Illinois Monarch Project launches website
20-year revival plan has role for everyone, from farmers to city gardeners, as ‘every milkweed stem counts’
Two monarch butterflies feed on a flower during their long migration from Canada to Mexico. (Shutterstock)
By Ted Cox
A 20-year plan to revive monarch butterflies and other endangered pollinators in Illinois is taking the campaign high-tech.
The Illinois Monarch Project, led by state agricultural groups and agencies, announced a 20-year plan to benefit monarchs butterflies a year ago that set a goal to plant 150 million stems of milkweed statewide by 2038.
The project has now launched a new website urging Illinoisans to “be the super generation that saves the monarchs.” Timed to coincide with National Pollinator Week, this week, it suggests the different ways farmers, city residents, and other state residents can all play a part in bolstering the monarch population, which has been dwindling in recent years.
The website points out: “It takes two or three generations of butterflies to migrate from the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico, to the prairies of Illinois in the spring months. By late summer, a ‘super generation’ emerges, equipped to travel an estimated 2,500 miles back to Mexico for overwintering.”
The project has set that goal of planting milkweed, essential to monarchs as it provides food for their caterpillars, and nectar as a food source for adults as they migrate over 3,000 miles to and from their winter grounds in Mexico. But it has also urged farmers not to plow land sustaining wildflowers, and for the Illinois Department of Transportation to also allow wildflowers to grow along state roads and highways.
Environmentalists have called for monarchs to be declared an endangered species, setting off mandatory methods to sustain and grow the population, but the Trump administration moved a year ago to put off a decision on the matter until later this year, after the presidential election in November.
Created following a Monarch Butterfly Summit held in Springfield in 2016, the project includes groups like the Illinois Farm Bureau, the Illinois Corn Growers Association, the Illinois Soybean Association, Illinois Milk Producers, and Illinois Pork Producers, as well as state agencies like the Department of Agriculture, with the state Departments of Natural Resources and Transportation and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency also involved.
Environmentalists, however, have taken issue with the agricultural groups’ support, insisting farmers can do more to benefit monarchs and charging that pesticides continue to damage the butterfly population along with other pollinators like bees. Farmers have countered that sustaining pollinators is in their best interests, as they’re critical to flowering crops.
The IFB cheered the new website this week and repeated that farmers have a key role to play in sustaining monarchs. “Pollinators are essential to our food system and the environment,” Lauren Lurkins, IFB director of environmental policy, told FarmWeekNow.com. “The resources provided by the Illinois Monarch Project can help our farmers continue to play an important role in supporting pollinator health.”
Lurkins applauded the way the new website “shows the big picture of conservation efforts across the state, and it is encouraging to know our farmers are doing their part in this initiative.”
The website urges that “farmers’ futures depend on thriving pollinator populations. While agriculture industry specialists support the future of monarchs through sound science and research, outreach and education practitioners work closely with the agricultural community to share and encourage best practices for conserving, enhancing, and creating monarch habitat.” It touts that an Agriculture in the Classroom initiative has instructed more than 100,000 students about pollinators and what can be done to their benefit through 5,000 teachers statewide.
But it also informs individuals that “whether you have a few pots on a porch, or acres of sprawling land, every Illinois resident plays a part in the regeneration of this vital pollinator. Every milkweed stem counts. Every nectar-producing wildflower brings the monarch one step closer to survival. Pledge now and make a difference from your own backyard.” It boasts that last year alone more than 2,000 Illinois monarch way stations were registered through the national Monarch Watch website.