no place like home
can have negative profits in those areas. It made obvious economic sense [to plant pollinator habitat in those areas],” Fredericks says. Fredericks made the decision to convert a portion of his farmland to pollinator habitat after using a computer application called AgSolver to run a profit scenario, which revealed that certain areas—behind wind breaks, or close to streams, or too small and oddly shaped to fit equipment—were not generating a profit. Enrolling in a Conservation Reserve Program, an initiative offered through the USDA Farm Service Agency to provide cash incentives to farmers to increase pollinator habitat, allowed Fredericks to cover the cost of planting habitat and generate nominal annual income on otherwise unproductive areas of farmland. The habitats grow more robust with each season, and pollinator visits have increased around the farm. Fredericks admits monarchs are still elusive, though: “I think it’s going to be a slow return, but the only way we’re going to get them to return at all is to reestablish habitat.” The potential to help flagging monarch populations and other struggling pollinators is a passion for Fredericks, who sits on the boards of the American Soybean Association, the Iowa Soybean Association, and the Monarch Collaborative, a group of national organizations representing farmers, ranchers, landowners, and agricultural companies, and he’s encouraging other farmers to follow suit. He often has groups of other farmers take tours of his farm, and the pollinator habitats are one of the first features he shows off. “The whole idea is that we can have both productive agriculture [and] monarch conservation,” he says. “We’re trying to create some room in the conservation part of the [2019] Farm Bill for an increase in acres for pollinator habitat, and we’re trying to raise awareness [among farmers] that pollinator habitat doesn’t have to be planted on productive pieces of farmland. We all have acres here and there that are in grass, [and] through an effective program, we could convert some of that over to pollinator patches.”
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