The Resistance of a Cow

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Yeah. Hope you're having fun. Have a great time. I'm having a ball. Great.

So, today's Simon and I... We have a weird... A weird story. Okay. I'm very excited that that was your reaction.

I feel like this mystery does start to people. Like people are like... What? What are you talking about? All right.

So, this story first came to us from...

My name is Clara Grunnell. Clara Grunnell. I'm a Danish journalist. Should I say more? Yeah, like how are you?

I'm very happy, very ecstatic and excited. I can tell. The enthusiasm has been made for it. That's just the Danish way, right? No, no.

So, Clara lives in works in Copenhagen.

“It's been a long day, but honestly, this is definitely the highlight.”

So, I am excited. She works for this audio journalism company called Zetland. We produce audio stories, features and news. Yeah. Well, first question is, like, how the heck did you come upon this?

Um... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the first thing that really happened was that we have this internal work.

You select in one of our channels. This guy, one of our colleagues posted at article with the headline. Let me see if I can find it. Okay. So, it's just...

Mystic on that little potence galenpol. Keona Nick Dardreg. Translation. A mystery about the water on Danish farms. The cows refuse to drink.

Okay. Cows refuse to drink water. Yeah. A little strange. Uh-huh.

But as she keeps reading this article. I was just like, this seems like something's very... awful. So, Clara grabs a colleague. Put it like...

And the two of them, why do we have him? Drive out of Copenhagen. See some windmills. Out in the countryside.

“You'll see those everywhere, especially out there.”

It's mostly just flat farmland. Of just grass and nothing else. He comes with some. And after a couple hours, they pull off the road onto this little gravel driveway.

Where sitting there waiting for them is... Grigas. Grigas. Grigas. Grigas.

Hi. The man whose cows won't drink. Hi. He's about in his early forties. With a sweatshirt, with a lot of like,

a painting stains on his daughter boots. And we're like, "Hi." Yeah. Could have got to say it to us. And Clara says, "Almost like immediately."

Hi. Yeah, boy. Yeah, boy. Yeah, boy. I bought a fictisk fiend.

He was just like, "I don't know what to do." I'm about to sell all of my cows. This is my life's work. Clara said he almost seemed a little bewildered. He was something wrong here.

Yeah. So the three of them walked down this path through this grassy field to the barn. Big red barn with a tin roof. And he starts rolling up the door. And we're like, "Not really show what to expect."

And then... Grigas opens the door. We go in... And there's about 200. Reddish cows.

Sort of just standing around in the barn. And, you know, immediately, it's not super clear to us that they're not well, but he's like, "Come with me over to the water." So to the table and you storm-tay. And the cows come over and you sort of see them sniffing the water.

But they never touch it. And then something weird happens. All of the cows... They start pissing. They start urinating.

And then, they start drinking. What? I do. The cows start drinking each other's piss. The moment a cow starts peeling.

All these other cows will immediately run over. And turn their head to sort of like catch the piss in there. Like it shoots out. I mean...

You're never seen a cow pee.

It's like a waterfall. Like a bubbler or a water fountain. A water fountain. Yeah. All these cows drinking from each other.

And Clar said, "If a cow wasn't peeing, another cow would come over and start licking it's behind." And then, like, "Oh, they do that to get them to pee, because they're so thirsty." And Clar turned the greatest.

And she's like... Is this normal in any way? Like, is this normal cow behavior? And he's like, "No."

So they don't trust mom. It's not normal.

“He's formed his whole life as father before him.”

I've never seen cows do this before.

But how long has this been happening? So apparently, like, months, months? Yeah, months? But how are they... Like, how are they surviving?

Like, how are they surviving? Yeah. Well, Greg said he could get the cows to drink water that he brought from off site. But cows drinking insane amount of water in a day.

It's something like 150 pounds worth of water. Cold into a cow a day. He was like, "I can't bring them water all the time." So he ran tests on the barn water and clean water. Yeah.

Nothing wrong with it. Totally clean. Weird. He was super disparate. He told Clara, he felt like he was running out of options. And so he started asking other farmers like, "What should he do?"

And some people are like, "Hmm, yeah. It maybe you should contact Gita." Gita? Yeah. She's like the cow whisperer.

Uh, not quite. Gita is the person who's famous and then my call when they have no one else to turn to. So Greg is called Gita. And she comes out.

She's about in her 60s. Great, short hair. And apparently she has brought with her a copper wire. A long copper wire. And also this gold chain.

Like a little pendulum, which is swinging. And she starts going around the farm. Dangling this little gold pendulum around the water trough around the cows. And then suddenly she just freezes, looks up and turns away. Walks very fast over to her car and drives away.

Like I'm out of here. I need to get out of here. It's farm and possessed. I mean, she drives away. And Greg is like, "What the fuck?

Like, what is this?"

“And she calls, "Gita, I think the next day or something."”

