Foraging at Scale: The Myth of “Leave It for the Bees”
For years we’ve heard the same thing:
'You can’t forage at scale.'
And whenever Dandelions are involved, the next comment usually follows close behind:
'But what about the bees?'
Both are fair questions. But after nearly 12 years of commercial foraging, I can confidently say that most people making those claims have never actually tried it.
This spring we harvested enough Dandelion flowers to produce 17,000 jars of our new Dandelion and Apple vegan honey alternative. Seven people picked for two days across two fields, gathering around 240kg of flowers in total.
That sounds enormous when written down. It sounds industrial - unsustainable, perhaps.
But here’s the reality: Dandelion flowers weigh roughly one gram each, meaning we harvested approximately 240,000 flowers from hillsides absolutely carpeted in bloom. After each day’s picking, you could barely tell we had been there at all. The flowers stretched for what felt like miles across rolling hills, thick between every footstep, extending far beyond the areas we harvested.
The video from day two only shows a fraction of it. On day one we were working over the ridge in the next field entirely, still surrounded by an overwhelming abundance of Dandelions.
That abundance matters.
Because the real conversation shouldn’t simply be about whether humans harvest wild plants. The far more important question is: how is the land being managed in the first place?
Standing in those fields, the contrast was impossible to ignore. Around the Dandelion-rich pasture were fields almost completely devoid of wild flowers. Sterile grass. No diversity. No visible food source for pollinators at all.
That is what truly impacts biodiversity.
Land management determines whether wildlife thrives or disappears. A field managed with space for wildflowers, insects, birds, and diverse plant life can support both nature and responsible harvesting. In fact, those things are not opposites. They can exist together remarkably well.
I care deeply about wildlife — probably to an unhealthy degree if I’m honest. I would never knowingly damage an ecosystem for the sake of producing a product. But I also think we need to move beyond the simplistic idea that any human interaction with wild landscapes is automatically harmful.
Foraging, when done thoughtfully and with restraint, can sit comfortably within a healthy ecosystem. Humans have harvested from landscapes for thousands of years. The problem is not harvesting itself. The problem is extraction without stewardship.
Within farmland managed for biodiversity, it is entirely possible to harvest fruits, flowers, herbs, and other wild crops while still leaving more than enough for pollinators and wildlife. Sometimes the very presence of those species is evidence that the land is already healthier than the alternatives surrounding it.
We’re never going to supply every major supermarket in the country, and honestly that’s fine by us. Scale does not always have to mean industrial monoculture. There is room for smaller, regional food systems built around seasonal abundance and careful harvesting.
And perhaps that’s the bigger point.
People often assume that “wild” means fragile and untouchable, while industrial agriculture is viewed as the only realistic way to feed people at scale. Yet standing among miles of thriving Dandelions, while neighbouring fields sat ecologically silent, it becomes clear that abundance and biodiversity are not enemies.
Sometimes they grow side by side.