To me, this felt like the right place to begin the conversation. We focus on a lot of major issues faced by farmers. This podcast in no way is pretending to say everything about farming and climate change. I was trying to paint a picture of what farming really looks like and what the reality of our farms is. I strongly believe that when you’re making an audio story, you need to meet the listeners where they are, and what many listeners picture is some storybook version of farming from grammar school, or Old MacDonald. Obviously, people who live in farming communities know plenty of farmers, but people who live in cities? Most of them don’t. When our food is advertised by big companies, they show us these family farms. I think this fantasy of the American farmer lives large in how we think about food. I’m always paying attention to when I’m excited, when I’m interested, when my mind is blown, because if I don’t know something, then chances are the listener won’t either.Īgriculture and climate change is such a vast topic, and you chose to focus on a subset of the agricultural community: farmers who grow crops in the Midwest. So I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t confused, and in the process, hopefully none of our listeners will be confused either. I think a radio producer is a stand-in for the listener, so in many ways it’s a great advantage when you don’t know about something, because you ask-and when you do know something, you forget that other people don’t know it. I talked to farmers, and I just asked questions. How did you go about immersing yourself in this world? Before producing this podcast, you were an outsider to all this yourself. Producer Eve AbramsĪ lot of people don’t know much about where their food comes from, and I thought you did a great job of making agriculture accessible to outsiders. “They’re doing the best they can to do the incredibly important work of feeding us.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. “I think we’ve put an incredible amount of pressure on ,” says Abrams, talking about the series. Over the course of four episodes, Abrams and her team connect with farmers who are quietly changing agriculture as we know it-whether they believe in climate change or not. But if we’re going to tackle climate change, then farmers need to be part of the solution. Crop yields are projected to drop as extreme weather intensifies, potentially upending the global food supply. In the past year, farmers have risked their lives to save their dairy cows from flash floods and fallowed their orchards in the face of record drought. greenhouse gas emissions, and it’s scrambling to adapt to a global crisis it helped create. Focused in the Midwest, we hear from farmers about climate change is affecting them and what they are going to do about it. New Orleans-based producer Eve Abrams spent more than a year working on FERN’s new podcast, Hot Farm.
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