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Who's Your BFF (Bee Friendly Farmer)?
From time to time you might spot this logo on a product in a store or market. It's the mark of a bee-friendly product, produced by a Bee Friendly Farmer (BFF).
The BFF logo tells you that this product was produced by a landowner using agricultural practices that maintain and encourage the growth of pollinators. It's an easy way for farmers to show that they are aware of the stresses that lead to population declines of managed bees like honey bees, and native wild bees, a trend that is happening both locally and globally.
The logo also signifies that those farmers are doing their best to minimize such stresses on pollinators, and have met the criteria to become BFF certified and listed on the Bee Friendly Farming website :
- Offer forage (food, in the form of blooms) providing good nutrition for bees on at least 3%-6% of your land.
- Plant continuous sequences of different flowering plants throughout the growing season, especially in early spring and late autumn.
- Offer clean water for honey bees; native bees get their water from nectar.
- Provide a variety of habitat for nesting and mating, through features such as hedgerows, natural brush, bufferstrips, deadfall and bare soil that native ground-nesting pollinators can access.
- Establish a pest management plan (Integrated Pest Management) if not an organic operation, and reduce or eliminate the use of chemicals. Pesticides kill non-target bees.
Certified Bee Friendly Farmers' locations are pinned on the website's map, and farmers can buy a BFF sign for their farm.
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