And it's like, "Hey, so you, there's still some of your stuff here. What's going on?"

And she's just like, "You'll have to mail me my stuff because I'm never going back.

So the place ever again." What did she say more than that? What what she said is that when she was near the barn, she detected this energy. This horrible energy that was coursing through Greg's farm.

That she believed was coming from. This like, huge... Cita. Okay, yeah. Building.

Picture almost like a Walmart, but black. But these big, like, Viking rooms? Yeah. Viking link. It's a power station called Viking link.

That receives all of the energy that comes from the UK to Denmark. And then sends that energy across Denmark. And it sits right next to Greg's farm. And so what Gita is convinced of is that the big black box next to the barn is sending out so much electricity. Somehow, that electricity is getting into the water on Greg's farm and shocking the cows.

What? This is like a Twin Peaks episode. This is crazy. What are you talking about? This is Gita's theory.

This sounds like nonsense. I know. Is any of this physically possible?

“Well, this is where things get even weirder.”

So... I think we got a mystery on our hands. Clara and her colleague. Oh, yeah. And we start to their office.

And we start googling. Like, is this a unique thing to this guy? If this is something that other people have experienced. And she starts googling and finds out that this is not only happening at Greg's farm. No, that's what we're first of all.

She finds another farmer in Denmark. On the other side of the lake, he's whole nose. His cows won't drink water. They're drinking each other's pee. Yo, man, they're going home.

Then another farmer in Denmark, same thing. We quickly found that it was the same story again and again. Farmer's whose cows stopped drinking water and started drinking their pee. But either live next to power lines or power station. And as Clara kept looking into this, she realized that this wasn't something that was just happening in Denmark.

You don't let that happen already. It was also happening in the United States. Come on in. Okay, okay. So, she hears about this farmer named Jill Nelson.

Things just from Minnesota. Yeah, it was like, okay, yeah. A dairy farmer in Southwest Minnesota. Like, you've got a family that's been on this farm for how long. Yeah, so my family's been on the farm here since 1884.

And I'm the fifth generation. And she said she started noticing problems with her cows long before Gregor's way back in 2008. I started noticing that cows were becoming more reluctant to come into the parlor. Her cows didn't want to come into the milking parlor where they all get milked. Like, they would get really fidgety around the entrance to the parlor.

And kind of jump into the parlor. Which was odd. Yeah. And then she started noticing the kind of telltale sign. They started lapping at the water, not, you know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink.

For cows suddenly didn't want to drink. And they would walk over to a puddle of urine and drink that dry.

It was really, I've never seen anything like it before.

I just thought, this isn't normal. This isn't right.

Some things wrong here. Jill said she remembered this thing she had heard of called stray voltage. What did you hear about stray voltage? Um, I just, I had some customers in Wisconsin that had gone through it. Where they had told Jill that they had electricity that had gotten into their cows.

One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. And I was actually back in Wisconsin this past summer. All right. Here we are at the Baron County Fairgrounds at a county fair for each fair is underway. And I just went around asking dairy farmers.

“Have you ever dealt with stray voltage on your farm?”

Almost every single one of them was like, yes.

Oh, yeah. I know, was stray voltage way back when they didn't know what stray voltage was. Every one of them had been either affected by it or knew someone who'd been affected by it. Get give me a number of your 200, 300? Well, I used to do one a day.

And actually Matt and I talked to this dairy electrician. Yeah. Again, name Larry Newbauer. Who told us the number of stray voltage cases he's worked on? I would have to say probably close to over 4,000 to 5,000. What?

Yeah. We found cases of stray voltage reported in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Idaho.

Basically, it farms all over the country where what is happening these farmers say is that electricity is getting out of the cables.

The cables that are in the ground near their farm, somehow.

“And finding the path of least resistance to their farms where they have concrete with rebar.”

They have metal. They have water. And this electricity is getting up into that stuff and into their cows. The stray voltage is horrible. It will destroy you. And some of these farmers that we talk to told us about how it starts with them not drinking water. And when they don't drink water, they don't eat. And if they stop eating, that's it. There's nothing you can do. You can't force feed a cow.

They kind of starve themselves to death. We heard of cows getting so weak. They couldn't stand back up. I feel like giving up. You know, they have a good cow just died before your eyes. Cow is that we're born with birth defects. You just didn't want to go to the barn after a while.

I didn't know at any morning or any moment what I would find when I went out to the barn. We were talking cows that had died overnight or what. And that happened a couple of times. I wish. My son's favorite cow and she was my favorite cow.

She literally died right in front of me. When that happened, that was it. I knew that I couldn't, I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't, I couldn't do it. We heard stories about dairy farmers going bankrupt after their cows started dying, stopped producing milk.

But then we also heard how none of this is really happening. It's after the break. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Guys, it's tax season. Are you as stoked as I am? No. No, of course you aren't.

