Research Fellow — Managed Honey Bees

Fairer Fields is a new organization that works to make agriculture more humane for all by accelerating better agricultural practices for animals, people, and the world. We are currently:

• Researching and implementing more humane insecticides and insecticide alternatives.
• Conducting research to identify promising new ways to help animals and people impacted by plant agriculture, especially in areas such as pollination services, biological control, and mechanized harvesting.

We’re hiring a Research Fellow for a 1-year role to explore promising interventions in pollination services and honey production to improve the welfare of managed honey bees. Their role will be to explore the viability of potential interventions including possibilities that are bottlenecked on further scientific research. If successful the Fellow will have the opportunity to convert into a permanent role leading a coordinated research program and intervention development project to bring the intervention to deployment.

The Fellow will have unusual latitude to define the development of this field, direct meaningful research funding toward questions they think matter, and if the work goes well, build and run the program that follows.

Fairer Fields works to address the impacts of plant agriculture on animal and human welfare. Our current focus is on moving US agriculture to more humane insecticide practices. We also conduct and fund prioritization and scientific research on other topics, such as mechanized harvesting, pollination services, and biological control.

Fairer Fields is small: we have 6 staff, and we expect to remain under 15 total staff for the next year. We have a culture that fosters individual agency and accountability, with a high degree of focus on near-term, specific goals. As you progress through the hiring process, we’ll share more about the culture we’re working to build as an organization, and the working norms we follow.

The Research Fellow’s core responsibility is exploring possible interventions in commercial pollination services and honey production. These interventions will specifically target challenges faced by managed honey bees, to improve farm productivity and animal welfare.

Commercial pollination is one of the largest insect industries, in terms of animals impacted, and encompasses a wide range of potential stressors for bees, including thermal stress, increased exposure to agricultural fungicides and insecticides, and heightened exposure to pathogens and parasites. Routine practice includes long-distance transport, supplemental feeding, miticide treatment, colony splitting, and queen replacement. Our interest is in the welfare of these bees, and how these questions intersect with farmer agency and agricultural productivity — whether these practices cause harm we should care about, whether alternatives exist, and whether anyone could be persuaded to adopt them.

We take seriously the possibility that for some of these, the answer is “no,” and part of the Fellow’s job is to find out if that’s the case.

In this role you’ll:

• Conduct desk research on potential interventions, and develop ideas for new interventions.
• Meet with external experts in pollination services and brokering, beekeeping, and entomology to seek their input and feedback.
• Ultimately, produce internal reports and models on the viability of potential pollination services interventions to inform Fairer Fields’ prioritization.

Following the Fellowship, conditional on promising interventions being identified, the Fellow may have the opportunity to convert into a permanent role leading a coordinated research program to take the most promising interventions forward, or running a delivery program to apply them in the field.…