Whether you have acres of farmland to work with, like my guest this week, Jane Breckinridge of Euchee Butterfly Farm, or just a balcony garden, you can do your part to reverse butterfly decline. Jane joins me to share the amazing things the farm and its related nonprofit are accomplishing and to inspire listeners to spray less and plant more.
Jane is the director of the Euchee Butterfly Farm located in Leonard, Oklahoma, and an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She has spent the last 20 years raising and exhibiting butterflies throughout the United States and Canada, as well as providing community and youth education on butterflies. In 2013, Jane founded Natives Raising Natives, which is teaching rural tribal members to be butterfly farmers. She is the co-director of Tribal Environmental Action for Monarchs and Tribal Alliance for Pollinators, which partner with Monarch Watch and Native American tribes to restore habitat on tribal lands.
“ This is the time that we all need to get engaged with this,” Jane says. “It used to be that there was maybe the luxury of ‘this is somebody else’s problem.’ That time is past. We’re truly at a crossroads. And even if you live in a high-rise apartment and whatever, on the 45th floor, you can put those pots of zinnias out there and they will be found and they will be used. Because we’re losing over a million acres every year of monarch habitat just to development. If we’re just going to try and keep even, there’s so much work that has to be done.”
Jane Breckinridge, founder of Euchee Butterfly Farm and the Tribal Alliance for Pollinators. (Photo: Courtesy of Jane Breckinridge)
Amy Prentice, my Director of Marketing and Communications, lives in Oklahoma not far from Euchee Butterfly Farm, and she introduced me to the important work that Jane is doing after signing up for a tour of the farm at Euchee Butterfly Farm and meeting Euchee’s conservation botanist Collin Spriggs. Amy also met Euchee representatives at the Tulsa State Fair who taught her how she can attract native pipevine swallowtail butterflies to her garden with the right plants.
Before jumping into my conversation with Jane, I want to take a moment to remind you that on Wednesday, September 30, I will host “Death in the Garden: Why Your Fall Cleanup Might Be Killing What You’re Trying to Protect” with landscape ecologist, researcher and author Shaun McCoshum, Ph.D. Shaun will show you how to read your garden’s dead and dying vegetation like a habitat map — and how to manage or redesign your space so it looks intentional, not neglected, while doing dramatically more for local wildlife. Registration is $25 plus taxes and fees, and the program will begin at noon Eastern.
The Origin of Euchee Butterfly Farm
The Euchee Butterfly Farm has existed in its present incarnation since 2012, but the land has been in Jane’s family for generations. It was her great-grandmother’s land.
“ This land was her Native American Indian allotment from 1899,” Jane shares. “Her father was born on the Trail of Tears during removal from the homelands. She was deeded this land — 160 acres — as settlement when they were taking away the Indian Nations here in Oklahoma and making way for the state. … She received this when she was 16. It was held onto with a lot of sacrifice over the years. The entire 160 acres are still in family hands. It’s the last intact allotment land in Tulsa County, actually.”
It was a farm, she was a widow, and the land was everything to her, Jane says. “ It was sacred really.”
“She passed those values and those lands down to my grandmother and my grandmother’s sister, and then they passed it down to their daughters, and now it’s our generation that has it.”
Jane says knowing that the land was held onto through great sacrifices for 120-plus years means that they take seriously their responsibility to make the land worthy of those sacrifices.
The farm sits on Jane Breckinridge’s great-grandmother’s original allotment land. 14 acres of original native prairie remain protected here, the last remnant of that size in Tulsa County. (Photo: Courtesy of Jane Breckinridge)
“Starting a butterfly farm may not seem like a natural jump from point A to B for a lot of people on that particular situation,” she acknowledges. “… We have tried to incorporate my great-grandmother’s values and her people’s values, and to be able to do this in a 21st century way to make it meaningful.”
Included in the 160 acres are 14 acres of true original native prairie, the last of its size in Tulsa County.
“ There are many species there that were thought extirpated from Oklahoma, decades ago,” Jane says.
She says she thinks about how much it would mean to her great-grandmother — the work being done to protect those species, to embrace and uplift the community. Plus the fact that the Euchee language is spoken on a daily basis on the farm.