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Okay, welcome back. This is Radio Lab.

I like it. I take that.

“Yes, so we left off with basically you have thousands of farmers who have claimed to have experienced this thing called stray voltage.”

Right. Who end up being told like, no, that's actually now what's happening. And there's next part of the story. Yes, it is. Kind of a little bit of a history lesson of electricity.

Okay. It's kind of a story about our relationship with electricity. And I think to understand that. To understand that, we have to go back, Matt. Yeah, lots of...

What we do. What is electricity? And why does it come from? To understand that, we have to invoke a cliché. Yes.

So, it's a birth of electricity in America really start with Ben Franklin and a kite. No. So, to take us back, we talked to... Hi, I'm Richard Hirsch. I'm a professor of history of science and technology.

Richard Hirsch? From Virginia Tech. And also... David Nye. I'm a professor in Denmark.

David Nye.

“These are a bunch of books on energy and electricity.”

Which, of course, is why I'm being interviewed, I guess, for this program. Okay. Turns out electricity in America is a little bit after Ben Franklin. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

It didn't really get going until about 1800.

When scientists first started figuring out how to make batteries, how to make generators,

so that we could actually create our own electricity. And do things with it, like, send it down the wire. And then turn that electricity on and off. To create a coat. Which is the Morris Code.

And suddenly, you could send a message from California to New York. You're, like, that nearly at the speed of light. So they suddenly realize electricity's got this sort of almost magical power. But first message ever sent by telegraph? What have got rocked?

So, 1830, you get the telegraph. 1876. Alexander Graham Bell. Patents the telephone. Which seems to work nicely.

And also, in the 1870s, you get light. Most importantly, that is its light bulb. And it was pretty wild stuff. Because up to that time, all of human history, light and fire were the same thing.

“You couldn't have fire without light or light without fire.”

If you saw a light, it automatically meant something was burning. And when the electric light came along, David says light bulb makers would have these public demonstrations. For example, they pick up the light bulb in their hand and hold it.

Something you could just never do with fire.

Then they take the light bulb and turn it upside down. The fire, the flame always wants to go up. But now you could blink the light. It's going, oh, it's amazing. And at the end of the demo, the demonstrator would take the light bulb and smash it in the light.

Immediately it goes out. Now, you don't have to worry about your house burning down if you knock over a carousine lamp, for example. Now, you have safe, controllable, electric light. Yeah.

I mean, the capitalist can see that this is going to make money. And, in fact, on Pearl Street in New York City, down in the financial district. Oh, oh, it's right here. I have a picture of myself and my wife next to a plaque.

Should we take a selfie together? Yeah. It's a big metal plaque. You 1882. Like three feet tall, two feet wide.

Above the text, we have an etching of five or six generators. Men standing about turbines. Got electrical wires seemingly running out of the turbines.

The plaque to commemorate the first large-scale power plant.

The birthplace of power. In the world. This is the place. And so down there in Lower Manhattan. This is where it began.

You had electric light. The stock exchange had it. The apartments to our railway stations. Factories that could run at night had it. The wealthy suppressed each thing.

They had it. So it starts there. It starts spreading. Lights up. It's spread from New York to Boston from Detroit to Chicago.

Lights up north. So east west. How to farm rural schools home. New lines going up almost everywhere. At the rate of 500 miles a day.

The whole country lighting up. And then Edison and others came up with. So smart. To own an automatic dishwasher. Appliances.

Electric stove. Refrigerators. Fans. The complete electric laundry. The motor.

Electric razor. Radios. Not water. Factome cleaners. Water heaters.

So by the time you get to the 1960s. We've become dependent on electrical power. The whole country is humming. And buzzing. With electricity.

We like it because it's clean. It's inexpensive. And it will do almost any work you can think of. And this becomes a problem. Because as more and more people move to the cities.

The cities begin demanding more and more electricity. And so power companies to meet this demand. Let's start to build more and more. Oil and gas could be here in quantity. Oil plants, gas plants, coal plants.

Nuclear power plants. To generate more electricity.

“And to get that electricity to the cities.”

Power companies began building these huge towers that you see out in the countryside. That had power lines that were carrying more electricity than we'd ever seen before. Power lines that had to cut through. Look out on the pasture and see power lines growing. Farmlands.

And for a lot of farmers across America. Farmers angry about a power line being built through their fields. They hated that. Farmers still don't want a high power to electric line across their land. Farmers are fighting construction of the power line on their land.

And one of the most famous examples of this is called the Power Line Protests, which was in the 70s in Western Minnesota. Western Minnesota farmers have resisted the high voltage power line with harsh words, lawsuits, and sporadic clashes with sheriff deputies. Trying to protect survey and construction crews.

