The Resistance of a Cow

Oh y wait, you're listening. Listening. Radio. W N Weiss. Back again. Hey, I'm Latv Nasser. This is Radio Lab. Prodigal's son has returned. From the top map. Today we got senior producer Matt Kilty, former senior producer Respond to the right. Correspondent emeritus. Yeah, at least we got my uh hyphenated title in there. From the grave. Yeah. Hope you're having fun. Fun. I'm having a boss.

Great. So oh today Simon and I we have we have a weird A weird story. Okay. I'm ba I'm very excited that that was your reaction. I feel like this mystery does that to people. Like people are like What are you talking about? All right. So the story first came to us from uh Clara Grunel. 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 in your voice.

That's just the Danish way, right? No. So Clara lives and works in Copenhagen. It's been a long day, but honestly, this is definitely the highlight. So I am excited. He works for this audio journalism company called Zetl. We produce audio stories, features and news. Yeah. Well, yeah. First question is like, how the heck did you come a upon this? Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. I think the first thing that really happened was that we have this uh

internal work we use do you use like in one of our uh channels this guy uh one of our colleagues posted an article with the headline let me see actually if I can find it. Okay so it says Mystikk om vannet på det danske landbro. Kørende nægter at drikke. Translation. A mystery about the water on Danish farms the cows refuse to drink. Castrophes and drink water. Yeah. A little strange. Uh huh. But as she keeps reading this article So Clara grabs a colleague.

Like And the two of them drive out of Copenhagen. See some windmills. You'll see those everywhere. It's mostly just flat farmland of just And after a couple hours they pull off the road. Onto this little gravel driveway. Where sitting there waiting for them is क्राइगा Christensen. I guess. The man whose cows won't drink. Fred ikke? Fagus. Bye. He's about in his early forties. Sweatshirt with a lot of like painting stains on it. Thank you. And Clark says almost like immediately.

Jeg bor ikke her, jeg bor faktisk 1,5 km herfra. 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 That there was something wrong here. De är på färor i hela världen. So the three of them walk down this path through this grassy field to the barn. Big red barn with uh tin uh roof. And he starts rolling up the door and we're like not really sure what to expect. Yeah. Go in Reddish cows. Ooh. Sort of just standing around in this 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 to the water truck. Så to tre procent i strømta. And the cows come over and you sort of see them sniffing the water. But they never touch it. And then something weird happened. They stop pissing. They start urinating. And then they start drinking. What? The cows start drinking each other's piss. Oh. Like the moment a cow starts peeing All these other cows.

And turn their head to sort of like catching up. Like it like shoots out. I mean I've never seen a cow pee. Like a bubbler or a water fountain. Water fountain. All these cows drinking from each other. Peen, another cow would come over and start licking its behind. Because they're so thirsty. And Clara turned to Gregis and she's like, Is this normal in any way? Like is this normal cow behavior? And he's like no. Jo, det er mange, der har spurgt mig om, så det er ikke dumt først for mig.

It's not normal. He's farmed his whole life, his father before him. Never seen cows do this before.

But how long has this been happening? So apparently like months. Months? Yeah, months. But what how are they like how are they? Like, how are they surviving? Yeah. Well Dragus said he could get the cows to drink water that he brought from off site. But cows drink an insane amount of water in a day. It's something like a hundred and fifty pounds worth of water goes into a cow a day. So he ran tests on the barn water and Clean water. Yeah, nothing wrong with it. Totally clean. Weird.

He was super desperate. 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 Hm yeah, it maybe you should contact Yeah. She's like the cow whisperer. Is the person farmers in Denmark call when they have no one else to turn to? so gregas calls github And And apparently she has brought with her. Pendulum? Okay. Swinging and she Going around the family.

looks up and turns away, walks very fast over to her car and drives away. Like I'm outta here. I need to get out of here. Farm's possession. I mean... So she drives away and Greggus is like, What the fuck? Like What is this? And she call uh Gaigas calls Gide I think the next day or something and is like, Hey, so you st you there's still some of your stuff here. What's what's going on? And she's just like, you'll have to mail me my stuff because I'm never going back to the place ever again.

