Word: californianess
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...credit binge that made the modern U.S. look prudent. The stock market took off into the stratosphere, and property prices got so out of control that it was said the land on which the Imperial Palace sat in the center of Tokyo was worth more than the whole of California. Then the bubble burst, banks found that their balance sheets were full of bad loans, and Japan entered a lost decade of stagnant economic growth. Nearly 20 years after its peak in December 1989, when the Nikkei index nearly hit 39,000, the stock market has never come close...
...white boxes parked in California's almond orchards this time of year are easy to spot. Stacked in sets of four or six, they squat between dead-straight rows of trees awash in blossoms. (A walk through an almond orchard in early March is not unlike a stroll past a department-store perfume counter.) From afar, the boxes look as if they might provide a weary farmer a place to sit or store his tools. But get close enough under the right conditions--dry, above 55°, no more than a light breeze--and you can hear...
Almonds are a huge business in California's Central Valley; the state's 660,000 nut-producing acres are responsible for some 90% of the world's crop. Every almond we eat is the result of multiple acts of pollination; without a massive number of bees to flit among the blossoms, growers say, almond trees would produce scarcely a tenth as many nuts. That's why, every February, more than a million beehives--with a total of some 20 billion bees--are shipped in on flatbed trucks from all over the country. (Video: TIME visits the buzzing almond orchards...
...sweet, symbiotic relationship: the annual pilgrimage keeps California's $2.2 billion almond industry ticking and is a huge moneymaker for more than half the country's commercial beekeepers. But this year, some worry that relationship is starting to sour. Driven by surging global demand, California's almond growers have doubled acreage since 1981, forcing them to lean heavily on imported bees from as far away as Vermont. Drive along the unlined roads around Hughson, and it's easy to find 10 different almond farmers renting hives from 10 different states. Orin Johnson, whose family has been keeping bees around Hughson...
Consequently, California's almond growers are getting stung. Dave Phippen, a partner in his family's farm in nearby Manteca, just paid $150 per hive to a Texas supplier. "If we didn't put any bees out here, I think we'd have a crop failure," he says, "and I'm not about to learn." Three years of record yields have depressed almond prices to half their peak; many growers will be lucky to break even this year. Meanwhile, a drought led Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a state of emergency on Feb. 27. Some almond farmers didn't even...