Pod Insights Radiolab The Resistance of a Cow About this episode There’s something rotten in the cows of Denmark. And Minnesota. And Wisconsin. And Idaho. What could cause a previously thriving herd of majestic dairy cattle to stop drinking water and start drinking … urine? A Danish farmer calls a special investigator, who takes one look at his farm and nopes the heck out of there, refusing to return, citing “bad energy” coming from something nearby … a big building covered in Viking runes.
It’s not magic. It’s an invisible force that’s far more common. And yet deeply mysterious.
This episode plunges producers Matt Kielty and Simon Adler knee-deep in a decades-old dairy farm controversy, rooted in a fundamental suspicion of the invisible streams of electrons that keep our world humming.
Special thanks to Dr. Liz Brock
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Matt Kielty and Simon Adler
with help from - Clara Grunnet and Rebecca Rand
Produced by - Matt Kielty
with help from - Maria Paz Gutierrez
Original music from - Jeremy Bloom and Matt Kielty
Sound design contributed by - Jeremy Bloom
Mixed by - Jeremy Bloom
Fact-checking by - Angely Mercado and Sophie Samiee
and Edited by - Pat Walters
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Books -
The Great Energy Transition: America from 1876 to 1929 (https://zpr.io/3PStsDgidpj5), by David Nye
Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification (https://zpr.io/GdQ4pMCy4DAV), by Richard Hirsch
Beyond the Barn – Dodging Cow Patties for 50 Years by a Country Vet (https://zpr.io/S8qS9HLEQBJe), by Don Sanders a memoir about his long career.
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Transcript 9,052 words · 31 speakers
0:01 Speaker 00 Wait, you're listening?
0:03 Speaker 01 Okay.
0:04 Speaker 00 Alright.
0:05 Speaker 02 Okay.
0:07 Speaker 00 Alright.
0:08 Speaker 03 You're listening to Radiolab.
0:11 Speaker 00 Radiolab.
0:11 Speaker 03 From...
0:12 Speaker 00 WNYC. See? Yep.
0:20 Speaker 04 Simon! Back again, back again!
0:25 Speaker 05 Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab.
0:27 Speaker 06 Prodigal son has returned.
0:30 Speaker 04 From the top, Nat!
0:31 Speaker 06 Okay, today, we got senior producer Matt Kielty, former senior producer...
0:36 Speaker 04 Emeritus.
0:37 Speaker 06 Correspondent emeritus.
0:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, at least you got my hyphenated title in there. Back from the graaade. Yeah, hope you're having fun.
0:45 Speaker 06 Having a great time.
0:46 Speaker 04 I'm having a ball.
0:47 Speaker 06 Great. So today, Simon and I, we have a weird... A weird story.
0:54 Speaker 04 Okay.
0:54 Speaker 07 I'm very excited that that was your reaction. I feel like this mystery does that to people. Like, people are like, "What? What are you talking about?"
1:04 Speaker 04 Alright, so the story first came to us from...
1:06 Speaker 07 My name is Clara Grunell.
1:08 Speaker 04 Clara Grunell.
1:09 Speaker 07 I'm a Danish journalist. Should I say more?
1:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, like, how are you?
1:13 Speaker 07 I'm very happy, very ecstatic and excited.
1:15 Speaker 06 I can tell, the enthusiasm in your voice.
1:17 Speaker 04 That's just the Danish way, right?
1:19 Speaker 07 No, no.
1:20 Speaker 06 So Clara lives and works in Copenhagen.
1:22 Speaker 07 It's been a long day, but honestly, this is definitely the highlight. So I am excited.
1:26 Speaker 06 She works for this audio journalism company called Zetland?
1:29 Speaker 07 We produce audio stories, features, and news. Yeah.
1:33 Speaker 04 Well, first question is, like, how the heck did you come upon this?
1:39 Speaker 07 Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. I think the first thing that really happened was that we have this internal work. We use Slack, do you use Slack? In one of our channels, this guy, one of our colleagues, posted an article with the headline... Let me see, actually, if I can find it. Okay, so it says:
2:04 Speaker 04 Translation?
2:05 Speaker 07 "A mystery about the water on Danish farms. The cows refuse to drink."
2:10 Speaker 06 Okay. Cows refuse to drink water?
2:12 Speaker 07 Yeah.
