Agriculture is the dominant land use within the monarch butterfly’s midwestern summer breeding range. Privately-owned farmland provides the single largest opportunity to create the widely distributed patchwork of habitat needed to grow monarch populations. Field buffers, ditch banks, farmsteads, private roadways, and unproductive areas of farms all offer potential sites for various species of milkweed and other forbs needed to sustain not only monarchs but also the multiple bee species needed to pollinate many crops.

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