Farmers shot up components of thousands of power lines. They managed to topple towers by touching out the legs of them. They ended up toppling like 15 of these towers. And a lot of it had to do with a concern about electricity. Farmers like John Trip want to know why Minnesota said it was okay for the power line

to pass over his fields and cows. But not over state wildlife preserves or school bus stops. They are tipping us off that this line is dangerous to us, to our families, and to our farm animals. Were they dangerous? Like had there been safety testing for the technology before it was deployed?

Yeah, they've been testing done to make sure that the lines were safe and insulated. And you know, things like that. But the idea here is that there was just this ambient concern. That there was something wrong about these power lines.

“If you want to do some research, I remember seeing photographs of people holding up fluorescent light bulbs.”

Underneath high voltage transmission lines. And the lights would light up. Really? Oh yeah. The electric fields were so intense underneath the power lines that the bulb illuminated.

That's wild. Yeah, I my mother-in-law lived near some power lines.

And I always thought, well, I don't want to live there.

And so what happened was after these power lines started going up. And they were these protests in the 70s and Minnesota. One state over in Wisconsin farmers started complaining that all the sudden their cows are getting sick. Their cows aren't drinking water. And they actually start finally lawsuits against the power companies.

Saying this is because of you because electricity is getting out into the ground, into our farms, into our cows. Yeah. And they start to win those lawsuits.

“Like I think you said Matt that one of them that it was like a million dollar payout for a farm.”

They argued that the losses were in the milk productivity of their cattle due to this stray voltage. Those were like jury trials probably. Yeah. And who? What was the sort of caliber of the scientific experts?

I don't know. Like wondering whether it was like a really strong emotional appeal that one of those lawsuits or was it like, No, there's like very clear connect the dots here. Boop it a boop it a boop it a boop. I mean, they have electricians come out and conduct tests that show their electricity in the farm.

But this is part of the problem is there aren't.

There aren't really experts on this. And there aren't really standards at this point. And so the state of Wisconsin because of these lawsuits is like, Oh God, we got to figure this out. We got to figure out what's going on. What's acceptable for even electricity to be like in the ground or on the farm.

And so the Department of Agriculture in the state of Wisconsin creates a 1986 a stray voltage task force, which ends up getting in touch with this guy. Doug Reineman, professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin Madison Doug works on milking machines in the modern context robotic milking machines. But back in the 1990s, I was asked to investigate concerns about stray voltage.

No, had you heard of stray voltage before? No, no, not really. And so what was your first reaction to the idea? Well, my first reaction is to find out more about it. So Doug goes and reads whatever you can find.

And what he finds is that stray voltage did not begin in Wisconsin. No, actually the earliest reports. They'd back to the early 1960s on the other side of the world in New Zealand. And what were the reports? It's a really interesting story in New Zealand at that time.

It was sort of the tradition for dairy farmers to go barefoot. So these farmers would be milking their cows. Not wearing any shoes or boots. And when they touched something like the metal pale or the metal water trough, they felt the tingle. Electricity somewhere on that farm.

Getting up into them.

First documenting case people out on farms.

But then Doug sees their reports we mentioned in North America. York, Pennsylvania, all of them involving cows. Cows behavior strangely, cows not producing milk. So what Doug starts to do is design a study to investigate a very specific question,

Hmm.

Can I stop you for a second?

Yeah, yeah. Why are we talking about cows? Why not any other animals? Like why not go to a chick? Yeah.

Well, so Doug explained to us that cows, there's a couple things. They're often in wet environments. So cows spend a ton of time on wet concrete. Hmm. And also are drinking, as we said, just a ton of water, which are both highly highly conductive.

Yeah. And then the other reason is actually because cows are bigger.

“Simple as what I think about this is cows are bigger.”

So they're like a bigger wire. So it's easier for electricity to pass through them. Oh, no. But anyway, UW Madison, they've got a lot of cows. Something like 500 cows.

And one by one, Doug and his team would take a cow into a barn stall. The specially designed stall. The cow would stay on this fancy scale. So we could measure when the cows shifted their body weight. When they would flinch.

And then they would take an electrode, clip it to the snout of the cow. And then clip four more electrodes, one to each hoof. Turn on a tiny little generator and send a small little pulse of electricity. Through the cow. Like 10 pulses.

And then watch. From there, they'd increase the electricity a little bit more. And a little bit more. And a little bit more.

And then we would see the cow basically move.

And they might move a hoof. They might move their head. They might move an ear. Generally is a fairly subtle response. The tiny little indication of the cow feels something that it might not like.

Yeah. And they keep doing this until they get to the point where most of the cows are doing something. Like a little head twitch or a little lake kick. Something that shows they're reacting. And so at what point is that?

“So if you want to imagine what the cow experiences put a nine volt battery on your tongue.”

That's the sort of experience. Which I did for this story. For this story. You're telling me this is safe. He is now going to place the battery on his tongue.

I'm sort of nervous. I know I am actually scared to. Oh yeah. That's no fun. Okay.