A monarch caterpillar statue at Euchee Butterfly Farm. (Photo: Courtesy of Jane Breckinridge)
Butterfly Farming
“Butterfly farming, it is a real thing,” Jane says. “It’s not just some kind of hippie hobby, although that would be something that would totally be in my wheelhouse.”
Butterfly farming is regulated by the USDA.
“Other people have livestock that are hogs or cattle or goats, and I’m just very fortunate because my livestock are these gorgeous butterflies and these very adorable caterpillars that we work with.”
She’s been butterfly farming for more than 30 years now, but it was her husband who raised butterflies first. He had a Christmas tree farm that he had inherited from his family in Western Wisconsin.
“At that time, the herbicide they used killed everything except for Christmas trees and milkweed. And so it was 80 acres of rows of Christmas trees with Asclepias syriaca, the common milkweed, just everywhere.”
Milkweed is the only host plant of monarch butterfly caterpillars.
“We just started collecting monarch caterpillars for fun,” Jane recalls. “It’s out in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin. And that was just really, really fun for us. And we’d raise them out in a 10-gallon terrarium.”
Somebody came over one time and said, “You know, you can actually sell those things.”
It was the early 1990s. Europe had butterfly flight houses for a while by then, but there were only a few in the United States. As the market was emerging, her husband began selling chrysalides out of the back of birding magazines.
“And then we were walking through the Minnesota State Fair, because we lived up in Minnesota at the time. And I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we put up a tent and filled it with butterflies and people could walk through?’ And he’s like, ‘That’s a crazy idea.’ Anyway, we just finished our 30th year at the Minnesota State Fair and put over 92,000 people through that thing. So yeah, it was evidently not a crazy idea.”
A crowd of newly hatched pipevine swallowtail caterpillars. These quickly dwindled to just a few survivors, a reminder that caterpillars are an important part of the food web, too. (Photo Credit: Amy Prentice)
Jane could see from the early years that much work needs to be done to not only educate people about species at risk but also to empower them to be able to take action and engage them in that conversation.
“When we’re out there at fairs and people are interacting with these butterflies, maybe people didn’t know they were conservationists,” she says. “Maybe they never really knew that they were passionate about butterflies. And let’s face it, nowadays so many people don’t see butterflies. They’re not there. A lot of people are urban. And people can be in there with the butterflies all over them in the exhibit and you can tell them, if we don’t get busy and do what we need to do, in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years these species that you’re sitting there admiring and engaging with, they’re going to be gone forever.
“And I don’t care who it is. It can be the biggest, scariest-looking biker dude. It can be somebody who you think, ‘Wow, I think this guy is maybe somebody who’s not really a conservation-minded sort of fella.’”
Being in that tent with those butterflies makes conservationists out of them.
“That’s what I see over and over and over again,” Jane says. “So for us, the most powerful ambassadors really for this work about conservation and protecting species at risk and empowering people to do that are the butterflies themselves. And getting them out there to engage with people is how we do that.”
She says it’s easy to read bad news, doom scroll, and feel depressed.
“It’s very easy to tune it out, and it’s easy to tune out lectures about threats to biodiversity and habitat fragmentation. And when you’re in with those butterflies and they’re all over you, and you’re actually there face to face and you’re feeding them with a little Q-tip, it changes the equation. So for me, yes, I am very much about butterfly farming as sustainable economic development, particularly for native people. But for me, it is a conduit to doing something else that we hope to achieve with our work.”
Inside the Euchee Butterfly Farm flight house, monarchs flutter around a waterfall and stone garden, creating an immersive, up-close butterfly experience for visitors. (Photo: Courtesy of Jane Breckinridge)
Natives Raising Natives
The Natives Raising Natives Project has three primary goals: Create economic development for Native Americans through butterfly farming; provide a hands-on learning opportunity that teaches Native American youth about agriculture, conservation and science; and raise awareness about the need for habitat conservation efforts that support native butterflies and other threatened pollinators.
The nonprofit is based at Euchee Butterfly Farm and is modeled after a similar initiative in Costa Rica.
“ There was an organization we were working with in Costa Rica where Indigenous people there were set up with training equipment and supplies to raise butterflies in their own land as an alternative to logging off rainforest. And then the profits from that go back into actually replanting rainforest,” Jane says.
