About a third of the greenhouse gases cooking our planet come from our food, agriculture and livestock production. To curb the impact, we need to drastically reduce the amount of land we use to make food, while at the same time making more food for a growing population. How are we going to do that?
“The organic, grass-fed beef that people love so much, because there's this sense that the cows are treated better and that maybe it's better for the planet, it's more sustainable, well, it's certainly worse for the climate,” said journalist Michael Grunwald. Grunwald is the author of the new book, “We Are Eating The Earth” and after five years of diving deep into food and agriculture, he says there are a few reasons why regenerative, grass-fed practices cause issues for the climate, “first of all, it takes [grass-fed animals] longer to get to slaughter weight, so the animals are alive longer to burp and fart methane. But the main reason is because it's less efficient. It requires more acres to make the same amount of meat.”
Right now, Grunwald explained, two out of every five acres on the planet are used for agriculture. The more land we use up to make food, the more carbon dioxide gets unleashed into the atmosphere, while also destroying the ecosystems that can absorb it. According to Grunwald, the best thing an individual can do to curb this impact is to give up eating beef altogether.
The second best thing? Turn to a controversial part of the agriculture industry: Factory farms. Grunwald explains that factory operations are just more efficient, “so, you know, these efficiencies, these productivities, it sounds like they're kind of dirty words, right? Like these are like rapacious corporations dredging dollars out of the dirt, but the more efficient they can be, you know, the lighter agriculture's touch is going to be on the environment.”
It can be a hard solution to stomach, so in this episode, the “How We Survive” team explores both sides of the argument. We go fishing with an eccentric rancher in Northern California who practices regenerative agriculture and then we head to Colorado to get a rare peek into the factory farm industry.
Note: Marketplace podcasts are meant to be heard, with emphasis, tone and audio elements a transcript can’t capture. Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it.
Amy Scott: I have to say, I didn't expect a rancher to be wearing flip flops.
Loren Poncia: Yeah, I'm the hippie rancher. You don't see very many ranchers go to Burning Man either.
Amy Scott: Oh, are you a burner?
Loren Poncia: Next week, baby. Woo hoo.
Amy Scott: I'm with Loren Poncia, owner of Stemple Creek Ranch. We're in Tomales, California, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco. Stemple Creek sells grass-raised beef and lamb and pasture-raised pork and chicken. Loren's showing me around the headquarters. It's a gorgeous part of the ranch. They sometimes rent out for weddings or educational events. There's a big barn that's been converted into an event space. String lights hang above a patio next to ancient cypress trees.
Amy Scott: These trees are amazing. These ones with a million trunks.
Loren Poncia: It's probably older than me and you combined. It’s like a 140 year old tree.
Amy Scott: Loren is tan and wearing a black and white baseball cap with an image of a cow in a green pasture on it, Stemple Creek's logo. He's a fourth generation rancher. His great grandfather, Angelo, came over from Italy in 1897 and Loren takes stewardship of this sprawling 1000 acres of land seriously. Stemple Creek practices what's called regenerative agriculture.
Loren Poncia: To me, it means creating life, dancing with Mother Nature and creating more above ground biodiversity and below ground biodiversity.
Amy Scott: The thinking goes, if we return farm and ranch land to a more natural state by not tilling the soil, minimizing pesticide use and letting animals roam and graze. Soil health improves and healthy soil doesn't just produce a healthier ecosystem, it also stores more carbon. To see what that means in practice,
Loren Poncia: I think I'll jump you, drop you guys in my pickup, and we'll go, we'll just drive around in my pickup, if that's okay.
Amy Scott: We load up in Loren’s truck, which is an adventure in itself.
Loren Poncia: Oh, it drives my wife nuts looking at my car, because it's like a $50,000 car, or whatever they are, and it looks like shit because I have dust and everything. You can't keep it clean.
Amy Scott: My producer, Haley, jumps into the back seat, where there are cowboy boots and work boots strewn on the floor, along with a deer skull with antlers attached.
Haley Hershman: What kind of gun is this in the back?
Loren Poncia: Um, which one?
Amy Scott: You have some guns back there?
[Don’t Stop Believing plays]
That's your ring tone?
Loren Poncia: That's my ring tone for my wife.
Amy Scott: I like it.
Loren Poncia: Hey, lately.
Amy Scott: Loren winds us around the property, past cattle grazing in the fields. He wants to show us a special part of the ranch.
Oh, my God, that is like, so bucolic.
