The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e101: Beneficial Insects on the Farm

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

This ep: I wanted to learn more about maintaining and increasing bug biodiversity on my farm so I contacted the Xerces Society, a non-profit that protects wildlife through the conservation of invertebrates and their habitats. They connected me with Eric Mader, co-Director of their Pollinator Conservation and Agricultural Biodiversity program. Eric is my guest in this episode. I grabbed this episode's artwork from The Pacific Northwest Bumblebee Atlas

Hey folks, it's Jordan. And guess what? I've got some great news for all you sloppy farmers out there. You know all the bits around your farm that are likely to cause you a bit of shame whenever other farmers come to visit? The pile of old stakes with grass so high all around it that you can no longer see them? That rusty equipment graveyard out there at the back? Or that demonstration perennial garden you built that now looks like a weedy jungle of failure? garden you built that now looks like a weedy jungle of failure? My guest today is from the Xerces Society, an organization dedicated to enhancing and preserving insect biodiversity in farms and other areas around the world. And he says you should not feel ashamed about those unkempt areas around your farm. You should feel smug. But those areas of the farm, those are the valuable areas, and we should embrace them, and we should recognize that that's where the snakes and the songbirds and the insects are actually probably thriving.

So when those farmers come to visit and ask about the failure garden, you can look them square in the eyes and say, I don't know, I guess I just care about preserving insect diversity more than you do. This is the Ruminant Podcast. It's the Ruminant, a podcast about food politics and food security and the cultural and practical aspects of farming. You can find out more at theruminant.ca or email me, editor, at theruminant.ca. I'm on Twitter, at R ruminant blog and you can find me on facebook all right let's do a show hey everybody it's jordan and it is early august and

as i predicted things went quiet because, shit got real on the farm, as it always does. Nevertheless, I apologize. I apologize to those of you who really enjoy getting episodes more frequently and I'm grateful to those of you who feel that way and who write me to ask me how things are going and to ask about new content and all the rest.

It's been tough, but I'm back at least for this one episode, probably a few more because we're kind of over the hump. July, June, May, those three months are just insane for me. But I find typically that as we get into August, things calm down a little because there's less planting to do and suddenly I have a little bit more free time. And so I'm excited to get back on the horse yet again. I'm not going to say much more because there's still, you know, it's still pretty busy. It's still pretty busy around the farm. So I want to move right along to today's episode. But before I do, I really have to acknowledge some people since it's been a while since the last episode. And some of you have been visiting the ruminant.ca slash gift registry to make a

donation and i'm really grateful for that so thank you very much to sherry jensen and emily jenkins and joshua baker marshall right and marshall right i think that's also got to be associated with george somehow george are you marshall are you and marsh both listening to the podcast? I'm not sure, but thank you. Adam Vaughn and Henry Painter. Thanks to all of you for your generosity. I really appreciate it. The rest of you, if you're enjoying the show, please consider checking out the ruminant.ca slash gift registry.

Okay, so for a long time now, I've wanted to do an episode on insect diversity on the farm and I knew the group or organization to approach was Xerces because I've known about them for a while and I know that they're a really cool non-profit organization dedicated to educating people about the importance of insect diversity to making efforts to increase insect diversity in ecosystems around the world. And they've got a pretty good focus on agriculture. And so I wrote them and asked them if I could talk to someone about conserving and improving insect diversity in the farm environment.

And they said yes and linked me to a very knowledgeable gentleman called Eric Lee Motter. And here's who he is. This is Eric Lee Motter. I am the co-director of the Pollinator Conservation and Agricultural Biodiversity Program at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Now, after you hear this, many of you are going to want to seek out more information. So the basic site, xerces. Now, after you hear this, many of you are going to want to seek out more information. So the basic site, xerces.org, X-E-R-C-E-S.org. But more specifically, I would recommend xerces.org slash brochures, xerces.org slash brochures, tons of resources on their site that I recommend you check out. And I'll mention it one more time at the end. And that's all I need to say, because you're going to listen to the conversation right now. And it's a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I hope you will too. And I

