The 55,000 sq ft underground storage facility is the world's largest underground business complex. MALONE: Many listeners may remember "Saturday Night Live's" Matt Foley, as played by Chris Farley, the world's worst motivational speaker. Some of the cave openings are so big that a big truck can get through them, while others are so tight that it would be challenging even for an earthworm to sneak through. To do so, however, required a serious upfront investment. DUFFIN: (Laughter) That's right. ASCHEBROCK: And you insert it in through the block or the barrel or whatever. In 1949, the Agricultural Act allowed a government agency to buy up dairy products to stabilize prices. Al and Ralph may have influenced food safety labeling and your pizzas cheese. The USDA has a large presence in Kansas City, Missouri, and when it found itself with millions of pounds of surplus dairy and needed a safe, climate-controlled place to put it all, it started to search locally. Makes sense, considering the natural limestone ledge bordering the river. Every weekday we compile our most wondrous stories and deliver them straight to you. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: The great cheese giveaway began today in California. MALONE: This is a cave full of cheese in Kansas City. More Info Directions. DAN CALLAHAN: No, I've never thought about it. MALONE: Even if that bite just looks like some delicious cheese. Theres evidence the second story was a ballroom, complete with a stage, dumbwaiter and box office window. Lamar Hunt, the late founder of the Kansas City Chiefs, is perhaps the most well-known of the cave developers. Have you been inside? Help yourself. Have you fallen in love with amateur spelunking? And so they try to hire more cheese graders. Posted on June 8, 2022 ; in pete davidson first snl episode; by They feature an abundance of ores, as well as hostile mobs that spawn in the darkness. A miner from Colorado named Charles Griffee excavated these caves in the 1880s, but the land was later bought by the Faris family. MALONE: Andy is still in the dairy world. And it's the most government packaging you will ever see - just, like, brown cardboard, some black USDA stamps on it. Today, the National Archives has four underground facilities. Government agents were in uncharted territory. There are these massive columns, and it looks like something the "Lord Of The Rings" dwarves built. Government cheese, as the orange blocks of commodity cheese came to be called, wasnt exactly popular with all of its recipients. NOVAKOVIC: To persuade farmers to produce less. There you go. At Kanopolis park, near the lake of the same name, there's a short trail from a parking area that leads you through the brush into a clearing. It has a grid of 16 feet high, 40 foot wide tunnels separated by 25 foot square limestone pillars created by the room and pillar method of hard rock mining. MALONE: That is right. (Dean Russell/Here & Now) This article is more than 4 years old. MALONE: One part of the solution then was to gently get that milk supply down. give poor Americans a slice of the cheese surplus., exactly popular with all of its recipients. MALONE: One of the ways Carter proposed giving farmers an equal break was to raise the price of milk by about 6 cents per gallon, which was kind of a lot at the time. Starting in 1995, a government nonprofit has promoted a pro-dairy policy - in direct opposition to the Department of Agriculture and government nutritionists. When the Trump administration decided to pay subsidies to farmers hurt by trade, it reminded NPR's Planet Money podcast team about the time another president tried to help farmers. A slice of Kraft cheese is going to be less about. The Missouri River town is known for its charming main drag and castle-like college, Park University. It sounds amazing. The young people do - they say, well, I can't go out with a girl or I can't go out with a guy because I'm on the road all the time. Expand All. HOME; INTERIORS; EXTERIORS; OFFICE & PORTRAITS; PUBLICITY/EVENTS; CONSTRUCTION; INFO The underground industrial park known as SubTroplis opened for business in 1964 in an excavated mine below Kansas City, Mo., attracting tenants with the lure of lower energy costs and cheap rents . [3] The National Archives and Records Administration also leases space for a Federal Records Center. With temperatures maintained at 25F and 35F, staff have nicknamed the space the "Ice Cube." The two larger caves were used by the Faris family as a spring house, generator room and, a schoolhouse as well. Its existence serves as a reminder of Kansas Citys knack for innovative transportation especially as new railways for the streetcar go down all along Main Street. CARTER: But I am in favor of giving farmers an equal break. This little-known cave area in Kansas is the perfect opportunity to explore something that many Kansans might not have heard of before. 