so it's not a total loss, but I was looking at an authentic Garden of Eden for Monarch caterpillars, and now I am not.

My woods are full of "Prickly ash" aka "Toothache Trees". The zebra swallow tail butterflies really do well in that.

Maybe I shouldn't complain, but I've got a soft spot for Monarchs. It's sad to see the yesterday's clustered pink flower heads now nodding over as they die

Many of my neighbors eye my 70-ish acre place with envy, I"m under constant mailing pressure from folks who want to make my place more "useful" as they see it. Many of them want to plant35 acres of solar array!.Yikes!! I call them Buzzards when my partners wondes why I shred the letters, and I mostly otherwise quietly resent them for not being able to leave me in peace to do what I choose with my little scap of wet woodlands.

and was it near your wetland?

It was a couple hundred feet from my wetland, but my Oak-Hickory woodland is adjacent to the fields

My farm is on the west side of a mile long drumlin (left over pile of gravel from the last glactiation. Here in Jefferson Co Wi the landscape is rolling, divided by 40-70 ft high drumlin hills and then descending into 10 thousand year old wetlands (once small glacial lakes). The wetland doesn't grown Oak-Hickory woods. It mostly grows tamarack, and hawthorn and paw-paw

For the most part herbicide death that results from the farming doesn't drift far from the margins of the field. The contractor does a reasonably good job of getting it on the crop and not the field margins. But this year was a magnificent beginning to milkweed.

No MOre

by nature.

course of events. Bees and honey. Man and trash.
Man claims wisdom, but his nature often belies that.
Wisdom considers as far out as it can.
Nature is drawn to survival driven by pleasure.
Paradoxes are beyond my ability to refute.

something I can do in my little truck garden by hand without chemicals. But when you get into many dozens of acres that becomes costly and economically inefficient for the price. And in southern WI bull thistle is more common than the Scottish ancestry that it betrays

SO, the farmer contracts with a specialist who, in 15 minutes or less can spray a 30-50 acre field. Weeds are gone, chemical resistant plants survive although they've been bathed in an herbicide. Crops grow, weeds are absent. Farmer is satisfied he wasted no time on the problem and it was solved within the business model for his crop.

It's no longer ideology. Faarmers do what capitalism demands. Most of them have loans against the crop. You've got to protect it with "standard" best practices or risk not getting crop insurance payouts for weather damage, and problems working next years loans

The world we live in isn't terribly friendly to butterflies and birds. I sacrifice about $2000 a year to promote butterflies and birds in my wetland and woods. A personal choice that the people around me think is crazy. But then I also do 4 acres of Veggies for Vets, and I give any profit from that to the Vietnam Vets. Crazy I know. Especially for a person like me, not really a centrist, with faith in the notion that progress is about making things better, and giving back to nature, and hungry people is a pretty good thing

You did so more succinctly with actual practice.
I have very close farmer friends near Paris, TN.
Mennonites manage their land. Close to the ground mentality.
Have determined what has happened did so because it did. The best, most expedient, choice.
Mistakes have been corrected over time.
People respond with better planning or to emergency.
The long view or quick ROI.
Read some years ago about some upheaval in Europe where modern farming technology was stressed by economic instability.
Turns out, in Lithuania, many farms still used animals for plowing et al. They continued to manage.
My complaint is the pursuit of passive income is a detriment to human harmony. Wisdom might hint that an actual participation in the business would be far more rewarding than egotistically managing from afar.
Then again, I can't imagine the rewards of narcissism.

That's passive, not my active work. i rent it because I don;t have money for big equipment, new or used.

and it's the rent that pays the taxes with a small bit more, which helps with things like the expense of gas for keeping trailways and driveways open to mowers and such.

My activities have been building a house, gardening 3 acres as Veggies for Vets, and controlling woody growth in the wetland meadows proper, and cleaning up the treefalls.