will talk to you a little bit at the end. Thanks, everybody. Eric Lee Motter, thanks so much for joining me on the ruminant podcast. Yeah, thank you for having me. Eric, I have wanted to do a conversation like this for a long time. I have been market gardening as an organic veggie grower in my own business for about eight years now. And I've certainly, at the very least, really come to appreciate the importance of trying to increase insect diversity on the farm as far as the beneficials go anyway. So I'm really glad to have a chance to talk about this today. Yeah, I am as well. The Xerces Society has about a decade of experience now working specifically in agriculture around pollinator conservation and what we call conservation biological control,

the management of farm habitats for natural pest suppression by beneficial insects. So this is exactly the kind of conversation that we like to have with folks. Eric, I thought we could begin with me telling you a short story about my new farm property. Last year was my first year of production on a new piece of land. I have about five acres under intensive production, and I came from a farm that was more isolated. And one of the first observations I made over the course of last season, uh, was that there seems to me from my anecdotal experience to be like a lot less insect diversity, right? I don't see tons of pollinators. I don't see tons of spiders. I barely ever see a beetle. And then I,

I mean, there's decent bird life, uh, but I also don't see snakes, that sort of thing. I know we're talking about insects today. So I thought I would start by telling you that and then asking you how, and acknowledging that that is one single experience. And I should add that the context is lots of conventional orchards all around me, including one along one of my borders, like just, you know, within 100 feet of my production. I thought I would ask you how representative my observations are, my situation is, of the broader context of, you know, insect population situation on farms today. Yeah. And to be clear, it is very difficult to make any sweeping judgments based upon a single observation at a single site over a single year. Because animal population, animal abundance, animal diversity can shift wildly from season to season, from year to year. There can be population booms and busts. So it is really difficult to take a single observation point

like that and to draw a lot of conclusions from it. That said, you are hardly the only person making this kind of observation. And if we think just anecdotally about people's experiences, you know, myself, I'm here in my late 40s, and I remember a time growing up in rural North Dakota where we would drive 45 minutes into town to get groceries and the car would be covered with dead insect bodies on a hot summer day when you arrived into town and we'd have to go to the car wash. Today, you know, I can drive across the entire state of North Dakota and the car is practically spotless when I get to the other side. So a lot of us have these kinds of anecdotal observations. There are also, however, more robust and more reliable observations than those of us kind of individually just looking at the world around us are probably capable of making.

If we look at the scientific community and the people looking at insects, the picture that starts to come together for us is one that tends to reinforce those anecdotal observations. that tends to reinforce those anecdotal observations. We know, for example, that in North America, where we have collectively about 50 species of native bumblebees, that as of today, probably a quarter of those species are directly at risk of extinction and several of those species are likely already extinct. We can look at other types of insects that were once very, very common, like monarch butterflies, which overwinter in California and in central Mexico, and then fly northward to migrate across the southern or the northern United States

and ultimately breed in the northern United States and in southern Canada. And we see that those monarch butterflies, if you look at the scientific record of people who've tracked their numbers and done large-scale population surveys over many, many years, that over the past 20 years or so, we have seen about a 90% decline in monarch butterfly numbers. And then if you take that one step further and try to look at what's going on with insects insects at a global scale, we see similar trends elsewhere. And one of the most alarming studies that I've seen in recent years was a paper published last October by German scientists who had tracked insect populations in nature preserves in Western Europe over about 20 years. And they found that in their ongoing surveys of going out and collecting insects year after year after year over those decades, that insect sheer numbers or sheer insect biomass in those

nature preserves had declined by almost 80 percent in that time frame. And rather alarming to think about it because a nature preserve by definition should preserve nature. It should not be a place where nature is in decline. So what we see with insects, what you see with insects, is certainly borne out by science. And unfortunately, it's sort of representative of this larger decline that we see in wildlife as a whole. Eric, a big focus, not the only focus, but a big focus of Xerces is on monitoring and improving the situation

for native pollinators. And I think a lot of us, even in the business, really think about honeybees when we think about pollination. And I'm just wondering, like, just what kind of role the native pollinators can play in agriculture? Yeah. So it's interesting that so many people don't even know that the honeybee is not native to North America. It was imported in the early 1600s. And for a while, it was very successful in North America. It spread through feral swarming across the continent and found this landscape that was rich in flowers

and it did not have any natural diseases or parasites. And yet prior to that, of course, there were all of these wild pollinators. And if we focus just on bees, which are arguably some of the most important wild pollinators, bees, which are arguably some of the most important wild pollinators. There are roughly 4,000 species of wild bees native to North America, and those are species that co-evolved with the plants of this continent. So things like blueberries and huckleberries and cranberries and squash plants and native legumes, these pollinators have close associations with those crops.