What do you feel? Oh, it's like it's almost like something really cold touching your tongue for a second. Yes. Oh, that's not bad. Hey.

Yeah. What do you tell me? It's often experienced as a thermal sensation. I'd say he reacted a little stronger than warrant it. But you haven't even done it.

So how could you say that? Yeah. I'm too scared too. But the nine volt analogy works. The coldness.

Except the coldness has to be so bad that P is better than that. Right. And they're not even saying that. They're just saying at nine volts. This is what we have started to see behavioral changes.

Adverse behavioral changes. Right. And so what the state of Wisconsin does is they set the threshold for what is an acceptable level of stray voltage of electricity on the farm below that. Okay.

Okay. So now Doug also says if you take that threshold and you take that out into the real world into farms, which in the state of Wisconsin since 1990, there have been over 9,000 stray voltage investigations conducted by the state. You find that less than 3% of farms ever hit this threshold.

Oh, weird. And again, that threshold, that's just for behavior. You know, one of the reasons we spend a lot of time looking at behavior because it is the most sensitive indicator. Like, if electricity is harming a cow, hurting a cow, the first thing you're going to notice is some change in the cows behavior. But of course, we looked at milk production.

We looked at water intake. We looked at things like feed consumption and things on, you know, blood chemistry. We did like all kinds of things. And what they found is that the amount of electricity it takes to get a cow to stop drinking water or to mess up its immune system or have all these infections is so much electricity that out on a farm.

Like, you're just not going to find this unless it's a real serious problem.

Yeah, why are, why are we always break?

You know, hopefully not often, but there's always the possibility that the electrical system can be damaged. But, you know, Doug says in the rare case that does happen, you get a lot of stray voltage. Find it and fix it. It's not hard to find and it's not hard to fix.

“But then if it's not electricity, what is happening with the cows?”

Like, why are they not drinking water and yes drinking pee? Well, there can be a thousand different issues of what's going on. And you just simply got to look through those. So we talked to a veterinarian. Dr. Don Sanders, Dr. veterinary medicine.

How many years did you practice event? Wow, and don told us from his 50 years what he'd mostly seen. Is cows drinking urine is when they lack potassium in their diet. Cows will turn to drinking pee if they don't have enough minerals like potassium.

That generally is the major reason for a drinking urine. I guess I'm also a little surprised. Like, the, I don't know, I'm sure I'm deficient. I know I'm deficient in vitamin D, I don't know. I'm sure there are dozen things that I don't have enough of.

And yet I'm not going around drinking urine.

“But why, why is it that these cows are so sensitive?”

Let me, let me sow something out to stir the pot a little.

Basically, don't explain that these cows being milk

are not just average animals. They have been bred to be more like high performance athletes. And so if they're diet is not perfectly dialed in, things will go bad. And it won't be all at once. It'll be when it's been that way for several months or maybe even longer.

And then you start to get immune problems, other infections or even pedrick. Exactly. Okay, I get that. But that doesn't explain the not drinking water part. Right.

So remember a farmer in Minnesota, Jill Nelson, how she said. And then they started lapping at the water. Her cows started lapping at the water, not drinking normally. Yeah. You know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink.

They slurp it up.

So in a talking to this guy, Nigel Cook.

He's another professor at UW Madison. In the school of Atlanta, medicine.

“So he said, okay, so take a cow lapping water.”

Oh my God, we've got stray voltage because the cows are lapping the water as normal. You could go to 100% of farms and find cows that lick and lap and play with water. And he also said a dairy cow when she's not eating or being milk. She sort of just like standing around in a barn. And she's looking for other things to do.

As Nigel put it, they like hobbies. How's like doing stuff? And one of those things is hanging around water troughs and playing with water. And he also told us that cows are just like very social animals. They have social dynamics, hierarchies.

Cows will sometimes stand in the water trough and they'll kind of be dominant around it. They'll kind of shoe other cows away or they can be really sensitive to overcrowding. We've certainly been in the barns where instead of three to four inches of trough perimeter space per cow,

which is our design recommendation.

Now we have two. That makes a difference to water access. I guess what I'm wondering though is if you look at the cases of stray voltage, like some of them start in North America and the late 70s and the 80s, and then like really pick up in the 90s.

And so what I'm wondering is like clearly something happened or it was happening with cows. Well, what worked out what was going on in the 90s. Yeah, so let's take Wisconsin when I arrived in 1999. We had 25,000 dairy herds and most of them were tystals.

What's the tystall? If you've driven around the upper Midwest, they're little red barns. Those are tystals. And natural explained in a tystall, what you have is each individual cow. Can find in a single stall.

Tied to that stall. So she lived in that stall. She fed in front of the stall. She had a little water cup in front of every stall. And so the job of a dairy farmer was deliver feed, scoop the poop out in the morning,

and milk the cow twice a day. So relatively simple cow management, where you could see if a cow wasn't eating enough. Or wasn't drinking enough. You could pick up a sick cow.