What did she say more than that? Well what she said is that when she was near the barn, she detected this energy. This horrible energy. That was coursing through Gregus' farm that she believed was coming from. Building. picture almost like a Walmart, but black. With these big like Viking Viking symbols on it. Yeah. 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 Gregus' farm. And so what Gitte is convinced of is that the big black box next to the barn is sending out so much electricity. That somehow that electricity is getting into the water on Gregus' farm and shocking the cows. This is crazy. What are you talking about? This is Gita's theory, L. This does not I know. I know. Well This is where things get even weirder. So I think we got a mystery on our hands.

Clara and her colleague go back to their office. 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 Gregory's farm. She finds another farmer in Denmark. His cows won't drink water. They're drinking each other's pee. Then another farmer. Same thing. We quickly found that it was the same story again and again.

Farmers whose cows stopped drinking water and started drinking their peak. that either live next to power lines or a power station. Clara kept looking into this, she realized that this wasn't something that was You don't let I forgot about this party. It was also happening in the United States. Okay, okay. So she hears about this farmer named Jill Nelson. Yeah, well like okay, you're yeah. A dairy farmer in southwest Minnesota. Wait, 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 eighteen eighty four. And I'm the fifth generation. And she said she started noticing problems with her cows long before Gregor's, way back in two thousand. I started noticing that cows were becoming more reluctant to come into the parlor. Her calves didn't want to come into the milking parlor where they all get milk. Like they would get really fidgety around the entrance to the parlour. And kinda jump into the parlour.

Yeah. And then she started noticing the kind of telltale sign. Started lapping at the water, not you know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink. Cow suddenly didn't want to drink. 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. And it was right around here. I just thought, this isn't normal, this isn't right, something's wrong here.

She'll said she remembered this thing she had heard of called Stray voltage. Yeah. I I had some customers in Wisconsin that had gone through Where they had told Jill that they had electricity that had gotten into their cows. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And I was actually back in Wisconsin this past summer. Alright, here we are at the uh Barron County Fairgrounds. At a county fair. 4-H fair is underway. And I just went around asking dairy farmers. Have you ever dealt with

stray voltage on your farm. And almost every single one of them was like, yes. They dealt with 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. G give me a number here, two hundred, three hundred? Well I used to do one a day. And actually Matt and I talked to this dairy electrician. Yeah, a guy named 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. at 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 cow. Stray voltage is horrible. It will destroy you. And some of these farmers that we talked 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.

kind of starve themselves to death. We heard of cows getting so weak they couldn't stand back up. feel like giving up, you know, you have a good cow just die before your eyes. Cows that were born with birth defects. You just didn't want to go to the barn after a while, so I didn't know at any morning or any moment what I would find when I went out to the barn. We're we're talking cows that had that had died overnight or what? Mm-hmm. And that happened a couple of times. Ha ha. I wish.

Um 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. Um 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. That's time for the break.

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Okay, welcome back. This is Radio Lab. I am joined here with the one and only's, Matt Kiltey and Simon Adler. I like it. I I'd take that. Yes. So yeah. So we left off with basically you have thousands of farmers who have claimed to have experienced this thing called stray voltage. Right. End up being told, like, no, that's actually not what's happening. And this next part of the story.

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 You understand that. To understand that we have to go back. Yeah Latif. Electricity. ترجمة نانسي قنقر Where does it come? To understand that, we have to invoke a cliche. Yes. So does the birth of electricity in America really start with Ben Franklin and a kite? No. Um So to take us back, we talked to Hiya.

I'm Richard Hirsch, I'm a professor of history of science and technology. Hirsch from Virginia Tech. And also David Nye, I'm a professor uh in Denmark. Or David Nye. He's written 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 it's a little bit after Ben Franklin. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. It didn't really get going until about eighteen hundred.

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 a wire. And then turn that electricity on and off. Create a code. Which is the Morse coat. And suddenly you could send a message from California to New York like that. nearly at the speed of light. So they suddenly realize electricity's got this sort of almost magical power.

The first message ever sent by telegraph? What hath God wrought? So, 1830, you get the telegram. Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone. Which seems to work nicely. And also in the eighteen seventies you get Most importantly, Edison's 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. And then they take the light bulb and turn it upside down.

With fire the flame always wants to go up, but now you could point the light. Oh that's amazing. And at the end of the demo 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 kerosene lamp, for example. Now you have safe, controllable electric light. Yeah. I mean it capitalists can see that this is gonna make money. المترجم للقناة Prone full. Down in the financial district. Oh, oh, it's right here.