And in many cases, they are on kind of a B for B basis, arguably more effective pollinators of those crops than honeybees are. of those crops than honeybees are. So if you were to compare the role that honeybees play versus the role that native bees play in crop pollination, for example, the honeybees being primarily a Mediterranean animal, an animal that did not evolve in this continent, in this hemisphere, it has a particular affinity for warm, typically dry landscapes, similar to what you'd find in a Mediterranean sort of climate. You compare that tendency or that predisposition on the part of honeybees or that adaptation on the part of honeybees to when, say, blueberries are in flower

here in North America, which is typically early spring, typically very cold, windy, wet conditions in many areas. And you quickly see that the native bees, particularly bumblebees, which are large and robust and actually warm-blooded animals, are much more suited to those weather conditions and much more likely to fly in those weather conditions than honeybees are. So native bees have these particular adaptations that make them very effective pollinators. Now that honeybees are faced with new challenges, new parasite and disease issues, there's a renewed interest in sort of rewilding farms, creating habitat on farms that can better support the needs of those honeybees, but also bring back those wild pollinators. And we know that farms that have a sufficient threshold of habitat, of native wildflower habitat present on them, can oftentimes get all of their pollination needs met by the

wild bees that are sustained by that habitat alone. Well, Eric, I think that's a good segue for where I wanted to go. So my next question is, well, I'd like to talk about how our actions on the farm can hurt or help with improving insect diversity. So I'd like to start with how we hurt, because I think some of our actions as farmers are kind of obvious and others aren't. So, yeah, maybe I'll just let you take it away. Like, what are the major actions taking place on farms that are really contributing to declines in insect diversity? that are really contributing to declines in insect diversity.

Yeah, and the declines, to be clear, the declines in pollinators are probably representative of declines in other beneficial insects on farms. And we should remember that there are all of these beneficial predator and parasitoid insects that can provide a substantial, and in some cases, a complete suppression of crop tests where they're allowed to thrive and where there's a good equilibrium of farm habitat that can support them. So thinking about just beneficial insects as a large, all-encompassing category of predators and pollinators and nutrient cyclers, they typically have sort of three fundamental needs on farms. And any threat to any of these fundamental needs will reduce their population significantly. So the fundamental need that they all have, first and foremost, is they need food sources throughout their entire life cycle. And for pollinators, that typically means they need flowering plants, especially wild flowering plants throughout the growing season.

So things that are in bloom in the summer, well, beginning in the spring, throughout the summer and into the fall, are really critical to maintain that continuity of pollinator populations throughout the year. But there are also beneficial wasps, parasitoid wasps, that will prey upon crop pests. And oftentimes those wasps are also feeding on flower nectar as an alternate food source during at least one of their life stages as well. Typically as adults, they're feeding on nectar and then laying their eggs on crop top.

So they also benefit from those wild flowering plants throughout the year. So that alternate food source or that continuity of food source is really critical. The second thing that beneficial insects, almost regardless of the type, need are they need some form of shelter. They need places to lay their eggs. They need places to overwinter. If you consider predatory ground beetles, which are some of the most effective predators we have of slugs and snails on farms and soft-bodied pest insects. Those predatory ground beetles are typically nocturnal, so they need cover to reside in during the daytime.

And so farms sometimes create structures like beetle banks, which are elevated berms consisting of native bunch grasses. And you'll see farms that actually construct these beetle banks right in the middle of the crop field, knowing that these predatory ground beetles have somewhere to reside during the daytime. And then at night, they spread out into the crop fields surrounding them. And they're long-distance travelers. Many of them are fast runners, and they can travel hundreds of feet in a given night and eat tremendous numbers of insects.

