Walk through a milkweed field in full bloom, look all around you, follow a monarch and watch its caterpillars up close. Scroll through the tour at your own pace.
A two-minute walk through a milkweed field in midsummer. Tap a chapter to jump to it.
Two stops in a milkweed field in July: in the middle of the field, then near the forest edge. Turn the view and tap the dots.
Drag to look around. Tap the dots to learn more.
A milkweed field is a dominant crop, not a monoculture.
Milkweed is what is grown, and it takes the lead. But clover, vetch, goldenrod and fleabane grow around it. These perennials have their place: they keep the field in flower all season long, feed other insects and cover the soil.
Once milkweed is established, there is no more plowing or yearly sowing. No bare ground between seasons: the roots hold the soil, and soil life is left undisturbed.
Flowers for pollinators, leaves for monarch caterpillars, shelter for all kinds of small wildlife: within a few seasons, a milkweed field becomes an ecosystem again.
Leaving the soil unturned, keeping it covered, making room for diversity: these are the principles of regenerative farming. A milkweed field puts them into practice, while yielding a useful harvest, the floss that insulates our products.
Rich in nectar, milkweed flowers attract bees, bumblebees, butterflies and beetles, by day and by night.
Milkweed pollen is not a powder: it is packed into small sacs, called pollinia, that catch on insects’ legs and travel from flower to flower. A rare mechanism among plants.
The monarch is the best known, but a wide variety of insects live on milkweed or feed from it: bumblebees, wild bees, beetles, specialized bugs.
The sun slips behind the forest. The bees head home, the moths arrive: the field never quite sleeps.
A flash of orange in the leaves. The camera followed it for a minute.
Monarch caterpillars filmed up close on milkweed plants, from dawn to the last molt.
For decades, farming treated milkweed as a weed. Growing it means relearning: sowing, tending, harvesting the pods in the fall.
No growers, no material. Without buyers, they cannot carry the risk of this crop alone. Buying milkweed from the people who grow it, year after year, is what keeps the fields in place.
After bloom, the pollinated flowers become pods, called follicles: large green pods that ripen until September.
Inside each pod, more than two hundred seeds are attached to fine white silks, hollow and coated with wax. This structure traps air: it is what makes milkweed an insulator.
Harvest takes place in the fall, once bloom is over and the most important period for caterpillars has passed. Some of the seeds then come back as seeds for planting, so milkweed keeps spreading.
Milkweed doesn't stop at the edge of the field. Here's where to go next.