Loren Poncia: It's one of my favorite places.
Amy Scott: Trees and tall grass surround a big pond, which is completely still the clear blue sky reflecting off of it, but it wasn't always like this. Part of adopting regenerative practices included revitalizing this area.
Loren Poncia: There were none of these trees were here, 10 years ago. I planted them all. So they're all sequestering this carbon, all this chicory here. I mean, that's all just sequestering carbon right now, because it's growing. This looks like an oasis. When you look around in this area, everything's dry, and this is like lush and green and full of life, beaming with life.
Amy Scott: When did you decide you wanted to sequester carbon and do ranching differently?
Loren Poncia: So that's a really good question. And so the truth is–that's a bass or something.
Amy Scott: We're standing on the shore of the pond, and every few minutes Loren sees fish moving around on the surface.
Loren Poncia: Yeah. Look, there’s another one.
Amy Scott: Ok, I’ve gotta watch better. I’m missing these.
Loren Poncia: I want to throw something out there and catch one over there too.
Amy Scott: Loren is too distracted by the call of a potential catch to talk about regenerative agriculture. He can't help himself. He heads to a shed he built near the pond and grabs a fishing rod.
Loren Poncia: Oh, you see that that came up through the weeds? Oh, yeah, they’re all in the weeds right here.
Amy Scott: But they're not biting.
Well, sorry you didn't catch a fish.
Loren Poncia: I'm not done, yet, I gotta cast one more time.
Amy Scott: We do this for, I don't know, about 20 minutes. He's relentless, but eventually surrenders.
Loren Poncia: Okay, we gotta go.
Amy Scott: Anyway. Loren says his ranch has always prioritized conservation and protecting wildlife. Then about 15 years ago, he teamed up with a local group trying to promote climate-smart agriculture. At first, he says it was just a way to get free compost.
Loren Poncia: And then what it really did was open my mind about soil health and connectivity amongst living plants. Carbon is just another piece of that link, and I'd be naive to say what we're doing is actually going to have a huge significant impact on just on my ranch, but if everybody around the world did this, it would have a huge significant impact in terms of creating more photosynthesis, which are going to basically pull more CO2 from the atmosphere.
Amy Scott: Regenerative agriculture has been heralded by some as a major solution to the climate crisis, but one that may be overblown.
Michael Grunwald: Well, this is where I start getting in trouble.
Amy Scott: That's journalist Michael Grunwald. Again. We heard from him in episode one.
Michael Grunwald: Because the organic, grass fed beef that people love so much, because there's this sense that the cows are treated better, and that maybe it's better for the planet, it's more sustainable? Well, it's certainly worse for the climate.
Amy Scott: I'm Amy Scott, welcome to How We Survive. This is episode three, the land problem.
About a third of the greenhouse gasses cooking our planet come from our food: Agriculture and livestock production are incredibly taxing on the planet. To curb the impact, we need to drastically reduce the amount of land we use to make food, while at the same time making more food for a growing population. So how exactly are we going to do that? One answer may surprise you.
Amy Scott: So, yeah, what do you see when you when you look at this case?
Michael Grunwald: So, I mean, I see filet mignon, I see New York Strip. I see boneless ribeye, T bone steak, like my mouth is watering, because beef is freaking delicious.
Amy Scott: I met up with Michael Grunwald in Denver, Colorado, at an upscale grocery store.
Michael Grunwald: But the other thing I see is what's eating the earth, right?
Amy Scott: We're standing in front of the meat counter looking at a selection of cuts from Neiman Ranch, a network of sustainable, independent ranches similar to Stemple Creek. A lot of us have been told that if we're going to eat meat at all, this is a better choice for the animals and the environment; grass fed, humanely raised. But Michael says for the climate, not so much.
Michael Grunwald: First of all, it takes them longer to get to slaughter weight, so the animals are alive longer to burp and fart methane, but the main reason is because it's less efficient. It requires more acres to make the same amount of meat.
Amy Scott: And Michael says proponents of regenerative agriculture have oversold its potential to offset carbon emissions. That's one of the points he makes in his new book, we are eating the Earth. Michael spent five years researching the climate impacts of our food and agriculture systems to better understand how these industries are contributing to the climate crisis. I wanted to know what his takeaways were after such a long journey, so we head outside to a picnic table.
All right, so on this very hot Colorado day–that there's a haze in the sky because of the wildfires west of here, it seems like a it's a regular phenomenon, not even just in the summer anymore–what got you interested in meat and food as a as a contributor to climate change?