They have a propensity to actually kill more prey than they can eat in some cases. So food, shelter, and shelter for pollinators may be hollow stems. It may be brush piles, the types of woody structures that you find in hedgerows. But also many of those pollinators, many of those wild bees nest in the ground. So they need undisturbed areas of the ground, areas with minimal cultivation, minimal disturbance to the soil to protect those nests. And sort of the third fundamental need that all beneficial insects have on farms is the need for protection from insecticides. And there, of course, are, it probably goes without saying for your audience, that there are significant threats from conventional insecticides on conventional farms. But organic farms also

have their own suite of organic approved insecticides that some producers use. And many of those are broad spectrum poisons, things like pyrethrins and spinosids, those are also toxic to pollinators and beneficial insects. And so efforts to either reduce or eliminate or at least mitigate the impact of those insecticides are really, really important. Okay, so of those three, the one I have at least one or two follow-up questions for has to do with soil disturbance. Because I was on the Xerces site doing a little bit of research for this conversation. And, you know, it's so funny, Eric. Like a lot of farmers, I at least attempt to reduce or limit my impact on my farm ecosystem. A lot of times I fail. Farming is just inherently destructive, no matter what kind you practice, it seems. But what's so funny, what I was really

reflecting on when I read the site, a couple articles on the site was how I often when I think of soil disturbance, so let me just say tilling, you know, when I think of like tilling up a big patch of land to plant, I'm often I'm always really up till now been thinking about like destruction of soil tilth and soil microbiota. And I started reading your site and just like started appreciating that I wasn't even thinking about all of the different insects, many beneficials that, that, that, that live in the soil that whose, whose habitat I'm, I'm destroying. I'm thinking specifically of some of the different pollinators that tend to live in old rodent holes or just make their burrows in the soil. And, and that just, um, I don't know, that was, that really hit me. And, you know, soil, soil cultivation is, is common to just about every type of, uh, annual plant agriculture, you know, soil cultivation is common to just about every type of annual plant agriculture, you know. And that one, God, that's got to be devastating.

That's got to be devastating in a way that, you know, I already knew that pesticides of all kinds are devastating, but I hadn't really thought about that. Yeah, we've certainly entered kind of a new era of soil awareness, and I think we still have a ways to go. I think back to when I was in graduate school, and I was in a graduate program in horticulture, and they made me go back and take a bunch of foundational coursework in soil science. And, you know, 10, 15 years ago, the conversation still focused entirely on soil chemistry and soil physical properties. And soil biology was really just completely ignored. And then in recent years, we've seen the pendulum switch, you know, totally, totally swing the other way. And now the conversation seems to be dominated by soil biology. And yet, even in those conversations around soil health and soil biology today,

the focus still seems to be on the microbiology, on root exudates and glomalin and mycorrhizal fungi and all these great things. And still, we tend to ignore the fact that there are animals that live in the soil and that these animals are abundant, they're important. A single square foot of soil from a native prairie or forest ecosystem may have up to 5,000 arthropods living in it. And these arthropods, these animals are oftentimes the first stage in the carbon cycle. They're breaking down the big pieces of organic matter so the microbiology can go to work. Animals that are as common as ants are probably very, very important for carbon sequestration on a global scale. If you think about the tunneling of ants and the amount of subsoil that they bring up to the surface and deposit on the surface and in the process sort of pancake down thatch and organic matter on the surface of the soil,

of the soil. There's documentation estimating that the amount of subsoil matter that ants bring to the surface on a single acre of land in a given year in temperate North America could probably be measured in the tons per year. So they're doing a huge amount of work. Ants alone, along with earthworms and plant roots, are probably the most significant soil engineers that we have on the planet. And then, of course, yeah, probably 75% of our native wild bees nest in the ground as well. So it's good that you're thinking about this. And I certainly think about it on my own farm as well. And I think many of us are looking for creative ways and new ways of maintaining as much of that soil life as possible. So one follow-up question, Eric. I'm just wondering, there are areas of my farm that I ultimately intend to create like an undisturbed area for insect habitat to develop,

but certain of those I'll have started out and, and, and I'm learning in this conversation and, and some of my pre-reading, I'm learning this is a bit, this is a bit wrong approach, starting out with some scorched earth policy like tilling. And I'm just wondering, and I know you can't answer this accurately because there's too many thousands and thousands of arthropod species. But like once you do that, how long does it take if you're going to leave it undisturbed after that? Like what kind of timeline to start reestablishing populations? That's a good question.