I have a picture of myself and my wife next to a plaque. Yeah. It's a big metal plaque. Like three feet tall, two feet wide. Above the text we have an etching of five or six generators, men standing about turbo. Turbines, got electrical wires seemingly running out of the turbines. First. The bird In the world. This is the place. And so down there in lower Manhattan. This is where it began. You had Electric.

The stock exchange had the apartment store, railway stations, factories that could run at night have. The wealthy. Prestige. They had it. But then Country still in the dark. It starts. It's Brent from New York. From Detroit to Chicago. Well, yeah. Schools, home. New lines going up almost everywhere at the rate of five hundred miles a day. The whole country lighting up. Edison and others came up with So smart to own an automatic dishwasher. Appliances. refrigerators. A complete electric line.

Yeah. Motor. Electric razors, radios. vacuum cleaners, water heaters. The miracles of electricity. So by the time you get to the Yeah. 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. As more and more people move to the cities, the cities begin demanding more and more electricity. Oil and gas could be here in quantity. A nuclear power Nuclear power plants to generate more electricity. 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.

Now look out in the pasture and see power lines growing. Farmland. And for a lot of farmers across America. They hated them. Farmers still don't want a high-powered 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 Lime protests, which was in the seventies in western Minnesota.

Farmers have resisted the high-voltage power line with harsh words, lawsuits, and sporadic clashes with sheriff's deputies trying to protect survey and construction crews. Farmers shot out components of thousands of power lines. They managed to topple towers by topping out the legs of them. They ended up toppling like fifteen of these towers. And a lot of it had to do with a concern about electricity.

Farmers like John Tripp 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 this technology before it was deployed?

Yeah, yeah. There'd been testing done to make sure like that the lines were safe and insulated and you know, things like that. Right. 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 uh high voltage transmission lines. And the lights would light up and Really?

Yeah. Yeah. The electric fields were so intense underneath the power lines that the bulb illuminated. Yeah, I my mother in law lived near some power lines and I always thought, Well, um yeah, I don't wanna live there.

And so what happened was after these power lines started going up and there were these protests in the seventies in Minnesota, one state over in Wisconsin Farmers started complaining that all of a sudden their cows are getting sick, their cows aren't drinking water, and they actually start filing lawsuits against the power companies saying this is because of you, because Electricity is getting out into the ground, into our farms and into our cows. Yeah. And they start to win those lawsuits.

Like I I think you said, Matt, that one of'em 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 um and who w what was the sort of caliber of the scientific experts? I don't know. I I just am uh like wondering whether it was like a really strong emotional appeal that won those lawsuits or was it like No, there's like very clear connect the dots here, boop ba da boop ba da boop.

I mean they have electricians come out and conduct tests that show there's electricity in the farm. But this is part of the problem is there aren't I see there aren't really experts on this. Yeah 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 In nineteen eighty six stray voltage task force, which ends up getting in touch with this guy. Doug Reinemann, 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. Now had you heard of stray voltage before? Uh no, no not really. And so what was your first reaction to the idea? Um I my first reaction is to find out more about it. So Doug goes and reads whatever he can find. And what he finds is that stray voltage did not begin in Wisconsin. No. Actually the earliest reports.

And what were the reports? So it's a really interesting story in 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. And when they touch something like the metal pail or the metal water trough, They felt The tingle. Electricity somewhere on that farm, getting up into them. First documented case people out on farms. But then Doug sees the reports we mentioned in North America.

York, Pennsylvania, all of them involving cows. Cows behaving strangely, cows not producing milk. Doug starts to do basically how much electricity does it take for a cow to feel? Hmm. Wait, wait, wait. Can I stop you for a second? Yeah. Why are we talking about cows? Why not any other animal? Like why not a goat or a chicken? Yeah. Well so Doug explained to us that Cow. Oh. They're often in wet environments.

So cows spend a ton of time on wet concrete 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 uh cows are bigger. Simplest way to 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 five hundred cows.

And one by one, Doug and his team would take a cow into a barn stall. The cow would stand on this fancy scale. So we can measure when the cows shifted their bodies. 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, two, two. Send a small little pulse of electricity through the cabin. Cow like ten pulses. And then what?

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 sh they might move a hoof, they might move their head, they might move an ear. Generally is a fairly subtle response.