But in the 90s, as cost were rising, margins, tight mean dairy farmers started modernizing. They started to build milking parlors. So you're not milking them in the stall. You're bringing them over the parlor where you're milking them together with more elaborate milking machines. And now, because you can milk more cows more efficiently,

you don't need that old red tie stall barn. Instead, you need a new bigger barn. What's called a freestyle? So they're free to move around. Now you can house more cows.

They're not chained in a stall anymore. Which means now, instead of feeding a cow individually. You feed a group of cows. You make the cows all drink from the same water trough as a group, which cuts costs.

It cuts labor. And so now. Now you can have 150 cows, 250 cows, 500 cows, 1000 cows. Now we're building 20,000 cow dairies. And I just as in that transition to bigger dairy farms.

Some of these farmers just couldn't make it. And life became very difficult for them. And somebody comes along and says, well, this problem's because you built the wrong barn, and you're not a very good manager. You're not feeding the cows properly.

It's not necessarily what a farmer wants to hear. That I'm not very good at managing my cows. And they probably were very good at managing their cows in a tight stall. Where they grew up, where their fathers and grandfather's managed cows. So that's a better pill to swallow.

“Where as somebody could go on your farm and say, hey, I think you got stray voltage.”

It's somebody else's problem. It's the utilities problem. Now you have somebody to blame.

And it's not your fault.

It's somebody else's fault.

And I would say, you come and milk my cows and tell me that. Because I know I know my cows, I know that this is affecting them. And I really love my cows. And I feel, I mean, I'm their caretaker. So when you're not able to take care of them, it was really hard.

And it was really hard on my husband because when the cows would get to the point where, you know, they were just suffering. We'd have to put him down and he was the one they had to do that. So yeah, when you stop crying because you're putting a cow down, you know, it's been. It's been a lot.

So Jill stood her power company and I didn't read into his court documents. And in them, the power company's making a lot of the same arguments that we just heard that the electricity found on Jill's farm didn't meet the threshold. How a lot of the problems on Jill's farm started after she built this big milking parlor. She had increased her herd size. They made arguments about how her feed composition wasn't right, how the milking machines were causing infections.

But also, there's this other argument taking place in these documents about something that's very tricky, but very fundamental to this whole story, which is what is the resistance of a cow? What? We will get to. Is the resistance of a cow?

“That's what we're going to get to when we come back from break.”

This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, why so many Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel? Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is, but the state of Israel has to be reinvented. And it cannot be reinvented according to this kind of ethno-nationalist principle that has taken hold of it. Historian Omar Bartoff, on his book Israel, what went wrong? That's in the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC.

Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, here we are. I'm back with the diamond dozen Matkilti and Simon Adryr. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we left off with the question, what is the resistance of a cow?

Feels epic. I'd say, somehow. It kind of is. Okay. Explain.

Well, okay, sort of physics 101 here, electricity 101. Love it. So when it comes to electricity, you're dealing with basically three things. Voltage, current, and resistance.

And these three things are always kind of in relation to one another.

And it's sort of try to help you make sense of that. We're going to do a little analogy, which is, imagine it's springtime. It is actually springtime. I don't really need to imagine. Okay, it's springtime.

Yeah. You're outside. And what do you do in the spring? You tend to your garden. You tend to your garden.

Exactly. And in your garden, in your hand, you have a host. Okay, yep. Here I am. I'm painting this picture for you because the hose is, in fact, quite a nice way to understand

how electricity works.

“So, what do you have at one end of the hose at the house?”

You have the spigot, right? The spigot that can turn the water up or turn the water down. Sure.

So the spigot is basically the voltage.

So, open the spigot way up. You got a lot of volts. Open a little bit. Tiny little bit of volts. Like it's like how much pushes coming out from the beginning.

Yeah. From that, you've got the water that is then actually moving. Right? Yeah. That is your current.

The flow of electricity. Okay. So it stands a reason more volts, more flow, more current, fewer volts, less flow, less current. Totally. Makes sense.

However, there is one final piece to this. This is the important part. Okay. The resistance. The resistance.

Yes. So think that almost like the hose itself. It has a set diameter, a sort of amount of space that the water can flow through. Yeah. So it's like, if you think if you have like a huge wide fire hose or something and you

crank that spigot, you're going to get. But if you have like a sleep apnea. Yeah. Okay. If you have a hose that's like the diameter of like a little tiny straw, like a little

cocktail straw. Okay. It doesn't matter how open that spigot is, how many volts you're trying to shove through there. You're still just going to get a tiny little bit of flow of current.

Correct. Correct. That's why resistance is so important. It affects the flow, the current. How much electricity is actually passing through something?

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So in the real world of electricity, something like rubber. And this stuff gets measured in ohms.

“So we're not going to get into it, but that's what it's measured in.”