Michael Grunwald: It's funny, I've been writing about climate and the environment for really 20 years, and the short answer is, food system is about a third of the climate problem. It's an even larger part of our other environmental problems. Agriculture uses 70% of our fresh water. It's the leading driver of deforestation, wetland destruction, water pollution. And I realized I didn't know squat about it. And I basically figured if I was this spectacularly ignorant, and I even wrote a fair amount about the climate, though, just about the energy part of the climate, and probably most people were pretty ignorant, too.
Amy Scott: What Michael means by “eating the earth” is that by gobbling up more land to produce food, we're unleashing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while also destroying the ecosystems that can absorb it, or, as he puts it in the book, we're clear-cutting and broiling the planet to stuff our faces. And beef is the biggest offender. Michael says, in the US, we get about 3% of our calories from beef, but it uses about half of our agricultural land.
Michael Grunwald: It’s just this very simple notion that, basically, the animals that we eat are using an awful lot of the earth. And it's it's one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it, right? We if you ever take a cross country flight and you see all those squares and circles out the window. I mean, you can tell that there's a lot of agriculture out there, but there is a lot of agriculture out there, right? It's now two of every five acres on Earth. There's just not going to be room for the forests and wetlands that store so much of the carbon that's stabilizing the climate. Even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, just through deforestation from the expansion of agriculture, we're on track to blow through all of our climate targets by 2050. So in many ways, the energy problem, it's a really big problem, but we kind of know what to do about it, right? We just need to electrify the global economy and run it on clean electricity, right? Simple, right?
Amy Scott: We have the tools, right?
Michael Grunwald: Exactly. I mean, we do know what to do, and we're actually starting to do it. We're in the middle of this incredible clean energy revolution that when I started writing about energy and climate 20 years ago, there really were no alternatives to fossil fuels, but that's where we are now with food and climate. Because really, certainly, when I started working on this, I felt like we didn't even know what we didn't know. And certainly, you know, I write about dozens of promising solutions in my book, but none of them really have a lot of traction yet. And so the problem is still getting worse every day.
Amy Scott: Yeah. And I think, you know, what's uncomfortable about the book for people like me is that, you know, we thought we were kind of doing right by the environment. I mean, I have given up meat. So I'm, you know, my conscience is pretty clean there. But you know, we've been taught that small family farms, organic farming, regenerative agriculture, pasture raised, grass fed. All those are good things, and here you are telling me that they're not, or at least they're not as good as we thought they were.
Michael Grunwald: Well, look, I do think Michael Pollan writes beautifully, but I do think that part, because he's such a compelling writer, I think he's created this sort of romantic notion of a kind of agriculture of his childhood and the agriculture of the past as this kind of rustic, bucolic, sustainable agriculture where small is beautiful and the animals have names instead of numbers, and the soil is treated with love. And look, there is an environmental cost to the intensification of those sort of low yield systems into these, you know, chemical drenched monoculture crops and the factory farms and and look, you know, they treat people badly. They treat animals badly. They use too many antibiotics. Their politics are often terrible. They're lobbying against environmental regulation and climate action. But one thing about them is that they do make a lot of food, and we are going to need more food with less land.
Amy Scott: To make more food with less land, one solution Michael turns to in his book is the industrial feed lot, the place where they fatten up the cattle before sending them off for slaughter, or harvest, as people in the industry refer to it, I wanted to go see an operation like this firsthand. And in his book, Michael profiles a place he says is a prime example of this. It's called Magnum Feedyard.
Michael Grunwald: And the owner, Steve Gable, his north star at Magnum is efficiency, and he's especially aware of how much beef he produces per animal and how fast, because that's his business. So, you know, these efficiencies, these productivities, you know, it sounds like they're kind of dirty words, right? Like these are like rapacious corporations dredging dollars out of the dirt, but the more efficient they can be, you know, the lighter agriculture's touch is going to be on the environment.
Amy Scott: Honestly, this is a hard solution for me to stomach. Could a factory operation be better for the planet?
Steve Gabel: There's 35,000 cattle here. You hear anybody that sounds like they're being abused?
Amy Scott
That's coming up after the break.
About an hour's drive northeast of Denver, Haley and I roll up to Magnum Feedyard in Wiggins, Colorado.
Hayley Hershman: All right, I'm just gonna park like right by the “I heart beef” sign.
Amy Scott: That sounds good.