The tiniest little indication that 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 leg 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 sorta nervous. I know I am. I'm actually scared too. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh no, that's no fun. What'd you feel? Oh, it's like it's it's almost like um something really cold touching your tongue for a second. Oh that's not bad. Yeah, what are you- Tell me about it. It's often experienced as a thermal sensation. I'd say he reacted a little stronger than warranted.

But you haven't even done it. So how could you say that? Done it. Yeah. But wait, sorry. But the could the the nine volt analogy works, the coldness, except the coldness has to be so bad that P is better than that.

that. Right. And they're not even saying that. They're just saying at nine volts, this is when you start 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. Okay. How below?

Well below that. Okay. So 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 nineteen ninety, there have been over nine thousand stray voltage investigations conducted by the state. You find that less than three percent 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 the first thing you're gonna notice is some change in the cow's 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 gonna find this unless it's a real serious problem. Yeah, wires Wires will 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 why are they not drinking water and yes, drinking pea? Well, there can be a thousand different issues of what's going on and you just simply gotta look through those. So we talked to a veterinarian. Dr. Don Sanders, doctor of veterinary medicine. How many years did you practice as a vet? And Don told us from his fifty years w what he'd mostly seen. Is cows drinking urine is when they lack potassium in their diet.

Cows will turn to drinking pea if they don't have enough minerals like potassium. Sodium or whatever like that. That generally is the major reason for drinking urine. I guess I'm also a little surprised, like the uh 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 a dozen things that I don't have enough of and yet I'm not going around drinking urine. But uh why why is it that these cows are so sensitive?

Basically, Don explained that these cows being milked are not just average animals. They have been bred to be more like high performance athletes. And so if their 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 pea drinking. Exactly. Okay, I get that. But it but that doesn't explain the not drinking water.

Right. So remember a farmer in Minnesota, Jill Nelson, how she said And then they started lapping at the water. Her cow started lapping at the water, not drinking it normally. You know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink. Slurp it up. So we ended up talking to this guy Nigel. Cook. He's another professor at UW Madison. the School of Veterinary Medicine. So he said, okay, so take a cow lapping water.

My God, we've got stray voltage because the cows are lapping the water as normal. Uh you you could go to a hundred percent 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 milked, she's 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. Uh they have social dynamics, hierarchy. Cows will sometimes stand in the water trough and they'll kind of be dominant around it, um, kind of shoe other cows away. Or they can be really sensitive to overcrowd. We've certainly been to 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 excess.

I guess what I'm wondering though is if you look at the cases of straight voltage, like some of'em start in North America in the late seventies and in the eighties. And then like really pick up in the nineties. And so what I'm wondering is like clearly something happened or was happening with cows Well work out what was going on in the nineties. Yeah. So l let's take Wisconsin. When I arrived in nineteen ninety nine, uh we had twenty five thousand dairy herds and most of them were Tistal.

What's a tie style? Um if you've driven around the upper midwest, there are little red barns. Uh those are Tysals. Nigel explained in a tie stall, what you have is each individual cow. Confined 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 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 nineties. As costs were rising, margins tightening, dairy farmers started modernizing. They started to build milking parlors. How you're not milking them in the stall? You're bringing them over the parlour 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 free stall, so they're free to move around. Now you can house more cows. 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. It cuts costs, it cuts labor, and so now

Now you can have 150 cows, 250 cows, 500 cows, a thousand cows. Now we're building twenty thousand cow dairy.

And Nigel says 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 that I'm not very good at managing my cows. And they probably were very good at managing their cows in a ty stall, where they grew up, where their fathers and grandfathers managed cows. So that's a bitter pill to swallow. Whereas 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, you've got a boogeyman, 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 you know, know that this is affecting them and I really love my cows. And I feel um I mean, I'm their caretaker. So when when you're not able to take care of'em, um, it's really hard. And it was really hard on my husband because when the cows would get to the point where, you know, it they were just suffering, we'd have to put'em down and he was the one that had to do that.

When you stop crying because you're putting a cow down, you know it's been Um it's been a lot. So Jill sued her power company and I've been reading through this court document. 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. is the resistance of a cow. We will get to is the resistance. Yeah. Yeah. This is what we're going to get to when we come back from break.

