Kaylee Wells

We were worried in the beginning, will they be sleeping on the streets?

Where will they stay?

Everybody wished in, opened up their homes, hoping to get a piece of that.

Cloud seeding has been around since the 1940s.

It involves releasing silver iodide particles into clouds, which cause water to freeze and fall out as snow or rain.

And while the jury's still out on its potential as a water management tool, it's become a global industry nonetheless.

I'm Amy Scott, and this week on the How We Survive podcast, we're talking to Augustus Dorico, a 25-year-old former Teal Fellow and the founder of Rainmaker, a business that's racing to save the Great Salt Lake from collapse.

So is cloud seeding at scale the godsend solution it seems to be?

Find out this week on How We Survive, available on your favorite podcast app.

Tanya Tice runs a seasonal ice cream stand called Barnside Creamery.

She says she owes a lot of its success to bird watching, a hobby she doesn't really know much about at all.

As their birding week festivities have come to be more known and have grown,

So is our business right alongside of it.

Her business is on a rural stretch of road about 25 miles east of Toledo.

She's under a migratory flyway.

And since she's a mile away from the Lake Erie shore, lots of birds stop around here before attempting to cross it, which is why Northwest Ohio is home to the country's largest annual birdwatching festival.

The week of this year's festival, temperatures were in the 50s and it was cloudy, not traditional ice cream weather.

But it's Tice's biggest week of the season, and the local businesses that supply her ingredients know it.

When I call for my orders, they're like, oh, yep, it's birding week because Tanya just talked up.

The biggest week in American Birding Festival brings more than $50 million to northwest Ohio every year.