2:13 Speaker 06 A little strange.
2:13 Speaker 04 Uh-huh. But as she keeps reading this article...
2:16 Speaker 07 I was just like, this seems like something's very off.
2:21 Speaker 06 So Clara grabs a colleague...
2:22 Speaker 07 Fredrik.
2:25 Speaker 06 And the two of them drive out of Copenhagen.
2:28 Speaker 07 See some windmills.
2:29 Speaker 06 Out into the countryside.
2:30 Speaker 07 You'll see those everywhere, especially out there.
2:32 Speaker 06 It's mostly just flat farmland.
2:34 Speaker 07 Of just grass and nothing else.
2:37 Speaker 04 And after a couple of hours, they pull off the road.
2:40 Speaker 06 Onto this little gravel driveway.
2:42 Speaker 04 Where, sitting there waiting for them, is...
2:45 Speaker 07 Gregors.
2:45 Speaker 04 Gregors.
2:46 Speaker 07 Gregors. Christensen.
2:47 Speaker 08 Hi Gregors.
2:49 Speaker 04 The man whose cows won't drink.
2:51 Speaker 08 Hi, Fredrik Gregors. Hi.
2:54 Speaker 06 He's about in his early 40s.
2:56 Speaker 07 With a sweatshirt, with a lot of, like, painting stains on it.
2:59 Speaker 06 Steel-toed boots.
3:00 Speaker 07 And we're like, "Hi."
3:02 Speaker 06 And Clarice says, almost like immediately...
3:08 Speaker 07 He was just like, "I don't know what to do."
3:11 Speaker 07 "I'm about to sell all of my cows. This is my life's work."
3:14 Speaker 06 Clarice, did he almost seem a little bewildered?
3:16 Speaker 07 That there was something wrong here.
3:20 Speaker 04 So, the three of them walk down this path through this grassy field to the barn.
3:25 Speaker 07 Big red barn with a tin roof. And he starts rolling up the door. And we're like, not really sure what to expect. And then...
3:35 Speaker 04 Gregors opens the door.
3:36 Speaker 07 We go in.
3:37 Speaker 04 And there's about 200...
3:39 Speaker 07 Reddish cows.
3:41 Speaker 04 Sort of just standing around in this barn.
3:43 Speaker 07 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 trough."
3:53 Speaker 07 And the cows come over, and you sort of see them sniffing the water, but they never touch it.
4:02 Speaker 06 And then, something weird happens.
4:05 Speaker 07 All of the cows, they start pissing.
4:09 Speaker 06 They start urinating.
4:10 Speaker 07 And then, they start drinking.
4:12 Speaker 06 What?
4:15 Speaker 06 The cows start drinking each other's piss. Like, the moment a cow starts peeing, all these other cows...
4:24 Speaker 07 Will immediately run over and turn their head to sort of like catch the piss in the air.
4:31 Speaker 06 Like, it like shoots out?
4:32 Speaker 07 I mean...
4:32 Speaker 06 Never seen a cow pee.
4:34 Speaker 07 It's like a waterfall.
4:35 Speaker 04 Like a bubbler, a water fountain.
4:36 Speaker 07 A water fountain.
4:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
4:37 Speaker 07 Yeah, exactly.
4:38 Speaker 06 Wow, all these cows drinking from each other. And Clara said if a cow wasn't peeing, another cow would come over and start licking its behind.
4:46 Speaker 07 Then Gregus is like, oh, they do that to get them to pee because they're so thirsty.
4:52 Speaker 06 And Clara turned to Gregus and she's like,
4:55 Speaker 07 is this normal in any way? Like, is this normal cow behavior? And he's like, no.
5:02 Speaker 07 It's not normal.
5:03 Speaker 06 He's farmed his whole life, his father before him.
5:05 Speaker 07 I've never seen cows do this before.
5:08 Speaker 06 But how long has this been happening? So apparently like months? Months? Yeah, months. But how are they, like, how are they even? How are they surviving? Yeah. Well, Gregus said he could get the cows to drink water that he brought from off-site.
5:22 Speaker 04 But cows drink an insane amount of water in a day. It's something like 150 pounds worth of water goes into a cow a day.
5:28 Speaker 07 He was like, I can't bring them water all the time.
5:31 Speaker 06 So he ran tests on the barn water and?
5:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, clean water.
5:34 Speaker 06 Yeah, nothing wrong with it, totally clean. Weird.
5:37 Speaker 07 He was super desperate.
5:39 Speaker 04 He told Clara he felt like he was running out of options. And so he started asking other farmers, like, what should he do?
5:46 Speaker 07 And some people are like, hmm, yeah, maybe you should contact Gide.
5:50 Speaker 06 Gide?
5:51 Speaker 07 Yeah.
5:51 Speaker 06 She's like the cow whisperer?
5:53 Speaker 04 Uh, not quite.
5:54 Speaker 07 Gide is the person farmers in Denmark call when they have no one else to turn to.
6:00 Speaker 04 So Gregus calls Gide.
6:02 Speaker 07 And she comes out.
6:03 Speaker 04 She's about in her 60s.
6:05 Speaker 07 Gray, short hair.
6:06 Speaker 04 And apparently she has brought with her.
6:08 Speaker 07 A copper wire.
6:09 Speaker 04 A long copper wire.
6:11 Speaker 06 And also this gold chain?
6:13 Speaker 07 Like a little pendulum, which is
6:15 Speaker 06 Okay.
6:16 Speaker 07 swinging, and she starts going around the farm.
6:19 Speaker 06 Dangling this little gold pendulum around the water trough, around the cows.
6:24 Speaker 04 And then suddenly.
6:26 Speaker 07 She just freezes, looks up and turns away, walks very fast over to her car and drives away.
6:35 Speaker 06 Like, I'm out of here.
6:36 Speaker 07 I need to get out of here.
6:37 Speaker 06 His farm's possessed.
6:39 Speaker 07 I mean, so she drives away and Gregus is like, what the fuck? Like, what is this? And she called, Gregus calls Gide, I think the next day or something, and it's like, hey, so 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 that place ever again."
7:03 Speaker 05 What did she say more than that?
7:06 Speaker 06 Well, what she said is that when she was near the barn, she detected this energy.
7:11 Speaker 07 This horrible energy.
7:13 Speaker 06 That was coursing through Gregus's farm, that she believed was coming from.
7:18 Speaker 07 This like huge.
7:22 Speaker 07 Building.
7:22 Speaker 04 Picture almost like a Walmart, but black.
7:24 Speaker 07 With these big Viking runes.
7:27 Speaker 06 Viking symbols on it.
7:28 Speaker 07 Yeah, Viking Link.
7:30 Speaker 04 It's a power station called Viking Link.
7:32 Speaker 07 That receives all of the energy that comes from the UK to Denmark.
7:37 Speaker 04 And then sends that energy across Denmark.
7:39 Speaker 06 And it sits right next to Gregus's farm.
7:43 Speaker 07 And so what Gita is convinced of is that the big black box next to the barn is sending out so much electricity.
7:53 Speaker 06 That somehow that electricity is getting into the water on Gregus's farm and shocking the cows.
8:02 Speaker 05 What? This is like a Twin Peaks episode. This is crazy. What are you talking about?
8:07 Speaker 04 This is Gita's theory, let's.
8:09 Speaker 05 This does not, this sounds like nonsense.
8:10 Speaker 06 I know, I know.
8:11 Speaker 05 Is any of this physically possible?
8:14 Speaker 06 Well, this is where things get even weirder.
8:18 Speaker 04 So.
8:19 Speaker 07 I think we got a mystery on our hands.
8:21 Speaker 04 Clara and her colleague. Oh, yeah. Go back to their office.
8:23 Speaker 07 And we start Googling.
8:25 Speaker 04 Like, is this a unique thing to this guy?
8:27 Speaker 07 If this is something that other people have experienced.
8:30 Speaker 04 And she starts Googling and finds out that this is not only happening at Gregor's farm.
8:35 Speaker 07 No.
8:36 Speaker 06 She finds another farmer in Denmark.
8:39 Speaker 06 His cows won't drink water.
8:40 Speaker 04 They're drinking each other's pee.
8:43 Speaker 06 Then, another farmer in Denmark.
8:44 Speaker 04 Same thing.
8:45 Speaker 07 We quickly found that it was the same story again and again.
8:48 Speaker 04 Farmers whose cows stopped drinking water and started drinking their pee.
8:51 Speaker 06 That either live next to power lines or a power station.
