A makeover for milkweed
Some farmers growing plant they once hated — for butterflies’ sake
For generations, North American farmers have despised milkweed and done their best to rid their lands of it. “I hate to have milkweed inmy strawberry field,” Nathalie Leonard says fromher farm by the Quebec village of Lac-duCerf.
So why does she have 60 acres of milkweed growing on purpose? It’s for the sake of butterflies— the iconic monarchs. And for a chance to turn milkweed into profit.
“Everyweed,” she says, “is only aweed because it’s in the wrong place.” Leonard and her partners in Monark, a co-operative of farmers through Quebec and into Vermont, hope milkweed nowhas found its rightful place in their fields.
Intrigued by the notion of helping to restore the sinking population of monarch butterflies— and persuaded by the stirrings of a new market— these farmers began clearing land or ripping out cash crops and turning precious acres over to a plant they’d previously seen as a nuisance.
The milkweed makeover began when researchers in Quebec transformed the plant’s silky fibers into a high-end insulation material for winter clothing and advanced other commercial uses for it, like sound insulation and absorption for oil spills. Winter coats stuffed with milkweed fiber reached outdoor retailers in 2016, fetching $800 or more apiece. The Canadian Coast Guard tried milkweed garb and liked it. And as a side benefit, the distinctive honey frommilkweed fields is prized.
Yet the company formed to process and market the fiber collapsed last year, forcing the farmers who growit to step in and try to make a go of the whole milkweed initiative. They’re on track for perhaps their best harvest in the five or so years since the milkweed experiment began, but where the fiber will go after the fall is uncertain.
The orange and black monarchs are wholly dependent on milkweed. The plant is the only host for their eggs and sole sustenance for the caterpillars, which feed on milky secretions from the leaves. Milkweed has been in rapid retreat, crowded by urban development, attacked along roadways and driven frompastoral landscapes by herbicides that spare resistant corn and soybeans.
But in recent years, as the plight of the monarchs became more pronounced, communities, schools and gardeners began planting patches of milkweed along roads and public buildings and in backyards to give the butterfly a fighting chance. A 2017 study at theUniversity of Guelph in Ontario found there’s nothing more effective in this effort than the all-you-can-eat buffet of a farmer’s field of milkweed— visible from the sky, rooted in rich soil and isolated fromtraffic and pollution.
WhenUniversity of Vermont agronomist HeatherDarby first heard of Quebec’s initiative, from aman who called looking forVermont farmers to join, shewas thrown. Milkweed is toxic to livestock— one study says it gives cows “profound depression” on the rare chance they eat it. It’s been a mark of shame on farmlands, a sign of sloppy maintenance.
After learning that hundreds of Quebec acreswere already under milkweed production, she reached out to farmers in Vermont whomshe considered innovators. Now, more than 100 farmers in Quebec and about a half dozen in Vermont are producing milkweed forMonark, of which Nathalie Leonard serves as president.
The ecological and economic promise of milkweed prompted Roger Rainville to convert 50 prime acres of his farm lining the Canadian border to milkweed several years ago.
“You get along roadsides and there’s not much fertility there. I tell farmers, if you’re going to growthis, if you try something new, do it on your best soil,” he said. Farmers fromacross the U.S. call him to ask howto get goingwith milkweed.
“What better opportunity to preserve an insect that’s just so dearly loved by so many people, so globally known,” Darby said, “but also seeing it come together with agriculture in such a beneficialway.”
It takes two or three years after planting for milkweed to flower and produce the pods bursting with fluff. Once established, they can be irrepressible.
On her Lac-du-Cerf farm, Leonard will have her first harvest this autumn, her second year after planting. She’ll pick the pods by hand because noway has been devised to harvest them mechanically while preserving the long, wide fibers essential for fine clothing, the lucrative end of the market.
It’s a short harvest, about threeweeks, making for a labor-intensive, inefficient process, and a bottleneck producers must overcome if they are tomake a milkweed industry take root.
“We are really pioneers,” Leonard said.“We could lose it all. That’s howit works. You always need dreamers and people who are stubborn enough to keep going when people say it’s time to stop.”
The monarch population is cleaved by the Rockies: Those east of the mountains winter inMexico by the tens of millions, while much smaller numbers in theWest migrate to California. It’s one of nature’s miracle migrations as the insect ranges over as many as 3,400 miles, in a round trip that takes several generations to complete.
Mexican officials reported inMarch that the wintering monarchs, clumped tightly in trees, covered 6.1 acres last winter, a decline of 15 percent blamed in part on brutal storms that season. The butterflies covered more than five times that territory 20 years ago.
Nowthe cycle continues: On Rainville’s farm, monarch eggs have been spotted on the leaves.
He andDarby have seen the butterflies come in higher numbers, and they anticipate more each year as the pathway becomes better known through butterfly “signaling.” Such increases have been reported in Quebec, where milkweed farming got an earlier start.
Over coming months, the monarchs will get their fill, find their wings and flutter away south, setting up the harvest for the milkweed they leave behind. It’s a fraught journey— for the insects in their against-theodds flight, and for the farmers trying to help them and make a buck.