Her husband, an economics major, saw the potential in doing the same training program in Oklahoma on the allotment land.
“So with our people here on the Muscogee Nation reservation, we provide training, equipment, supplies, and all the support, all of everything, so that they can raise these butterflies on their own land,” Jane says.
She points out that allotments in the southern part of the reservation are not very suitable for traditional farming, though the Muscogee were traditionally agrarian people.
“But with butterfly farming, you’re working with nature instead of against nature,” she says. “It’s all about replanting those host plants and growing that out and reconnecting with that natural world.”
She’s also seen that it has been a cool way to get kids excited about science.
“ Natives Raising Natives, it is our core program, but so many other things have come out of it.”
Through Natives Raising Natives, participants receive hands-on training in butterfly conservation, native plants and habitat restoration. (Photo: Courtesy of Jane Breckinridge)
Protecting Beauty in the Natural World
“ It doesn’t matter who they are or what their educational level is or background is, all of us are saddened, I think, to see things of beauty like butterflies disappearing in our natural world,” Jane says.
Butterfly decline, and insect decline in general, is one of those situations that is comparable to a frog sitting in a slowly boiling pot of water.
“It’s all happening gradually, and we’re not jumping out,” Jane says.
Fortunately, monarch butterfly decline, for one, has been perceivable.
“ Monarchs, we notice when hundreds of millions of them went disappearing,” she says. The population went from 900 million in the fall of 1996 to 43 million by the fall of 2013 — the all-time lowest.
“ Monarchs and other butterflies, they’re really the canaries in the coal mines for what’s happening for all of our native pollinators, particularly our native bees,” Jane notes.
“ Everything that we can do to get people excited about butterfly conservation is multiplicative because it also helps protect so many other species at risk. And people want to do something about it. People do care about it. What they just need are the tools and training and information to get off the couch, stop doom scrolling, and get out there and do something.”
According to a USDA map, Oklahoma falls right in the middle of the critical zones for saving monarch migration in the Eastern United States.
Monarchs gather on native milkweed inside the butterfly flight house. (Photo: Courtesy of Jane Breckinridge)
“We are also unfortunately the spot on the migratory path that has the most degraded habitat,” Jane says, “We’ve lost over 96% of our native grasslands in Oklahoma, which is where our beautiful wildflowers and milkweeds are typically found to support those populations.”
Fortunately, she has met many Indigenous people who want to be part of the solution.
“ We knew through Natives Raising Natives that there was a commitment from the tribes to try and do something about this,” she says. “… I never once had a tribal leader ask me why we needed to save monarchs. The only question was how.”
The tribes came together around 2014 to do this, starting with seven tribes in partnership with Monarch Watch.
“We were really lucky early on to have Dr. Chip Taylor — who was the founder of Monarch Watch, the inventor of Monarch Waystation — come on board with this program,” Jane says. “And one of the first things he said was, ‘Yeah, this is very great. It’s very cool to have created a monarch migration path on tribal lands through Oklahoma, but you are going to be limited by the capacity issue. You simply do not have the capacity in Oklahoma to do this sort of work.”
Chip explained: “You have got to have locally sourced native seeds both for the forbs and also the milkweeds. And because they’re not available, you’re going to have to start a seed bank.”
He became their technical director, and that’s what they did.
“ We created the first intertribal seed bank in Oklahoma with 153 species. And halfway through that initial project, there was so much more interest and such a demand for the information, that capacity-building work we were doing, that we founded the Tribal Alliance for Pollinators, or TAP, which since then has grown to be the largest native-led grassland restoration organization in North America. TAP has the largest native plant seed bank with 283 species in it, so many of which are not found elsewhere in captivity, and it’s free for any tribe or tribal member to use.”
They grow out seeds and get grant money so access to funds will not be an impediment to land restoration.
Observing pipevine swallowtail butterflies in Amy’s garden sparked a question at the Tulsa State Fair that would eventually lead her to discover its caterpillars living on native pipevine near her home along the Arkansas River. (Photo Credit: Amy Prentice)
Supporting Butterflies in Your Garden and Beyond
“ If you can do nothing else, declaring a non-toxic zone in not only your yard, but the other places you frequent, whether it’s your church or your kid’s school, the shopping mall,” Jane says.
Pesticides will kill the butterflies and other pollinators that you are trying to encourage.
