[ourmandave]

Iowa plans to plant milkweed state wide to help the Monarch recover. All part of a national effort.

http://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Planting-a-billion-milkweed...

Almost sounds touchy-feeling, until you get to this part (of the link above)...

"... The Endangered Species Act has tremendous impact on private land ownership. And so we don't want to get at a point as a partner with DNR with our other partners out there, we don't want to get to the point where there is no choice but to do this then it becomes mandated under the endangered species act. We'd rather have voluntary participation."

tl;dr; If the DNR shows up, we'll finally have to do something about our water quality.

[Natsu]

My mom used to raise Monarch caterpillars for her elementary school class. I remember that it was always difficult to find milkweed even back then. We had to walk a certain hiking trail to find some and then search the plants for a few caterpillars. I don't ever remember seeing large patches of milkweed, only a few scattered plants with perhaps a dozen or so plants over a roughly one mile hike.