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Mac Ehrhardt often feels like he has one leg on either side of a barbed-wire fence.

On one side stand the farmers who have bought seed from his family’s business for three generations, and who rely religiously on insecticides to protect their crops. On the other is Ehrhardt’s growing conviction that southern Minnesota’s two-tone landscape of corn and soybeans has become a barren and toxic place for a crucial player in the nation’s food system – the honeybee.

Ehrhardt’s uncomfortable position at the Albert Lea Seed Company reflects the powerful role that farmers could play in the plight of the bees. Though they represent just 2 percent of Minnesota’s population, farmers control half its land. And their embrace of the monocultures and pesticides that form the basis of modern industrial agriculture has been implicated in the decline of bees and pollinators.

But as long as farmers sit at the receiving end of an agri-chemical pipeline that fuels the nation’s rural economy, not much is likely to change, he said.

“No one in this county is getting paid for growing bee-friendly corn,” Ehrhardt said. Organic farmers might ask why use chemicals at all, he added. “I respect that. But out here in farm country, that’s not what’s happening.”

The modern farmer

Gary Schrad, one of Ehrhardt’s customers, doesn’t farm the way his father did.

There was a time when farmers would plant their crop, harvest it, and then save some of the seed – or buy a neighbor’s seed – to plant the next year’s crop.

Not anymore.