Jane Breckinridge is a fifth-generation farmer but is the first in her family to raise butterflies.
“Some people have hogs as livestock or they have goats,” she said. “I’m just very, very lucky because my livestock happens to be beautiful butterflies.”
The zebra longwings, pearl crescents and monarchs raised on the farm will be sold for museum exhibitions and state fairs.
She and her husband, David Bohlken, started the Euchee Butterfly Farm near Leonard, Oklahoma, about 15 years ago on land that’s been in her family for generations. Her great-grandmother, the daughter of a Euchee man and a Muscogee woman, received the 160-acre allotment in 1899.
Breckinridge is helping train tribal citizens through her Natives Raising Natives Project. It gives tribal members training, supplies and support to become butterfly farmers themselves — creating a sanctuary for an at-risk species on land that’s been a safe haven for Indigenous people, as well.
“I love butterflies. But it’s more about how they can be ambassadors to engage people in this conversation that I think needs to happen so badly,” she said, “about how do we preserve ecosystems? How do we preserve wild spaces? How do we save the planet before it’s too late?”
The loss of pollinators
Pollinators have seen massive decline over the last 25 years.
More than half of all native bee species in the U.S. are declining, and 1 in 4 is at risk for extinction, according to a 2017 study by the Center for Biological Diversity.
Meanwhile, managed honey bee colonies in the U.S. are nearly half of what they were in the 1940s. This year’s annual survey on monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico found the flying insects took up just 2.2 acres during the 2023-2024 winter season, a 59% drop from the year before.
“You know pollinator species in general, butterflies included, are declining and the challenges across both these butterflies and a lot of other pollinator species are very similar,” said Nicole Alt, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Center of Pollinator Conservation. The habitat loss over the last several decades is also due to pesticide exposure, climate change and disease, Alt said.
Converting native grasslands to agriculture was one of the biggest causes of habitat reduction more than a century ago, Alt said. Today, pesticides have pushed out native vegetation along roadways, as well as through manicured lawns, leaving fewer places for pollinators.
“I think it’s more of the fact that at some point, populations get small enough that they get into a cycle where they have challenges to rebound, and they’re less resilient because there’s fewer and fewer habitat patches available to them,” Alt said.
Enter the butterfly farms
Back on the Euchee Butterfly Farm, producers gather for the Tribal Alliance for Pollinator’s Spring Workshop and eventually try their hand at planting native plants on the farm’s field.
