Growing and Harvesting Milkweed

Sustainable Practices and Environmental Impacts

Milkweed is an essential plant for creating eco-friendly and durable insulated productswhile supporting biodiversity. At Lasclay, we prioritize responsible milkweed cultivation, balancing it with the protection of monarch butterflies and the environment.

1. Artisanal Growing

- Small-scale, hand-harvested and manually processed
- Supports biodiversity through intercropping and native plants
- Benefits pollinators and monarch butterflies
- Minimal impact on insects thanks to hand weeding or non-motorized mechanical tools

2. Industrial Growing

- Large-scale, mechanized harvesting
- Ensures consistent quality, volume, and pricing
- Limited use of herbicides (glyphosate) and diesel tractors

Artisanal Milkweed Growing: A Sustainable and Eco-Friendly Approach

Artisanal milkweed cultivation is known for its environmental respect and contribution to biodiversity. Small-scale growers aim to replicate milkweed’s natural ecosystem by planting it alongside other native plants, supporting pollinators and the survival of monarch butterflies.

Agricultural interventions are carried out by hand or with non-motorized tools, including spring weeding, which allows milkweed to establish effectively. This approach minimizes impacts on insects and limits the use of chemicals, ensuring high-quality milkweed ideal for creating eco-friendly accessories and other durable products

Benefits of Artisanal Milkweed Cultivation

Challenges of Artisanal Cultivation

- Limited availability: harvests are seasonal and smaller in scale
- Higher cost: manual labor increases the final product price

At Lasclay, we prioritize working with artisanal producers to offer products that respect nature while supporting biodiversity and local ecosystems. However, this approach comes with significant challenges. Our mission is to make the use of milkweed more accessible as an alternative to problematic insulators like down or synthetic fibers, which requires our products to remain affordable, competitive, and available in sufficient quantities.

Although artisanal milkweed is more environmentally responsible, it is often less abundant and more costly, which limits large-scale production. In this context, industrial milkweed cultivation helps ensure a steady supply, sufficient volumes, and price stability, while maintaining a commitment to more responsible practices.

Industrial Milkweed Cultivation: Steady Supply and Environmental Challenges

To ensure a steady supply of milkweed silk, Lasclay also works with industrial growers. These producers provide a consistent supply, maintaining stable volumes, prices, and quality—essential for making milkweed a widely accessible alternative to traditional insulators such as down or synthetic fibers.

However, this approach has environmental impacts:

- Mechanized harvesting using diesel tractors
- Limited use of herbicides (glyphosate) in the spring to quickly remove competing plants

It is crucial to distinguish between herbicides and pesticides:

- No milkweed growers in Quebec use pesticides, in order to protect monarch butterflies and other pollinating insects.
- The limited use of glyphosate in the spring is a compromise to ensure large expanses of milkweed, which ultimately supports the survival of monarch butterflies, as suggested by some studies (Flockhart et al., 2014).

Why compromise?

For a young company, predictable costs and a reliable supply are essential:

- Enables better production planning and accurate cost/margin estimates
- Minimizes risks from raw material price fluctuations

From a global perspective, the entire product life cycle must be considered: raw material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, and end-of-life (recycling, composting, or reuse). Limiting herbicide use and fuel consumption is beneficial at the raw material stage, but the impact on the complete life cycle must also be taken into account.

In practice, it is often better for 10,000 people to use milkweed mittens that are slightly less eco-friendly but far more durable than down or synthetic materials, rather than producing a few dozen products that are 100% artisanal but scarce.

Towards More Responsible Industrial Cultivation

From the start, we aimed to work with an organic industrial grower who uses no herbicides and incorporates cover crops and intercrops to improve the ecosystem. Unfortunately, certain constraints—such as the lack of immediate availability and the requirement of a minimum volume of 1 ton—limited this partnership for our first year of production (300 to 2,000 pairs).

- Several farmers are committed to:Reducing and eventually eliminating herbicide use
- Introducing cover crops and intercrops to enhance pollinator habitats
- Gradually increasing yield while moving toward organic and more sustainable practice

For comparison, rhizomatous plants like blueberries also require herbicide treatments during the first few years before transitioning to organic cultivation. Milkweed follows a similar process to ensure a stable supply while improving long-term sustainability.

Ensuring Responsible Milkweed While Supporting Growth

At Lasclay, we are committed to sourcing the most responsible milkweed possible for our products. However, as a growing company, it is essential to make strategic decisions that ensure both our economic viability and our socio-environmental responsibility.

Taking into account our development goals and the associated ecological benefits—particularly the reduction in demand for animal and synthetic insulators—we aim for an approach that continuously reduces our impacts while working with suppliers able to meet increasing demand at viable costs.

Every step counts: by becoming a significant player in the market, we will gain greater influence over our partners, encouraging them to adopt increasingly responsible milkweed cultivation practices that respect ecosystems and biodiversity.