Yeah. Rubber is has the resistance of something like 10 to the 13 power ohms.

Yeah. Or the tiniest of straws of straws. Tiniest of straws of straws.

“So very resistance, so I mean, you don't get a lot of current.”

A lot of electricity passing through. Sure. Yeah. And then to keep us going, dry human skin can be about as low as 10,000 ohms. Fibal resistance.

We have very little to no resistance. And then wet human skin can be about a 1000 ohms. Oh, even less. So like nothing. Not not not very much.

We're a one of those like boba straws. Yeah. But now a cow. So back in the 80s and 90s when researchers doing all this work on cows. They came up with a number.

They settled a number. 500 ohms. So less than wet humans. It's like we're yeah. Okay.

So we're we have to take even better care of them. Yeah.

Because they've always been trying to be cautious and conservative for the sake of the cow.

So yeah. They come up with this number. Okay. As they should be. I think as they should.

And so they come up with this number. 500. This is known in the world. 100 ohm cow. The 500 ohm cow.

But the thing is.

“And in my world that just does not exist.”

Okay. There are people like Larry new power that electrician that we heard from earlier in the story. Who's just like. No way. Don't believe it.

It's nowhere's near 500 ohms. Huh. Why does he think that? Well, yet still Larry told us. Well, how is that 500 ohms determined?

How that was determined makes a big difference. Well, the 500 ohms was determined in a stanchion barn. The old milk tie stanchion barn. Have you guys all seen an old stanchion barn? Yeah.

The old school red barn. Right on. One cow on a stall. Right.

Well, today they never get tied up in a tie stall barn.

They're all free. Free stall. It's all free stall barn. Room around now. Yep.

But why should that matter where the cow is? Well, because. So they're explaining in a free stall barn or in a big milking parlor. You have all these cows grouped together. Where they are often coming into contact with this slurry.

A slurry of manure, cow urine and like water or milk. Yeah. And Larry explained that slurry is highly conductive. Is very conductive. And as we already know, when something gets wet,

it's resistance drops. Yeah. It's like a straw that when it gets wet, those straw opens up. Right. It's the same thing here with the cows.

Right. They are becoming bigger electricity straws. Right. That's Larry's theory. The cows are nothing more than like goldfish in a pond.

If I gave you an extension cord, I plugged in the drill. And I said, go walk across the grass here and go drill into that post. Okay. You wouldn't think twice about it. You go over to drill the hole and the post come back.

Right. Yeah. If I gave you that same drill and told you to jump in the pool and go drill out the iron. Post in the pool. Right.

You'd have a second thought about that. Yeah. So what happened was in 2016, these Idaho Dairyman contacted Larry and they're like, Hey, we think we have a stray voltage on our farm. Larry went out there and said, yeah, you do.

And the reason no one will tell you to do is because this whole resistance thing. And so the Idaho Dairyman told Larry,

“Well, how about we do a study trying to determine the resistance of a cow in these free stall barns?”

So we called up Richard Norrell out of the state of Idaho. And they invited me out to do some resistance measurements and cows. So this is Rick. I have a PhD in dairy science. And the reason the grease chat to Rick.

Well, the my PhD collected information on resistance of cows. It's Rick had actually done cow resistance studies back in the 80s. And he's like, sure, I can run this study. And then we had a meeting with the dairy industry with Idaho Power. To be like, can you guys help out?

Can you fund any of this? And Idaho Power brought in. Doug Ryan. No. Are was cousin guy.

Yeah. He was representing Idaho Power as their expert. Interesting. But it's also like Doug is the national expert. Like the go-to person on this.

So if he says thumbs down. Well, then you have quite a help with the climate. If you're going to beat his thumbs down. So he did write a report at the end. Did he thought something was good?

Some maybe not so good. Did Idaho Power sign off on the research? Um, not really. I mean, they sent us a letter and said that they didn't believe we were going to find anything. And they were not going to support it anyway.

Oh, that sounds like I'm pretty different. No. Right. Right. Anyhow, Rick goes out with Dairyman with Larry.

Look at six different Idaho Daries. Modern commercial dairy farms. Where the cows. They're walking in manure. They're all together.

They're wet. They set up all these tests. Where they hook up different electrodes to different parts of the cows. Because they're all just can go from front feed to rear feed. It can go from mouth to all four feet.

Contest the belly of the cow. And that goes out through all four feet. And so they ran all these different tests on like over 170 cows. And ultimately come up with a number. What is that?

200. 200. From 500 to 200. So what does that actually mean?

Well, if you take a 500-owned cow and you put one volt across it, that would be 2 million

2 million amps of current, which is the current threshold.

Well, yeah, according to them at 500. Yeah. If you take a 250-owned cow and you had one volt under the perfect conditions. You'd have 4 million amps through her. So be double.

Be double. It's loud. Right. Right. The Tory threshold.

