Cannon Michael Pollinators Continued

For California AG today, I'm Mike Stephens. We continue speaking to Canon Michael, one of the crops he's focusing on is pollinated crops for monarch butterflies. The caterpillars only feed on milkweed. So there's an emphasis to grow the milkweed for the caterpillars.

At the same time, meeting folks like Environmental Defense Fund, EDF and others became continuingly aware of the decline of the monarch butterfly. And just obviously, if we could be part of a solution that would help prevent the loss of an important species like that, we thought it would be worthwhile to try to help figure out how to make that happen. So we actually have over 20 acres of producing milkweed that we're harvesting the seed for restoration work not only on our farm, but around the Central Valley.

Working with other groups is important for expantion

Expansion. We're able to work with a lot of different groups like Pollinator Partnership and others to keep expanding and hopefully stem the losses of important species and improve possibly the production on the farm by having healthy pollinating species all around the area. So not that it's self-serving, but I guess in a way, if you have a healthy environment ecosystem, it it does help help you in some ways to have that good natural pollinating species going well. So we've started a small seed company, Great Valley Seed, where we're just have our first year of production. So we'll be able to bring some seed to market here in in twenty 20 this year and then expand that over the next few years.