belt ranchers she’s in touch with are in the process of converting some or all of their pasture to native grasses. One of them, Steve Freeman, co-owns Woods Fork Cattle Company with his wife, Judy, in Hartville, Missouri. Freeman has converted 80 acres of fescue to natives, with plans to convert 180 more in three years. In total, that will make a third of his pasture diverse native grasslands.

“Almost all my inspiration has come from going to [the Hamiltons’] field days every year and seeing what this land could be,” Freeman said. For him it’s not just about eradicating fescue toxicosis, it’s about the whole suite of benefits for biodiversity, soil health, and water retention. “I realized we’re not going to get there with the grasses we have.”

Freeman notes the power imbalance between the informal effort to promote native grasses and the universities and beef industry groups that are pushing modified fescue. “There’s no money that backs this,” he said of native restoration. “The novel endophytes and those kinds of things, there’s a lot of money to be made. They’ve helped the universities. I think [Hamilton] is starting to change people’s minds, but it’s been 15 years of doing this.”

For his part, MU’s Roberts hears the subtle dig at his work. “Friends of mine in conservation groups think the university professors are hooked on fescue,” he said. “They’re not. What they’re hooked on is a long grazing season, good yield, and good quality. They’re hooked on criteria, not on a species.”

Either way, change on this scale takes time. The University of Missouri claims that 98 percent of pastures in the state are still toxic, with ranchers slowly opening up to either friendly fescue or native forage. “I’m sure there are ranchers out there that think we’re absolutely nuts,” Hamilton said. “But some of them are interested in thinking about new ways of doing things.”

As we drove out to visit her cows, we passed some of her neighbors’ fields. In one, a herd of emaciated cattle had grazed a fescue field down to stubble. In another, all but a few cows stood in the middle of a pond, trying to cool themselves on a mild, cloudy day. 

“These are good people,” Hamilton said. “They’re just trying to make a living.”