2023 Atlas Obscura. Known for its hiking trails (with Missouri River views), wineries and the McCormick distillery, Weston is also home to OMalleys, the oldest bar in Missouri. Family-run for more than a century, this pizzeria makes a unique mustard pie. MALONE: At one point, Donnie Wahlberg of the New Kids On The Block said, quote, "there's nothing like it. And Andy had a ringside seat to it. . This is, you know, important to me. It is an enormous artificial cave situated above the Missouri River. There's a lot of history buried beneath Kansas City streets, from Prohibition-era passageways and underground caves to the oldest bar in Missouri. The former limestone mines house about 400 businesses, many of which specialize in storage or warehousing because they are protected from extreme weather and can boast stable, year-round temperatures and humidity. As the room and pillar mining method is used to extract limestone throughout the Midwest, many companies are looking at ways to utilize the hundreds of millions of square feet created in this manner for everything from mushroom farming to crude oil stockpiling. ASCHEBROCK: Nope. No? YOU CAN, Argentina's El Impenetrable Opens Up New Options For Its People, How Laos Got Its First Buffalo Dairy Farm, How the Capones Strong-Armed Their Way Into the Dairy Business, The French Art of Cheese-Label Collecting, The Last Cheesemakers of the Eastern Himalayas, Show & Tell: Inside a House of Hot Sauce With Vic Clinco, The Secret to China's Bounciest Meatballs. The program is meant to "purchase Mozzarella, Process and Natural American Cheddar Cheese for the National School Lunch Program and other Federal food nutrition assistance programs." The Heim family owned property all over Kansas City at the turn of the century, including breweries called Rochester and Imperial, as well as the one in East Bottoms. KCUR serves the Kansas City region with breaking news and powerful storytelling. All our area around here - everybody had cheese. MALONE: You were hired as someone to show up with a metal thing ASCHEBROCK: Not - no, no, no. Caves . This little-known cave area in Kansas is the perfect opportunity to explore something that many Kansan's might not have heard of before. 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But milk doesn't store well, so the government bought other dairy products. NOVAKOVIC: We took a small amount of money from every dairy farmer, collected on every pound of milk they sold, and we created the National Dairy Board. And Congress is like wait - no, we also love the farmers. By 1984, the U.S. storage facilities contained 1.2 billion pounds, or roughly five pounds of cheese for every American. And the European Union has a long, scandalous history of accumulating butter mountains, wine lakes, and milk lakesthe latter of which consisted of vast quantities of skim milk powder housed in warehouses in Germany, Belgium, and France. All rights reserved. So they created a brand-new special program to give the cheese away through food banks. MALONE: The government of the United States of America had caves full of cheddar cheese. No, it isn't money but actually cheese, 1.4 billion pounds of it to be exact, stored in a cave in Missouri. Missouri's caves can . MALONE: So a campaign promise - that's what we call those. The net result of that was overcompensating in using this program to help out farmers, to the point where we wound up creating the most massive dairy surplus in U.S. history.. DUFFIN: In the pantheon of milk-related economic disasters, there is one that rises above the rest. Pour the dissolved yeast into the well and add enough warm water to make a soft dough. And while it might take up two stories above the ground, co-owner Heather Hamilton wonders if there are remnants of a tunnel leading out of the basement. is cottonseed oil safe for nut allergy Cave Tours Missouri, long known as the "Cave State," has almost 6,400 caves, and Missouri State Parks showcases four of the best for public tours. The New York Times declared that the bill would give poor Americans a slice of the cheese surplus.. NOVAKOVIC: It's really hard to balance what you want to do socially or politically with what you can get away with economically. Kenny Malone has the epic tale of government cheese. I mean ASCHEBROCK: We had cheese in every cold storage in the United States, including the caves in Kansas that were full of that stuff. Currently 5,000,000 square feet is occupied and 10,000,000 square feet are "improved.". NOVAKOVIC: So you can imagine, you know, you don't just kind of roll down one of these barrels down Seventh Avenue in New York City and say, anybody want some cheese? All rights reserved. You just have to follow us on Instagram. MALONE: (Laughter) And you just have a big knife. MALONE: This footage is amazing - just massive crowds of people being handed bricks of cheese. Nevertheless, dairy surpluses still very much exist. And it is also very cold - good for the government cheese, though. It has a grid of 16ft (4.9m) high, 40ft (12m) wide tunnels separated by 25ft (7.6m) square limestone pillars created by the room and pillar method of hard rock mining.