[cmpb]

The article mentions planting natives and leaving leaf litter for the insects to nest in. Anecdotally, that works extremely well. My neighbor always leaves his leaves under the trees (gums), and I'd noticed his yard always has a prolific firefly population. Two years ago, after I started to get interested in native plants, I started doing the same thing, and this year for the first time ever I have lightning bugs as well!

I've also seen a plethora of other native bugs that I've never seen before, but that could just be due to the fact that I wasn't really very interested in them before.

[trgn]

Yup, small conservations efforts can make a real difference.

Leaving sections of our yard a little more wild, and bird and insect population went up, this includes lightning bugs, which we continue to get in abundance (we're in a reasonably urban area).

I've planted milkweed, it took a few years, but now we get monarchs every year too.

Jonathan Franzen wrote a great article on this that went viral (considering the topic) a few years ago https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture . He basically argues that the cataclysmic worries about climate change should not paralyze us to make changes that promote local conservation, which have real tangible benefits for biodiversity on a small scale.

[beauzero]

The farm we purchased 6+ years ago is just starting to see fireflies and bats come back. We look at dusk visible bats to gauge our bug population. We stopped spraying and are allowing fields to go back to a mixture of natives and grasses. Also started mowing strips instead of bush hogging the whole field during the summer to give shelter to animals and insects. The biggest impact we have seen is that we have more of a "bug balance". The first two years we were here the garden plants were destroyed by pests. Now we have about a 20% reduction in garden production. We do not spray or fertilize. We have also discontinued the previous owner's habit of putting chicken litter (from commercial poultry facilities) on our hay and grazing fields. We have not been able to measure that effect yet.

[toss1]

Excellent to hear how you are bringing back the native grasses and insects! In what part of the world are you?

Have you tried no-till agriculture? We're finding great satisfaction and success with it, and a lot of excellent information from Charles Dowding [1] — with lots of really detailed text and videos of how he manages his organic farm, showing those key details that are so often assumed or glossed over.

Of course mentioned in the article, the Xerces Society has many excellent resources to help the pollinators and other key insects [2] — good info for everyone.

Always good to see people having a clue about sustaining nature and doing something about it — so many are just oblivious and it will literally kill us all.

[1] https://charlesdowding.co.uk/

[2] https://xerces.org/

[beauzero]

We have on a limited scale...honestly grass growth has been a problem. With corn...works fine. With bush beans the grass grows too much and we are forced to weedeat/cut etc. since we can't put animals in with it. Squash we got a decent first and second crop but a third (which is pushing it anyway) had issues with a lot of rain and too much grass growth which caused mold. With pumpkins we have had better luck using a tine plow and planting between the grass furrows then moving the pumpkins onto the dirt as they mature. The biggest issue we have had is an over abundance of grass with no till since we don't spray a burn down on any of our cover crops.