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Back with the Dime a dozen, Matt Kilty and Simon Adler. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so we left off with the question, what is the resistance of a cow? Feels feels epic. I'd say. Somehow. Okay. Explain. Well, okay. Sort of physics one oh one here, electricity one oh one. 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 gonna do a little analogy, which is Spring time. 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 your garden. Exactly. And in your garden, in your hand, you have a Okay, yeah, here I am.

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. The spigot is basically the voltage. So open the spigot way up, you got a lot of volts, open it a little bit. Like it's like how much push is coming out from the beginning. Yeah. From that Right. You're current.

flow of electricity. Okay. So it stands a reason more Flow, more current. Fewer volts, less flow, less current. Totally. There is one final piece to this. This is the important part. Okay. Resistance. The resistance. So think of it almost like the hose itself. It has a set, diameter, a sort of amount of space. 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 gonna get But if you had like

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, it doesn't matter how open that spigot is, how many volts you're trying to shove through there, you're still just gonna get a tiny little bit of flow, of current. Right. Yeah. Correct. That's why resistance is so important because it it affects the flow, the current, how much electricity is actually passing through something.

Ja, okay, okay. So in the real world of electricity, something like rubber, uh and this stuff gets measured in ohms, so we're not gonna get into it, but that's what it's measured in. Yeah. Uh rubber is has the resistance of something like ten to the thirteenth power ohm. So p rubber is like the brickiest of brick walls. Yeah, or the tiniest of straws of straws. Tiniest of straws of straws. So very resistant, so it means you don't get a lot of current, a lot of electricity passing through. Sure.

Yeah. And then it keeps us going. Uh dry human skin can be about as low as ten thousand ohms. No resistance. We we have very little to no resistance. Wet human skin can be about uh a thousand oh. Oh even less. So like nothing. Not very much. We're uh one of those like boba straws. Yeah, human boba. This is the question. What is its resistance? So back in the 80s and 90s when researchers were doing all this work on cows. Uh

They came up with a number, they settled on a number 500 ohms. So less than what human So it's like we're yeah, okay, so we're we're we have to take even better care of that. They've always been trying to be cautious and conservative for the sake of the cow, so yeah, they come up with this Okay, as they should be. I think as they should be. Yeah, right. Yeah, of course. And so they come up with this number, five hundred. This is known in the world. Hundred ohm. The five hundred ohm.

Mas a coisa é... In my world, that just does not exist, okay? There are people like Larry Neubauer, that electrician that we heard from earlier in the story, who's just like, no way, don't believe it. It's nowhere near five hundred ohm. Huh. Why does he think that? Well yeah, so Larry told us. How is that 500 ohms determined? How that was determined makes a big difference.

The five hundred ohms was determined in a stanchion bar in the old milk tie stanchion bar. Have you guys all seen an old stanchion bar? Yeah, the old school red barn. Right on. One cow in a stall. Right. Well today they never get tied up in a tie stall bar. Yeah, they're all in free freestyle. It's all they're all roam around now. But why should that matter where the cow is?

So Larry explained in a freestall 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. And Larry explained that slurry is highly conductive. is very conductive. And as we already know, when something gets wet, its resistance drops. Yeah. W something g uh it's like a straw that uh when it gets wet, the straw opens up. Same thing here with the cat.

Right. They are becoming bigger electricity straws. Right, that's Larry's theory. 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'd you wouldn't think twice about it. You go over there, drill the hole in 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 now, wouldn't you? Sure. So what happened was in twenty sixteen these Idaho dairymen contacted Larry and they're like, Hey, we think we have stray voltage on our farm. Larry went out there, said, Yeah, you do and the reason no one will tell you you do is because of 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 freestall barns? So we called up Richard Norrell out of the state of Idaho. And they invited me out to do some resistance measurements on cows. So this is Rick. I have a PhD in dairy science. And the reason they reached out to Rick. Well the uh my PhD I I collected information on resistance accounts. Is Rick had actually done cow resistance studies back in the eighties?

And he's like, sure, I can run this study. We had a meeting with the dairy industry, with Idaho To be like, can you guys help out? Can you fund any of this? And Idaho Power brought in. Right now. Our Wisconsin guy. He was representing Idaho power as the 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 hill to climb if you're gonna beat his thumbs down. So he did write a report at the end that he thought some things were good, some maybe not so good. Did Idaho Powers sign off on the research? Um not really. I mean they sent us a letter and said that that they didn't believe we were going to find anything and they were not going to support it in any way. Oh That sounds like a pretty definitive map.