An “I heart beef” sign greets us at the front, followed by this guy.
Steve Gabel: Good morning.
Amy Scott: Good morning, you must be Steve. Hi, Amy Scott, nice to meet you.
Steve Gabel runs Magnum Feedyard. He's owned the place since 1993 and in that 30-some years, Steve has grown the business quite a bit. When he began, he says the facility had about 3,500 livestock. Today they can accommodate more than 35,000 that growth came from necessity.
Steve Gabel: I broke my neck 26 years ago, unloading a bull in a livestock accident. A life changing experience, where one day, you go from being completely able bodied to the next day, when they tell you, black and white, you will never, ever, ever walk again.
Amy Scott: Steve gets around in a wheelchair.
Steve Gabel: And as defining as that can be for one's life, I had a wife and I had two kids, and I thank the Lord every day that I wasn't a dentist or I wasn't an electrician or I needed the full use of both hands, because I don't have that.
Amy Scott: He says his accident pushed him to grow the business, to take care of his family, so he started delegating, hiring help, and it's become a family business. His wife, son and daughter all work here, too. Michael Grunwald describes Steve as having a Moneyball-style grasp on his business. And that quickly becomes apparent.
Steve Gabel: We feed a million pounds every day. So over the course of a week, we'll feed 7or 8 million pounds of feed. There's 35,000 cattle here today that have to eat two times every day.
Amy Scott: So you're you're basically fattening them up
Steve Gabel: Exactly that's that's our goal is to as efficiently as possible get them to a point that they are market ready. We challenge the livestock from a performance perspective, if they're going to gain two pounds a day when, genetically, hey, they have the ability to gain four pounds a day. You can understand what that does to economics. So our goal is to maximize performance.
Amy Scott: To see how Steve's operation maximizes performance, we climb into his truck, which is retrofitted to drive with a wheelchair for a tour of the facility.
Steve Gabel: Are either of you vegetarians or vegans?
Amy Scott: Well, it's funny you should ask, I call myself a pescatarian. I haven't eaten beef since I was 18.
Steve Gabel: Okay,
Amy Scott: I'm sorry to tell you that.
Stevel Gabel: Because?
Amy Scott: Well, it's a long story, but I read a book called Diet for a New America, which talked about, you know, animal welfare. And I had a boyfriend at the time who kind of convinced me, and then I just, it's been so long, I sort of lost the taste for it.
Steve Gabel: That's unfortunate.
Amy Scott: But you won't kick me out of your truck.
Steve Gabel: No, I will not.
Amy Scott: Steve likes to describe the feed yard as a hotel. He says the pens are the cattle's bedrooms and the mill facility where they process the cattle's food:
Steve Gabel: This would be the kitchen area so extremely important to us in terms of just being, you know, a profit center. And by profit center, I mean, we're feeding about $90,000 worth of feed every day
Amy Scott: We step into a yard where a man in a John Deere tractor is scooping up loads of yellow corn to get processed and then eventually moved into giant steam chests, which make the corn easier to digest. In front of us is a humongous pile of flattened corn flakes with steam still rising off.
Amy Scott: It smells good. Kind of sweet.
Steve Gabel: It tastes good too. I mean, you could eat a kernel, and they'll taste a lot like your corn flakes.
Amy Scott: Really. It's like safety.
Steve Gabel
Oh yeah. There's no issues with it.
Amy Scott: I mean it's just out of the oven.
Steve Gabel: Try it.
Amy Scott: Of course, this episode wouldn't be complete without a taste test.
All right, here we go. I can feel myself getting fatter.
Steve Gabel: There's times of the year where economics might dictate that we feed wheat instead of corn, and I enjoy the months when we feed wheat. You come down here, it smells like a bakery.
Amy Scott: Oh, I bet. Yeah that's not bad. A little dry.
Steve says they feed the cattle a mix of things, depending on cost and availability. From here, the corn flakes will be mixed with alfalfa hay and a protein supplement, plus vitamins and pro biotics that get added in micro doses.
Man, this is a precision operation.
Steve Gabel: There's a lot more detail than the general public realizes, and I've said several times in the course of my career, I'm not embarrassed by anything that we do day to day. Obviously, there's some days that are better than others, but I'm not embarrassed by anything that we do.
Amy Scott: Steve repeats that refrain a lot that he's not embarrassed by anything they do here. He knows that factory operations have a bad reputation.
Steve Gabel: I think being in the business, you're always aware of what the other side thinks. And I think everybody in the industry is aware that there's days we were a target on our back.
