Booneville

About the Program
CRH Americas Materials' Booneville site is a wash plant for sand and gravel located west of Des Moines, Iowa. The site strives to manage native plants to create habitat to benefit wildlife, especially pollinators. Another goal for the site is providing educational opportunities for employees and the public about the importance of pollinators and empowering them to act to promote pollinator habitat.

Practices and Impacts

• The team manages and monitors a 345 square foot garden of approximately 200 native plants to provide a habitat for pollinators. The team selected plants sufficiently suited for a sunny and dry habitat. with guidance from master gardeners in the community. They maintain seed heads during the winter, limit pesticide use, and divide and remove plants to promote diversity. Monitoring stats include bloom time, plant survival, plant diversity once per month during the spring, summer and fall seasons. This project aligns with larger initiatives including Plant Native Iowa and Blank Park Zoo's Plant.Grow.Fly certification program.              
• The team installed a new bee house in September 2021 to replace the old one that broke. A hummingbird feeder and water-holding geode are also near the garden for pollinators such as bees, birds, and butterflies, and planted milkweed to provide food sources for monarch caterpillars. The garden is close to Interstate 35 which is one of the interstates listed in the Monarch Highway and aligned with the Presidential Memorandum which encourages nongovernmental organizations to increase the quality and amount of habitat and forage for pollinators. The team observed 65 pollinator species from 2019-2021.
• The team handed out pollinator pamphlets in 2019 to employees and the public that visited the site to educate them about the pollinator garden habitat and the benefits of pollinator species, specifically monarch butterflies. They created a poster from the pamphlet material and hung in the scale house in March 2021 that is continuously visible, when they were no longer able to hand out pamphlets.
• Employee training activities include instruction on pollinator and plant identification, specifically how to complete landscape monitoring reports, pollinator monitoring reports, and maintenance logs.