Right. Anyhow, Rick goes out with uh Well Looked at six different Idaho dairies. Or the cows. Walking in manure. They're all together. What? It can go from mouth to all four feet. And so they ran all these different tests on like over 170 cows and ultimately come up with a number. 200 Two hundred. From five hundred to two hundred. What does that actually mean? Well, if you take uh a 500 ohm cow and you put one volt across it, that would be two milliampes.

Two milliamps of current, which is the current threshold. Well, yeah, according to them at five hundred. Under the perfect conditions, you'd have four milliamps through her. So be double, be double what's allowed under regulatory thresholds. If you had a two hundred ohm cow. Even higher. It'd be even higher. And so the idea here is that. The omage is wrong by a factor of two 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 ohm cow be reduced to something closer to a 200 ohm resistance? I believe it should, but I also believe that uh

Uh you know, my data needs to be published and it needs to be critically evaluated. And I'm sure there'll be some people poking some holes at it, but I think it's pretty good.

Yeah. I don't know. The the weight of the dairy world is on your shoulders, Rick. I know, I know. And I I'm embarrassed to say this, but when I retired I packed everything up out of my office that I w needed to take along and brought it home. And uh I had one binder that had lots of important information that I needed to look at and Yeah. I know I put it in my vehicle to bring it home, but It's just gone. Now okay. Yeah. Here is everything that we can definitively say at the end of this.

So that two hundred 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 freestall cows. That continue to suggest that five hundred ohms is actually the correct number. Like that's what the data supports. Still strong. That fight is still nobody has changed their minds.

So you have farmers who still believe that the resistance should be lower, but all the data peer reviewed, published, still points to five hundred. So the so the farmers are all like low resistance, look, like it's getting into our house and then the experts are like, No, it's high resistance. Like you guys the it's not electricity is not your problem, whatever your problem is. Right.

Other things we can definitively say, so where we started this whole story with that guy, Craigus, what happened with um Craigus? Oh he did? Yeah. And he started growing potatoes. No. Really? He's now a potato farmer. He gave up. Yeah, and apparently his cows, which are on a different farm in a different part of Denmark now. From what I hear they are thriving and drinking water. Era the cow! Wow. And then there's Jill. Oh my god, there's so many cows.

Who 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. Yeah. No 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 a hundred and thirty in this barn.

things went back to normal. Wild. They're so big and pretty. Thank you. I kinda think so too. Yeah, no, they're they're gorgeous. What is it again? Stardazzle? Stardazzle. You're so pretty. 'Cause you're so pretty, you get to go to the fair to bellow the ball. That's right. Well that's th'cause that's that's hard to argue with that that is really the proof is in the pudding kind of thing.

Well baby cuves. Oh my god. Jill, this is it's a really compelling story, but it is like it's one story. Stardazzles baby, do you also love pets? She does.

I don't think it definitively proves anything. But if I was a betting 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 Your AI data set. Energy. Hungry too. Because again, much of the state is about to go through another very hot day. Towards. Transmission line capable of carrying five hundred thousand volts. Powers that carry the power mess up our fire.

No. It's a big day for Caltrain, the agency rolling out its new fully electric floor. Meet the state's mandate to transition bus fleets to completely electric streets. This episode was reported by Matt Kilte and Simon Adler. The episode was produced by Matt Kiltey with help from Maria Paz Gutierrez, reporting help from Clara Grunett and Rebecca Rand.

Original music and sound design contributed by Jeremy Bloom and Matt Kiltee. The episode was mixed by Jeremy Bloom, fact checking by Angeli Mercado and Sophie Sami. It was edited by Pat Walters and a special thanks to Liz Brock and Julie Cohn. If you miss Simon, like I, Uh just be comforted knowing that he is now gonna be heading back to the greener path.

Windstar Enterprises. If you're curious to know more, go to WindStar Solutions dot 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 Latif Nasser. Soran Wheeler is our executive editor, Sarah Sandbach is our executive director, our managing editor is Pat Walters, Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Cindy Nina Sambandan, Matt Kielti, Mona Modgauker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vizza, Ariane Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santos. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angela Mercado, and Sophie Semay. Hi, I'm Maddie and I'm from Frederick, Maryland.

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