Amy Scott: Back in Steve's truck, he drives us to the pens.
A lot of eyeballs looking at us. Lots of them. Hello. That's cute. Their heads sticking into the trough.
I'm looking at hundreds, if not thousands, of black steers munching at the concrete feed bunk or standing out in the dirt.
Steve Gabel: I'm going to stop right here, and I'm going to put all of our windows down, even if it's just for a minute, and I'm going to shut this thing off.
And I'm going to say, just listen.
Amy Scott: It’s pretty quiet.
Steve Gabel: There's 35,000 cattle here. You hear anybody that sounds like they're not happy or they're being abused?
Amy Scott: They just look kind of curious.
Steve Gabel: They're curious. They don't get this. They don't get to see us do this very often. But part of my argument about our good story to tell is to do just this. We park right here. Listen, yeah, every now and then you'll hear something that's vocalizing, but it's way more the exception than it is the rule.
Amy Scott: Do you think people expect a lot of complaining?
Steve Gabel: I mean, if we're forcing them into this environment and we're locking them up in this environment and we're forcing them to eat these ingredients that they're not used to eating, how can we not be devils? We wouldn't think so if we sat here and listened to them.
Amy Scott: To be fair, they don't look like they're being tortured, although it's not like I can ask them directly how they're feeling here. Steve says there's at least 250 square feet of pen space per animal, each one has an ear tag used to identify it, and cowboys ride through the pens each day to check on the cattle. From what I've seen, Steve's main argument boils down to this, efficiency is everything from a profit perspective, and mistreating the cattle in any way, whether it's giving them food they don't want to eat, or not giving them enough space to be comfortable is bad for business.
When I gave up meat, the concerns were about animal welfare, and, you know, some environmental concerns about, you know, fertilizer and land use and water, but now there's a lot of concern about climate change and the emissions from, you know, cow burps and farts and and again, the land use, the deforestation that's happening in parts of the world. Do you think about that at all?
Steve Gabel: I do and and I will, I will say right up front that I've got five grandkids, and I want each of them to have five kids, and they're going to live here long after I'm gone. I want to be on the forefront of science. If you look to your hard right there's a little trailer parked right there that's got a tower on it. There's, I think, one on the other side of the feed yard. For over 20 years, we have worked in conjunction with Colorado State University and allowed them onsite to do air emissions tests. We have altered some feed ingredients, the concentration in some protein packages to try to have a positive impact on how the use of those products might influence the atmosphere, how they might affect climate change.
Amy Scott: Have you tried any of these alternative proteins like Impossible, Beyond?
Steve Gabel: Yes, I think they taste like shit. I shouldn't say that for a radio show.
Amy Scott: That's all right. It's honest.
Steve Gabel: Yeah, it's not a grain fed steak. It's not a grain fed burger. Is there a marketplace that it'll satisfy? Probably, but at the end of the day, demand is what's going to dictate their survival, and as long as the government keeps their nose out and we all get to compete in a purely supply and demand driven market, we'll soon know whether or not there is a market for the alternative proteins.
Amy Scott: Reminds me a lot of the argument we heard from Arye and Justin from the cultivated salmon company Wildtype about wanting to compete with beef in the market but not being able to because of bans in Florida and Texas–the government hasn't exactly kept its nose out. The beef industry is heavily subsidized, according to a report last year from the Government Accountability Office between 2018 and 2023 the biggest livestock feeding operations received more than $12 billion in federal assistance.
Magnum might be an outlier when it comes to transparency. In the course of this reporting, we reached out several times to a couple other feed lots in the area. They never responded. As open as Steve was, I couldn't stop thinking about Stemple Creek, how much more idyllic and natural the operation seemed. I wanted to know what Loren Poncia made of Michael Grunwald's efficiency argument that pasture-raised cattle and regenerative farming could actually be worse for the climate.
Loren Poncia: Absolutely, the feedlot is more efficient in terms of speed and economy and turning out more protein in a short amount of time. But what about all the inputs that go into the animal. They're all super petroleum based. It's petroleum based fertilizers. It's petroleum based equipment that are harvesting them. It's petroleum based transportation to get this stuff all over the country, and it's zero photosynthesis. So in my opinion, I'm a friendly guy, but like, we could pick a fight about this, because he's missing the facts of reality. The dance with Mother Nature is like, no, it is way better to do the way nature intended. And most of the cattle that are raised grass fed are not great. Are not raised on the Super, Ultra Concentrated best farmland. They're raised in the hills where you can't grow anything anyway, and we're using water that falls from the sky. It's not like we're pumping water out of the ground to feed these cows. This is natural blue water that came out of the sky. It's not pumping it up and feeding it, you know. So I think it's misdirected.
