Monarch Migration Moral Mess

There’s a lot of milkweed growing in our pastures. It’s really dry and not much is thriving out there–except milkweed. Every week, more and more plants pop out of the ground.

This presents me with a moral quandary.

Milkweed is good, right? Remember the monarch caterpillars you raised in kindergarten from eggs to full grown lepidoptera, all because you had some milkweed handy?

Yes, those charismatic orange and black butterflies that fly the 2300 miles from the Shenandoah Valley to the Michoacan forests in Mexico every fall need milkweed to raise their caterpillars, and they need nectar-rich flowering plants to give them the energy they need for the trip. And we’re happy to have lots of native plants and flowers on our farm to support them in their epic migration.

So where do monarchs and milkweed become a moral mess?

About 20 acres of milkweed-dotted land is growing hay (in addition to thistle, burdock, catchweed, pokeweed, and various other undesirables). The hay is weedy, low-quality stuff that’s full of things in addition to grass.

Milkweed is necessary to the lifecycle of monarchs. Milkweed is also toxic to livestock. The farmer managing the hay and milkweed fields doesn’t pay rent but trades in hay for the use of the fields. This milkweed-laced hay is what will feed our goats through the winter. It’s what my husband’s cousin has been feeding his horses for the years we were gone. Theoretically, it’s what the farmer is feeding his own dairy cows.

And it will be full of a toxic plant, which even when dry, can kill an animal that eats enough of it.

And the toxic plants will be full of monarch eggs and caterpillars when it’s cut!

The toxins reside in the milky, sticky substance that oozes out of milkweed when you cut it. Many insects leave milkweed alone or risk getting gummed up in its “milk.” So how do monarchs manage the nasty stuff? They’re immune to the toxins and in fact become toxic themselves, which is a clever disincentive to birds and other predators that might eat them. Their bright orange coloring is a warning sign–Caution! Poison Inside!!

Somehow, we need to get the milkweed out of the pastures and keep it confined to the pollinator gardens, without spraying a lot of pesticides, which will kill the pollinators we are trying to host. The eternal farming dilemma.

Not only monarchs love milkweed. Yesterday I followed two monarchs to a milkweed patch to see if I could get a good photo of them, and found these other critters as well.

Please help me out with identification. I have an app on my phone called Picture This, which works great for plants. Where do you go to ID bugs?

I know what the last one is–Japanese Beetles, which have been eating peaches down to the pit on a nearby tree. We’ve doused the tree several times with a spray of diatomaceous earth and water. The beetles have disappeared from the tree, which looks like it’s there out of season, graced with a white dusting of snow. But apparently some beetles have survived and moved on to other edibles.

Maybe the milkweed toxins will get them.