And you're right. I mean, I don't have an answer for it. I don't know that there is. I don't know that anybody has an answer for it because every site has its own variables. You know, I use sort of scorched earth cultivation on my own farm, typically followed by soil solarization to create new perennial crop beds. I'm going one step further and putting plastic over it and letting the sun keep that site for a full year to scorch all of the dormant weed seed in that soil. And I think at a small scale or, you know, kind of a mid-sized farm scale, I don't think it's, in the scheme of things, I don't think it is the most catastrophic thing that we can do if it's sort of one step in a longer-term process of site restoration and soil restoration. I will also say, as sort of I think a few relevant asides, much of the restoration,

I think a few relevant asides. Much of the restoration, the habitat restoration work that Xerces does on farms today operates on the same model, where we will go in and we'll cultivate large field borders on farms. We'll spread clear, high-tunneled plastic over those cultivated areas and leave it for a full season to kill off the dormant weed seed in that soil and peel back the plastic and then feed native wildflowers into those areas. And the results are great. The results consistently demonstrate it's a very, very effective process for restoring native plants, native vegetation in areas that may have been dominated by invasive grasses, invasive pasture grasses, invasive weeds for, you know, 100 years or more.

years or more. And I think, you know, that approach is justifiable since the ultimate aim is to recover sites of the farm, recover areas of the farm that can be restored to some long-term natural habitat, specifically intended to restore greater biodiversity to the farm. intended to restore greater biodiversity to the farm. There's also some research out there that indicates that some of the microbial communities in soils are probably associated with weed species that grow in those soils. So plants like smooth brome or cheatgrass probably have microbial associations in the soil, and some level of kind of resetting the soil biology may be necessary to fully foster kind of a new non-invasive plant community that will support it. But kind of back to your question, you know, a lot of these soil arthropods are resilient. A lot of them may reside at deeper horizons in the soil than cultivation or other things may ultimately impact them at. Any sort of soil disturbance is certainly going to set back those populations, but they're

small, they're mobile. Many of them are mobile in water and can move between pore spaces and soil. So I think the ability to recolonize disturbed sites is well demonstrated by these small but important animals. Okay, so Eric, I'd like to now talk a little bit about, I think I'm just going to ask you to focus on the low-hanging fruit that farmers can think about trying to grab to increase diversity on the farm. So what are some of the entry-level practices that Xerces suggests to farmers to try and improve insect diversity? Sure. I think the most important thing that every one of us can do is become habitat keepers. We have with the declines in beneficial insects and the declines

in wildlife as a whole, and that I would lump things as diverse as songbirds and salmon in that category. The single most important thing that all of us can do with our landscapes, regardless of what that landscape is, regardless of whether it's a flower pot on a balcony or whether it's a 10,000-acre farm in the Canadian prairie provinces, restoring and maintaining and protecting native plant habitat is the single most important thing that all of us can do today to help save biodiversity in working agricultural lands. Pollinators and beneficial insects are a little bit unique because they tend to be animals of open sunny meadow or prairie type habitats they're not typically as common uh in in dark shady

forested type environments forests have certainly have their own beneficial insects that are associated with them. But for the types of insects that we so often want on farms, which include things like bees or predatory ground beetles or parasitic wasps that will attack aphids and soft-bodied pests like caterpillars and crabs. Open, sunny, meadow-type habitat in field borders, in grassed waterways, in filter strips, in riparian buffers. That's the single most important thing that we can all do on farms is get those native wildflowers back in the landscape. those native wildflowers back in the landscape. The second thing that we can all do is maintain, and this will be easy for most farmers.