8:54 Speaker 04 And as Clara kept looking into this, she realized that this wasn't something that was just happening in Denmark.
9:01 Speaker 04 It was also happening in the United States.
9:03 Speaker 06 Come on in. Okay, okay. So she hears about this farmer named Jill Nelson.
9:08 Speaker 04 I think she's from Minnesota. Yeah, well, like, OK, you're, yeah.
9:11 Speaker 06 A dairy farmer in southwest Minnesota.
9:13 Speaker 04 You've got a family that's been on this farm for how long?
9:15 Speaker 09 Yeah, so my family's been on the farm here since 1884. And I'm the fifth generation.
9:22 Speaker 04 And she said she started noticing problems with her cows long before Gregory's, way back in 2008.
9:27 Speaker 09 And I started noticing that cows were becoming more reluctant to come into the parlor.
9:32 Speaker 04 Her cows didn't want to come into the milking parlor where they all get milked.
9:36 Speaker 06 Like, they would get really fidgety around the entrance to the parlor?
9:39 Speaker 09 And kind of jump into the parlor.
9:41 Speaker 06 Which was odd.
9:42 Speaker 09 Yeah.
9:42 Speaker 04 And then she started noticing the kind of telltale sign.
9:45 Speaker 09 They started lapping at the water, not, you know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink.
9:51 Speaker 04 Her cows suddenly didn't want to drink.
9:53 Speaker 09 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.
10:01 Speaker 06 And it was right around here.
10:02 Speaker 09 I just thought, this isn't normal, this isn't right, something's wrong here.
10:06 Speaker 06 Jill said she remembered this thing she had heard of called...
10:09 Speaker 09 Stray voltage.
10:10 Speaker 06 Stray voltage.
10:12 Speaker 05 What have you heard about stray voltage?
10:14 Speaker 09 Um, I just, I had some customers in Wisconsin that had gone through it.
10:19 Speaker 06 Where they had told Jill that they had electricity that had gotten into their cows.
10:24 Speaker 04 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 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. Oh, yeah.
10:42 Speaker 10 I dealt with stray voltage way back when they didn't know what stray voltage was.
10:45 Speaker 04 Every one of them had been either affected by it or knew someone who'd been affected by it. Give me a number here, 200, 300? Well, I used to do one a day. And actually, Matt and I talked to this dairy electrician.
10:56 Speaker 06 Yeah, a guy named Larry Newbauer?
10:57 Speaker 04 Who told us the number of stray voltage cases he's worked on.
11:00 Speaker 11 I would have to say probably close to over 4,000 to 5,000.
11:04 Speaker 06 What?
11:05 Speaker 11 Yeah.
11:06 Speaker 04 We found cases of stray voltage reported in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Idaho.
11:11 Speaker 06 Basically, 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 cows.
11:31 Speaker 04 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.
11:40 Speaker 09 And if they stop eating, that's it. There's nothing you can do. You can't force feed a cow.
11:45 Speaker 04 They 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 big cow just die before your eyes. Cows that were born with birth defects.
11:55 Speaker 10 You just didn't want to go to the barn after a while, so.
11:58 Speaker 12 I didn't know at any morning or any moment what I would find when I went out to the barn.
12:04 Speaker 04 We're talking cows that had died overnight or what?
12:08 Speaker 12 Mm-hmm.
12:09 Speaker 04 And that happened a couple of times?
12:13 Speaker 12 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.
12:41 Speaker 04 We heard stories about dairy farmers going bankrupt after their cows started dying, stopped producing milk.
12:47 Speaker 06 But then, we also heard how none of this is really happening.
12:56 Speaker 06 Let's head for the break.
13:26 Speaker 00 Pollsters are gearing up to get a bad rap yet again, but they do more than sometimes miss on election outcomes.
13:32 Speaker 13 People want to raise taxes on the rich. I can tell you that definitively because we know it from polling. And if we lose trust in polls, we have no way to understand what Americans want to be done.
13:46 Speaker 00 On this week's On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.
13:58 Speaker 05 Okay, welcome back. This is Radiolab. I am joined here with the one and only's Matt Kielty and Simon Adler.
14:05 Speaker 04 I like it. I'd take that.
14:06 Speaker 06 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.
14:13 Speaker 05 Right.
