FERN’s Friday Feed: Where crop insurance is a hot mess
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Why are we paying for crop failures in the desert?
FERN and The New Republic
“In mid-July in Phoenix, a man demonstrated to a local news station how to cook steak on the dashboard of his car. The city sweltered through a nearly monthlong streak of 110-degree temperatures this summer, while heat records are tumbling across the Southwest,” writes Stephen Robert Miller. “But despite the signs that this is the new normal, farmers in the region are planting the same thirsty crops on the same parched land in the desert, and watching them wither year after year. And why not? The American taxpayer is covering their losses. Research released in June by the Environmental Working Group shows that, since 2001, heat linked to climate change has driven $1.33 billion in insurance payouts to farmers across the Southwest for crops that failed amid high temperatures.”
The food tubes that feed spy plane pilots
Popular Science
“When an Air Force pilot flies a U-2 aircraft, they wear a full pressure suit and helmet … The plane is known for … its ability to soar at heights significantly higher than commercial airliner cruising altitudes. The U-2 can operate, according to an Air Force fact sheet, ‘at altitudes over 70,000 [feet],’ and the suit the aviators wear exists to protect them,” writes Rob Verger. “Someone wearing a sealed pressure suit can’t exactly grab a protein bar to gnaw on if they get hungry. That’s where the tube food and the straw-like probe comes into play. The pilot, who can heat the tube in the cockpit, puts the probe through a small portal in the helmet, allowing them to get sustenance while staying protected within the envelope of the sealed suit.”
Eat like a 19th-century lumberjack
Atlas Obscura
“Deep in the mid-winter Maine woods in 1902, a young chemist persuaded six lumberjacks to be his lab rats. For one 18-meal work week, he cataloged every scrap of food the men were about to eat, then he collected all the relevant feces, sealing them in ‘museum jars’ and freezing them in a snowbank cache. With the cooperation of the camp cook, he also assembled and froze samples of every type of food served to the men,” writes Paula Marcoux. “The research was part of an early wave of metabolism and digestion studies that would become foundational to the nascent field of Nutrition Science. But it also provides an incredibly detailed portrait of the diets of lumberjacks at the turn of the century. The study’s subjects were Canadian migrants in their late 20s who were supremely physically fit, spending long days doing ‘severe work under more or less trying conditions,’ as the study’s authors put it.”
Climate change confounds farmers
The New York Times
“This single field, just 160 acres of Kansas dirt, tells the story of a torturous wheat season,” writes Mitch Smith. “One side is a drought-scorched graveyard for grain that never made it to harvest. Near the center, combines plod through chest-high weeds and underwhelming patches of beige wheat, just enough of it to make a harvest worthwhile. And over by the tree line, the most tantalizing wheat beckons like a desert mirage. The grain there is flourishing, the beneficiary of a late-season shift from dry to drenching. But it will never be collected: The ground is too waterlogged to support the weight of harvesting equipment. ‘It really doesn’t get any crazier than right here, right now,’ says the farmer of that land, Jason Ochs.”
Dinner theater and delusion in ‘Baptist Vegas’
Eater
“There’s no way to make someone feel more catered to, more served, especially en masse, than to entertain them while feeding them,” writes Amy McCarthy. “This kind of immersive service demands a perfect, relentless veneer of cheeriness from the city’s performers and servers, many of whom struggle to find affordable housing in the city where they work. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a singing magician try to prod a bunch of uncomfortably sober octogenarians into a gag that requires audience participation. What is less compelling, though, is the sense of insidious nostalgia that permeates Branson [Missouri] and its attractions. Whether it’s the 1800s at Stampede or the rockin’ ’50s at Mel’s Hard Luck Diner, the message is clear: Branson offers a wholesome, clean alternative to the sin-riddled entertainment that’s being pumped into our homes every single day via the television and our cell phones. But what, exactly, does wholesome mean in a place like Branson?”