The second thing we can all do is to maintain some areas of the farm that are kind of unkempt and kind of unmanaged. Those areas where maybe you throw field stones and create brush piles, those are actually pretty important areas for overwintering and egg laying for beneficial insects. So leaving those intact, leaving those kind of messy areas of the farm actually has some ecological value. actually have some ecological value. And then the last thing we can do is either completely reduce or eliminate insecticides. And if we can't do that, we should at least begin to try to mitigate the impact of those insecticides. And that can be through things as simple as timing applications to avoid blooming crops. It could be altering your application methodology to reduce the risk of insecticide drift or to use more targeted sprayer technology to keep insecticides more concentrated on this specific target,

or to work towards the adoption of insecticides that are maybe not so broad spectrum or maybe not as long-lasting in the environment. So those are kind of the three things that any farmer can and should be doing. I kind of chuckled as you talked about point number two, like leaving some messy areas around the farm. One of my next questions or comments was about how it's really easy to wrap your head around the destructiveness of pesticides. But I was going to ask you how the impulse to keep things looking neat and tidy impacts this problem. Cause I, there, there really is that impulse for a lot of farmers for things to look really neat. And, uh, I, I think as you approach this task, I would just, it made sense to me

before you even said that, that I think we have to become more comfortable with, uh, with letting certain patches of, of land just grow out and look a little bit unkempt as far as people's normal expectations for farm management. Yeah. And I, you know, I guess I find folks typically kind of fall into one of two camps. You have the people who are really, really good at keeping things clean. And then you've got the other folks and I'm probably among them who are not as good at keeping things clean. And then you've got the other folks and I'm probably among them who are not as keeping things clean. A lot of, you know, a lot of folks have the place where, you know, you go park the old disc harrow and forget about it for the next five years and the grass and stuff grows up around it. And those kinds of areas, you know, we sometimes look at and we think, oh, I got to deal with that,

you know, one of these days. I got to buckle down and tidy that up. But those areas of the farm, those are the valuable areas. And we should embrace them. And we should recognize that, you know, that's where the snakes and the songbirds and the insects are actually probably thriving. Eric, what are some signs that you've got a diverse insect population on your farm, that you're making progress? Yeah, there are some formal protocols that can help individual farmers identify and track populations of beneficial insects on farms. And actually on the Xerces Society website, and maybe you can provide a link to this on the podcast website, the podcast website, we have a series of what we call scouting protocols for different types of beneficial insects.

And these are basically kind of one sheet or one page fact sheet that describe a systematic process for conducting timed observations of different farm features. So there's that kind of approach. But there's also just the more intuitive process of taking some time every day that you're outside working to maybe change your focus and not look at the crop, maybe change your focus and not look at the crop, but look at the other life forms that are in and around that crop. And it can, you know, many of us, because we specialize in a particular thing, a particular food crop, a particular farm enterprise, sometimes it's easy to become kind of myopically focused on just that crop rather than the whole system of life that's existing around it. So learning to maybe take that time and to sort of meditatively focus on the greater animal community, I think for many people, it's probably the most

meaningful way of getting reconnected to the life on your farm. And I think when you develop that skill, when you develop that ability to see other kinds of life that's existing in a plant community, it will tell you. You'll be able to take that skill and you'll be able to compare your own farm against some other type of landscape that you're around or visiting. And you'll begin to know whether or not you've got a lot of diversity and a lot of health in that system, I think just through that kind of meditative observation. Well, as an aside, Eric, I happen to think that the advice you just gave

is also good for not losing the main reason a lot of us farm, which is the joy of farming. I think because we do get myopic about the stresses and the crops. And I think little exercises, 5, 10 minutes a day like that can really help us appreciate the bigger picture so that there's another benefit right there. Um, so, so look, Eric, my time with you is waning. I have two one-off questions that are just very aimed at getting some practical information from you. Um, and so I'll just so I'll just ask you them because I think we have time. The first is, are there certain beneficials that one can introduce through purchase and release that you would recommend to be somewhat effective?