And if you had a 200-owned cow. Okay. And higher. You'd be even higher. And so the idea here is that if the omage is wrong by a factor of 2.

For most modern day cows, then that means that cows are actually modern day cows are receptive to a much lower level of electricity than the current standards would suggest. In a wet environment like that. Yes.

Based on your studies, if public policy was strictly directed by the scientific evidence,

“should that 500-owned cow be reduced to something closer to a 200-owned resistance?”

I believe it should, but I also believe that my data needs to be published. It needs to be critically evaluated. And I'm sure there'll be some people poking some holes on it. But I think it's pretty good. Do you have a timetable from when you might publish?

I know. The weight of the dairy world is on your shoulders, Rick. I know. I know. And I'm embarrassed to say this.

But when I retired, I packed everything up out of my office that I would need to take along and brought it home. And I had one binder that had lots of important information that I needed to look at. And for the life of me, I cannot find it.

I know I put it in my vehicle to bring it home. But it's just gone. Now, okay, here is everything that we can definitely say at the end of this.

So that 200 number is lost somewhere anywhere in the state of Idaho.

And when I talk to people like Doug Reineman, they're like, look, there's other data out there. Current data looking at freestyle cows that continue to suggest that 500-owned is actually the current number. But that's what still strong.

“That fight is still nobody has changed their mind.”

Yeah. So you have farmers who still believe that the resistance should be lower. But all the data peer reviewed published still points to 500. So the farmers are all like low resistance. Look, like it's getting in our cows.

And then the experts are like, no, it's high resistance. Like you guys, it's not electricity is not your problem, whatever your problem is. Right. Other things we can definitely say.

So where we started this whole story with that guy, Craigus. What happened with them, Craigus? He sold the cows. And we did. Yeah.

And he started growing potatoes. No. Really. He's now a potato farmer. He gave up.

Yeah. And apparently his cows were trying a different farm in a different part of Denmark now. From what I hear, they are thriving and drinking water. Hi. Here are the cows.

And then there's Jill. Oh my god, there's so many cows.

“Ooh, after years of being told she did not have stray voltage on her farm.”

Got in touch with our guy, Larry. I said, I'll take a look at it. And whatever I find, I'll tell you. Told her you're not imagining things. There is stray voltage here.

He got in touch with the power company. You know, he knew how to talk the talk and talk the language with them. Eventually they came out, made a bunch of changes to Jill's electrical system. And so how many cows are here? There's 130 in this farm.

Things went back to normal. While they're so big and pretty. Thank you. I kind of think so too. Yeah, another gorgeous.

What is it again? Start dazzle? Start dazzle. Oh, it's a baby. Oh, your tongue is so big.

You see at the Minnesota State Fair? 'Cause you're so pretty. 'Cause you're so pretty. 'Cause you're so pretty. You get to go to the fair to bet on a ball.

That's right. Well, that's, because that's hard to argue with. That is really the proof is in the pudding kind of thing. Well, baby calves, oh my god, Jill. Like, it's, it's a really compelling story,

but it is like, it's one story. Start dazzle. Baby, do you also love petting? She does. Come on, come on.

I don't think it definitively proves anything. I know. But if I was a bedding man, I'd wager we're only gonna see more cases of stray voltage in the years to come.

But the growing demand for power is in your AI data center. Record demand for electricity today. Energy hungry tech, because, again, much of the state is about to go through another very hot day. With an eye towards the future,

a 70-mile transmission line, capable of carrying 500,000 volts.

mess up our farms. We know across the country. We need to generate more power. It's a big day for cow train.

“The agency rolling out its new fully electric fleet.”

Meet the state's mandate to transition bus sleets to completely electric.

What they basically want to do is come from over the hill there.

Come straight across everything. This episode was reported by Matt Kilti and Simon Adler. The episode is produced by Matt Kilti, with help from Maria Paz Gutierrez, reporting help from Clara Grunnet and Rebecca Rand.

Original music and sound design contributed by Jeremy Bloom and Matt Kilti. The episode was mixed by Jeremy Bloom,

“fact checking by Angelie Mercado and Sophie Sammy.”

It was edited by Pat Walters,

and a special thanks to Liz Brock and Julie Cone. If you miss Simon, like I do, just becomeverted knowing that he is now going to be heading back to the greener pastures of his music sound and performance art project, WindStar Enterprises.

If you're curious to know more, go to WindStarSolutions.com. No cows were harmed in the making of this episode. So far as I know.

Catch you next week. Bye-bye-bye.

Hi, I'm Gabby.

“I'm from the Bay Area California, and here are the staff credits.”

Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lutz of Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director, our managing editor's Pat Walters. Dylan Kief is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nina Sambandon, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgauker, Annie MacQun, Alex Nesin, Sarah Carrey, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vizza, Aryan Wack, Molly Webster,

and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Semi. Hi, I'm Gabby, and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radio Lab's Science Programming

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