When I was little — and not-so-little in high school — the only way to make the county-wide trip from our farm to the local Farm Bureau office was a series of narrow, winding back roads. I distinctly remember feeling a mix of excitement and sadness when the state started gobbling up private property to build the US-31 freeway. I wasn’t keen on the government taking people’s homes and farms for development. But the idea of safer, easier, and faster access to the entire county, not to mention Indiana, was appealing.
But the project went into hiatus for almost 20 years. The reason? In the home stretch, which would connect both the I-94/I-96 interchange with the toll road in South Bend, workers discovered rare habitat for the even-more-rare Mitchell’s satyr butterfly. Construction came to a screeching halt.
This northern stretch of US-31 became the highway to nowhere until it was recently finished and opened in late 2022. The state altered the road’s course to preserve the butterfly’s habitat. Now commuters and butterflies are able to coexist.
We’ve all heard similar stories. A new housing development shuts down because a prehistoric toad is found in a nearby creek. A once-extinct bird’s nest offers a reprieve to a condemned building. Or an exotic fish prevents workers from repairing a bridge. There’s always a dichotomy: Either we protect endangered species or we allow unbridled human interference.
But how about that word “coexist.” Maybe it’s possible for us to live our modern lives in tandem with the environment. An article recently published in BioScience highlights just how that could happen.
Here’s the situation. The North American monarch butterfly travels every summer to the northern United States where it breeds. Its populations have declined by 80 percent to 99 percent over the last 30 years, mostly due to habitat loss. The drop off is so bad, the butterfly is close to making it on the federal endangered species list, which would allow for more protections.
Conventional wisdom (pun intended) tells us that modern agriculture is to blame. After all, farmland destroys habitats and pesticides kill any remaining insects. Because, you know, butterflies are insects and insecticides target insects. So obviously the only solution is to radically change our farming practices to protect the monarchs, right?
But not so fast. Steve Bradbury, a professor of environmental toxicology at Iowa State University, works with the Monarch Conservation Consortium to find solutions for the dwindling butterfly numbers. His team reached an interesting conclusion: Farms and butterflies can coexist!
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s current policy suggests that monarch habitats should only be installed more than 100 feet from any agricultural land to protect butterflies from pesticide drift. Bradbury’s team realized that under those requirements, 38 percent of non-crop land and 84 percent of road right-of-ways in Iowa were unsuitable. That’s a lot of land!
So the ISU research team wanted to test that theory: Is all of that land really off limits? The group considered how land use and pesticide use actually influence monarch populations. It turns out that some pesticides, like the much maligned neonicotinoids, don’t kill monarch habitats adjacent to the field. And while some pesticide drift could damage caterpillars, it doesn’t impact the entire 100 foot set-off around the entire field the same way.
In other words, modern agriculture and the almost-endangered monarch butterflies can live — and thrive — side by side. In fact, doing so might just be the trick to boosting populations and keeping the butterfly off the endangered species list. And future technologies (read: CRISPR) may create conditions where farmers use fewer pesticides, allowing conservationists to install even more habitats along fields.
Say it with me: “coexist.”
Amanda Zaluckyj blogs under the name The Farmer’s Daughter USA. Her goal is to promote farmers and tackle the misinformation swirling around the U.S. food industry.
