Butterfly Farming

Video Transcript

"Butterfly farming is an industry that has been going on for twenty, thirty years in a big way. A lot of people grow butterflies all over the world as a sustainable agriculture. Kind of like in the rain forest instead of stripping the land, and growing a crop for two or three years, and having the land be barren they actually need the virgin rain forest to get the butterflies. There is a lot of money in it. There is a lot of places like butterfly conservatories around the world that buy butterfly pupae, and they need to have a constant supply of them. And butterfly pupae can be anywhere from a dollar to five six, dollars each. And usually a butterfly gets will get four or five hundred a week. So they are shipped all over the world, there's permits obviously required. And there is another huge industry with a wedding industry where people who raise butterflies to release at weddings. So all around the world, and I know now in the United States it's becoming a big thing to get butterflies for weddings. So a lot of people do that as kind of a side business or a hobby. But butterfly farming is a kind of an important industry all around the world. A lot of people have butterfly gardens, and a good way to butterfly farm is to plant the kind of plants that the caterpillars would eat. So if you do some research, and figure out what each kind of butterfly feeds on you can plant that plant in large numbers, and then you can grow them in cages, and clip food everyday, and have them in small cages around your house. So butterfly farming can be something where it is a small scale thing at somebody's house, or it can be a large greenhouses, and all sorts of acres of land."