Amy Scott: Loren likes to remember back five to six years ago, when Covid first spread.
Loren Poncia: What happened to the skies above China during Covid, you remember?
Amy Scott: They cleared.
Loren Poncia: Why did they clear?
Amy Scott: They weren't burning.
Loren Poncia: We weren't burning. Yeah, we weren't burning fossil fuels faster than we were photosynthesizing. But there's so many people that think cows are the problem. Cows are the reason why global warming is happening. Cows are the reason why deforestation is happening. And that's really not true when you look at it. Sure, there's some bad actors that that's adding to it, but the big majority of it is cows or ruminants are nature's way of the natural carbon cycle. So when Covid happened, we didn't go kill all the cows and the sky turned blue, but we did quit doing all of the human activities that we'd been doing previously to the point where we were burning fossil fuels faster than we're sequestering carbon. So it's like, okay, this is like, are you trying to confuse me with the facts, or are you a PR company for a huge conglomerate that sells oil? Because if I was a PR company, I'd be saying, oh, cows are the problem, cows are the problem, cows are the problem. When really the problem is burning fossil fuels with consumerism faster than we're sequestering carbon through the atmosphere via photosynthesis.
Amy Scott: Loren is very clear-eyed about conventional agriculture's role in the world. Before taking over his family's ranch, he worked for Monsanto and later sold veterinary pharmaceuticals. He says he knows that without factory farms, a lot of people would go hungry. But after nearly 15 years of regenerative ranching, he still thinks what he's doing is better.
Loren Poncia: The more chemical inputs we use, the more chemical fertilizer we use, and the more tillage we use, the more damage we do to the environment, all at the benefit of a pharmaceutical company that's selling the stuff. And I worked for them. I know I spent millions of dollars training the educators on how to educate farmers to make their life easier and more efficient and better. And I made a shitload of money doing it, and it's the wrong thing to do for the planet.
Amy Scott: After visiting Loren's beautiful ranch, it's hard not to agree with him, but the uncomfortable reality that I'm still wrestling with is that what's better for the environment, in some ways, isn't necessarily what's best for mitigating the catastrophic impacts of climate change while feeding more and more people. So what does that mean, practically, for you and me? Well, Michael would say, hands down, the absolute best thing you could do for the planet is to stop eating beef and lamb, ruminant animals, altogether. He did, in the midst of his own reporting: the evidence was so strong he felt there was no excuse not to, and if we're not going to do that, though they're far from perfect, he says highly efficient factory operations might be our best bet.
Michael Grunwald: I do think these are the kind of trade-offs and priorities that we're going to have to think about. If you care about emissions, you have to care about how to make Beef better, because that's where the emissions are.
Amy Scott: It's not just beef that we need to produce more efficiently. It's all of our food we need to make more of it with less land. But climate change is making that difficult.
Paul Penner: I've seen yields drop because of drought, and believe me, boy, have I seen him drop?
Amy Scott: We have had dry spells that have lasted years. Coming up on this season of how we survive, we visit America's bread basket, where vital crops like wheat and corn are under serious threat.
Vance Ehmke: All of a sudden, everybody wakes up and oh, my god, we're running out of water. What are we going to do?
Amy Scott: Thanks for listening, and if you like what you're hearing, please rate, review and share us with a friend. Also, we want to hear your questions about food and the climate crisis. You can send a note, or better yet, a voice memo to survive@marketplace.org. We’re going to answer some of your questions in an upcoming episode. I'm Amy Scott. Hayley Hershman produced this episode and is our senior producer. Production support by our intern, Emma Condon. Caitlin Esch is Deputy Managing Editor. She also edited this episode. Scoring, sound design, and mixing by Brian Allison. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Bridget Bodnar is director of podcasts. Kelly Silvera is news director. Joanne Griffith is Chief Content Officer, and Neil Scarbrough is the vice president and general manager of Marketplace.
"How We Survive" Season 9 is supported by Climatize, which offers a way to put your money toward projects that help support the clean energy transition in communities across America. Review project details, learn how each opportunity works, and decide which investments align with your goals. Learn more at climatize.earth/howwesurvive
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