“ Don’t lure them in and kill them, please,” Jane begs. “That makes me sad.”
Pesticide drift on a windy day can carry pesticides far, with devastating consequences.
“ We had a problem one year at the butterfly farm with a pecan operation that was spraying on a day with 25 mile an hour winds, and literally the drift came over and killed every butterfly in our place,” Jane recalls.
Put in nectar plants that will also support bees and hummingbirds. Pick a variety of plants to provide continuous blooms from spring to fall.
“ I’m a big advocate of native plants, obviously. But we also have non-natives at the farm, too. And it’s just a matter of knowing what non-natives have high nectar value to support other species,” Jane says.
When planning a butterfly garden it’s not enough to think about adult butterflies — think about the caterpillars and what they need to eat.
“Every butterfly or moth has four life stages: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, adult,” Jane points out. “During that caterpillar stage of life, the larval stage, they’re going to increase their mass by over 2,000 times in less than two weeks. The caloric demands are huge, and they gotta have something to eat.”
Butterfly caterpillars need specific host plants, like milkweed for monarchs, spicebush for spicebush swallowtails and pinevine for pinevine swallowtails.
Jane says Dr. James Hung, a native bee specialist at the University of Oklahoma, gets asked a lot, “Is it true if you build it, they will come?”
He says, “I can’t guarantee you if you build it you, they will come. But I can guarantee you if you don’t build it, they won’t come.”
Local native plant societies and farmers markets are better bets for native plants and plants that have not been treated with neonicotinoids than big box stores. Most states have native plant societies with valuable resources for identifying your local native plants.
Amy adds that native grasses should not be overlooked as valuable host plants.
“ I’ve recently discovered some of our native Oklahoma grasses, like the gramas and things like that,” she says. “And they’re so easy to start from seed, and they support butterflies that you may not be thinking of, like little skippers. They’re not as big and flashy as our monarchs and our amazing swallowtails, but there’s a lot of other little bitty, tiny butterflies out there, and their host plants are grasses that are native, that we have lost in our prairies.”
Two of the survivors from that original crowd of tiny caterpillars, growing quickly on Dutchman’s pipevine in Amy’s garden. (Photo Credit: Amy Prentice)
Resources for Finding Native Plants for Your Region
- National Park Service Native Pollinator Garden Recipe Cards by Region
- Native Plant Societies by State/Region
- National Wildlife Federation Native Plant Finder
- Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Native Plant Database
- Xerces Society Pollinator-Friendly Native Plant Lists
- Pollinator Partnership Ecoregional Planting Guides
- Pollinator Partnership Find Your Roots Native Plant Tool
- Cooperative Extension Offices by State
A pipevine swallowtail caterpillar feasts on Dutchman’s pipe that Amy grew in her own garden specifically to provide a host plant for the species. (Photo Credit: Amy Prentice)
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jane Breckinridge on butterfly farming and native plant restoration. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by clicking the Play button on the green bar near the top of this post.
What do you do to support butterflies? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Episode 023: Attracting and Protecting Pollinators with Eric Mader
Episode 103: How to Create a Backyard Meadow: Simple Steps for Success No Matter the Space
Episode 230: Monarch Rx: The Prescription for Healthier Butterflies
Episode 234: Converting Lawn Into Meadow
Episode 262: Garden for Wildlife: Accessing the Right Native Plants, with the NWF
Episode 331: The Ecological Garden Blueprint: 10 Essential Steps That Matter Most
Episode 354: How Pesticide Regulations Fail Pollinators, with the Xerces Society
Episode 374: The Insect Crisis: How Losing the Little Things Creates Big Problems
September 30th webinar: “Death in the Garden: Why Your Fall Cleanup Might Be Killing What You’re Trying to Protect”
Fall Gardening Masterclass – Get access to the webinar replay for $20.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
NativeButterflies.org – Euchee Butterfly Farm
ebfLearningCenter.org – The Learning Center at the Euchee Butterfly Farm
TribalAllianceForPollinators.org
The Euchee Butterfly Farm on Facebook
Soil3 – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com – Use code JoeGardener26 for $10 off
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I receive a commission every time you purchase a product through an Amazon affiliate link. Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Cool Springs Press / Quarto Group and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