Or would you say, no, it's not a good idea in the first place? Or would you say, no, it's not a good idea in the first place? Yeah, I'm a strong promoter of the concept of conservation biological control, of managing the farm landscape for wild beneficial insects. There's real challenges and real problems that come up quickly when we introduce beneficial insects that are not present in wild populations. They can, at their worst, they may not even be locally native and they may begin to prey upon other beneficial insects in that landscape. In the case of introduced pollinators, they can out-compete

with wild native pollinators. They can spread diseases to wild pollinators. At their less bad, many of these introduced animals just fail to thrive in new landscapes. And so you see like ladybird beetles for sale as aphid control agents. Many of those are harvested from wild overwintering populations in California. So you're depleting wild populations when you buy them. But then when you release them, they also also they kind of wake up and they're in a new place and their timing is off for the year and they're not hungry at that time of the year. And their instinct is to just pick up and fly away. So you don't even get a great value from them. And, you know, with probably not a huge amount of work and a huge amount of money, everybody can instead focus just on introducing some wild flowering plants back to the farm that will attract those locally appropriate beneficial insects basically out of thin air.

out of thin air. Okay, great. Thank you. I'm glad I asked that question. The last one is, are there any species that come to mind of flower to plant that are going to help in the very early and very late season? Ideally, ones that are fairly versatile across North America, just to try and help as many geographies as possible? Sure, yeah. So in most parts of North America, early blooming flowers are less common than late blooming flowers. And there are certainly exceptions to that. The West Coast is one exception where a lot of our wildflowers are early blooming. Coast is one exception where a lot of our wildflowers are early blooming. But for most places, you know, the really, really early blooming plants are trees and shrubs. And we can oftentimes create spaces for flowering trees and shrubs on farms through the use of hedgerows.

Hedgerows as kind of a farm feature go back to Bronze Age Europe. And plants like willows and hawthorns and even some flowering, fruiting plants like chokecherries, those are plants that you can find across much of North America, they tend to be adapted to many different landscapes, and they bloom super, super early. Willows alone are probably the earliest blooming plant we have in most parts of North America, and they are great sources of pollen and nectar for beneficial insects. pollen and nectar for beneficial insects. And then for late season plantings, you know, sunflowers as a broad group, and there's, you know, there's a number of different individual species of wild sunflowers. As a broad group, they are some of our late blooming, very reliable late blooming plants. Some of the perennial sunflowers can last for many, many years. The annual sunflowers tend to be also inexpensive to plant from seed

and super widely adaptable. And again, a great way to kind of bookmark the end of the season with another very valuable pollen and nectar resource. Well, Eric Leemotter, our time is just about over. So first, I want to thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it. And I also just want to ask you really quickly to point people in the right direction. So specifically, what is the Xerces website? Because I know from experience there's a ton of useful information there. Yeah, so the Xerces website is xerces.org, X-E-R-C-E-S dot O-R-G. And most of the publications that Xerces produces are available as free downloads on the website. We've got a couple of booklets in particular that I would point listeners to. One of them is our Farming for Bees booklet, and the Companion Guide Conservation Planning for Beneficial Insects is also a very, very useful resource

for introducing folks to the diversity and ecology of beneficial insects and pollinators. These are two booklets that basically begin with, you know, what is a wild bee? What is a wild beneficial insect? They've got some identification resources, and they end with very concrete habitat restoration suggestions and methods and have some beautiful photography and examples of farms, case studies of farms that are actually putting this stuff into practice. So I would encourage folks to check those out. And in addition to those, there's a whole range of other resources that folks could dig into and I'm sure find many different individual paths that they could pursue based upon their own conservation goals. Eric, thanks so much.

Yeah, thank you today I learned I don't need anything to live on except for love alright that's it folks and I'm not going to say much more because I had to turn off my cooler fans to record this a little more quietly

and I'm getting worried it's getting hot outside I gotta get it back on so that's it I love you all I miss you all hot outside. I got to get it back on. So that's it. I love you all. I miss you all. And hopefully I will talk to you soon. Until then. Oh, and once again, the website for Xerces,

xerces.org slash brochures. X-E-R-C-E-S. All right. Alright. Spring water and peaches will owe nothing to this world of thieves And live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands

I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching and here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong.

So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces. And live next door to the birds and the bees. And live life like it was meant to be. And live life like it was meant to be I'm