Proposed Monarch Butterfly Endangered Species Listing Could Impact Farmers | Conservation and Renewable Energy News

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposed protection of the monarch butterfly as threatened under the Endangered Species Act could have ramifications for farmers.

Following more than a decade of pressure from environmental groups, the service announce on Dec. 10 the decision to list the butterfly and is seeking public comment until March 25.

With their distinct orange and black markings, monarchs fall into two migratory groups in North America. The eastern monarch is the largest and overwinters in the mountains of central Mexico. The western monarch mainly overwinters in coastal California.

The eastern migratory population is estimated to have declined by approximately 80% and the western population by 95%.

Habitat loss connected to the monarch’s primary food source, milkweed, is of primary concern.

“One of the items that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is looking for public comment on is whether there should be any included exceptions for the uses of pesticides and, if so, what measures are reasonable and adequate to offset pesticide exposure from agricultural and non-agricultural uses,” said City of Cambridge Ranger Tim Puopolo, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee who has worked on monarch restoration and educational programs in Massachusetts for the past decade.

The Endangered Species Act affords extensive protections to species the wildlife service lists as endangered or threatened. Under the act, it’s illegal to import, export, possess, transport or kill an endangered species. A threatened listing allows for exceptions to those protections.

The proposed monarch listing would generally prohibit anyone from killing or transporting the butterfly. Residents and farmers could continue to remove milkweed from gardens, backyards and fields but would be prohibited from making changes to the land that make it permanently unusable for the species.

Puopolo considers the monarch’s decline a canary in a coal mine.

“Every generation, there’s some big thing,” he said. “When they found out about the DDT with Rachel Carson, that was a huge turning point in the U.S. EPA and fish and wildlife.”

The feds hope to have the monarch formally listed by the end of 2025 along with a set of measures to mitigate its decline.

“Things may include sort of offset lands where if there’s any new expansion of agriculture, there may potentially be restoration involved,” Puopolo said. “There may be one corner that as area is cleared — forest to agriculture — it’s possible that through this Endangered Species Act, part of that cleared forest may be restored into support of a non-agricultural use, meadow, and have that conjoining so that there’s sort of net gain in meadow regardless of other uses.”

Puopolo understands why some farmers are not particularly fond of milkweed.

“If milkweed is in your corn field, it’s not corn. If milkweed is in your soybean field, it’s not soybeans.”

“It’s not even good for grazing animals, so ranching doesn’t want them either, because the latex inside the milkweed is there to prevent grazing.”

Ironically, he said, it’s the latex the monarchs need to survive.

“Because without that toxic latex, they won’t be poisonous as adults,” Puopolo said. “They need to eat that as a caterpillar. … They’re not born poisonous. They have to include these toxins into their tissues as they grow up.”

Being poisonous allows the monarchs to safely migrate, he said.

“If they weren’t poisonous, one flock of blue jays or crows could wipe out half the migration. They need that protection to make it from New England to Mexico and everywhere.”

While the monarch’s departure as a species might not be as significant as something like bee colony collapse, Puopolo said, it serves as a guidepost for avoiding such catastrophes.

“The loss of this butterfly isn’t so much the loss of just this butterfly,” he said. “The monarch butterfly is a delicate and fragile species. It’s one of our only migratory insects, but certainly the only migratory insect in the Northeast and North America. And because of that, it needs everything to be right.”

If something is out of whack across the North American continent, Puopolo said, it will show up first in the monarch butterfly.

“So, the idea is if we can hold the line and not lose the monarch, we can potentially not lose these other, more crucial elements,” he said.

Milkweed Market Potential

Today, kids in education programs like those hosted by Puopolo are encouraged to collect milkweed pods for habitat restoration.

During World War II, schoolchildren were recruited to collect milkweed floss, a naturally buoyant and water-repellent fiber, to fill life jackets for soldiers.

“And there was a factory that was built in Michigan to make these life preservers,” said Heather Darby, an agronomist and soil specialist with University of Vermont Extension.

A few years back, Darby was contacted by an entrepreneur and group of farmers from Quebec looking to grow milkweed as a commercially viable crop.

“They were starting to grow milkweed as a fiber crop and primarily to harvest the floss from the milkweed plant to be used in a variety of textile products,” she said.

“They were interested in possibly having farmers grow milkweed in the U.S., close to them, partly because they knew that there would be a big demand in the United States.”

Darby and her colleagues published the results of their milkweed production trials in 2019, noting that the Natural Resources Conservation Service had developed an incentive program to compensate landowners for establishing perennial monarch habitat, including planting milkweed.

“The silky fiber (floss) from the milkweed plant has a wide variety of oil/chemical absorbent and clothing applications,” read the abstract for the production trials.

“The floss has insulative properties similar to goose down due to its unique hollow fiber structure which also makes it incredibly light. Furthermore, the floss is equipped with a natural water-repellent waxy coating that allows it to be waterproof while absorbing hydrophobic liquids such as petroleum products.”

At the end of the day, the Quebec group abandoned its project due to a lack of viable, large-scale harvesting options.

“It has great potential,” Darby said. “But I think like other natural fibers outside of cotton, any kind of investment infrastructure — you can look to hemp, or you can look to flax — basically any other natural fiber besides cotton and see where there just hasn’t been really any investment.”

To submit public comment on the proposed monarch butterfly listing, go to regulations.gov.