14:13 Speaker 06 Who end up being told like, no, that's actually not what's happening. And this next part of the story.
14:19 Speaker 05 Yes.
14:20 Speaker 06 Is kind of a little bit of a history lesson.
14:25 Speaker 05 Of?
14:25 Speaker 06 Electricity.
14:26 Speaker 05 Okay.
14:27 Speaker 06 It's kind of a story about our relationship with electricity. And I think to understand that.
14:34 Speaker 05 To understand that, we have to go back. Matt?
14:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, Latif.
14:39 Speaker 06 We do.
14:39 Speaker 14 What is electricity? And where does it come from?
14:43 Speaker 05 To understand that, we have to invoke a cliche.
14:46 Speaker 06 Yes. So does the birth of electricity in America really start with Ben Franklin and a kite?
14:51 Speaker 15 No.
14:54 Speaker 06 So to take us back, we talked to.
14:56 Speaker 15 Hi, I'm Richard Hirsch. I'm a professor of history of science and technology.
15:00 Speaker 06 Richard Hirsch.
15:01 Speaker 04 From Virginia Tech.
15:02 Speaker 06 And also.
15:03 Speaker 16 David Nye. I'm a professor in Denmark, David Nye.
15:07 Speaker 06 He's written a bunch of books on energy and electricity.
15:09 Speaker 16 Which of course is why I'm being interviewed, I guess, for this program.
15:12 Speaker 06 Okay, turns out electricity in America, it's a little bit after Ben Franklin.
15:16 Speaker 15 Oh, yeah, yeah. It didn't really get going until about 1800.
15:20 Speaker 06 When scientists first started figuring out how to make batteries, how to make generators, so that we could actually create our own electricity.
15:28 Speaker 04 And do things with it, like send it down a wire.
15:30 Speaker 06 And then turn that electricity on and off.
15:32 Speaker 04 To create a code.
15:33 Speaker 16 Which is the Morse code.
15:34 Speaker 04 And suddenly you could send a message from California to New York like that. Nearly at the speed of light.
15:41 Speaker 16 So they suddenly realize electricity's got this sort of almost magical power.
15:46 Speaker 15 The first message ever sent by telegraph? What hath God wrought?
15:51 Speaker 04 So 1830, you get the telegraph.
15:53 Speaker 15 1876. Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone. Which seems to work nicely.
15:59 Speaker 04 And also, in the 1870s, you get light.
16:03 Speaker 15 Most importantly, Edison's light bulb. And it was pretty wild stuff.
16:07 Speaker 16 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.
16:21 Speaker 04 David says light bulb makers would have these public demonstrations.
16:25 Speaker 16 Where, for example, they pick up the light bulb in their hand and hold it.
16:28 Speaker 04 Something you could just never do with fire.
16:30 Speaker 16 And then they take the light bulb and turn it upside down.
16:32 Speaker 04 With fire, the flame always wants to go up. But now you could point the light.
16:37 Speaker 16 This guy, oh, that's amazing.
16:38 Speaker 15 And at the end of the demo, the demonstrator would take the light bulb and
16:43 Speaker 04 smash it.
16:44 Speaker 15 And the light?
16:44 Speaker 16 Immediately it goes out.
16:45 Speaker 15 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.
16:57 Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean, capitalists can see that this is gonna make money.
17:00 Speaker 15 And in fact.
17:01 Speaker 06 Pearl and Fulton.
17:02 Speaker 15 On Pearl Street in New York City. Down in the financial district.
17:05 Speaker 06 Oh, oh, it's right here.
17:07 Speaker 15 I have a picture of myself and my wife next to a plaque.
17:10 Speaker 06 Should we take a selfie together?
17:11 Speaker 04 Yep. It's a big metal plaque.
17:13 Speaker 06 Thank you.
17:13 Speaker 04 1882. Like, three feet tall, two feet wide.
17:17 Speaker 06 Above the text, we have an etching of five or six generators, men standing about.
17:22 Speaker 04 Turbines, got electrical wires seemingly running out of the turbines. A plaque to commemorate.
17:28 Speaker 15 The first large-scale power plant.
17:31 Speaker 06 The birthplace of power!
17:34 Speaker 15 In the world.
17:35 Speaker 06 This is the place.
17:36 Speaker 04 And so, down there in Lower Manhattan.
17:38 Speaker 06 This is where it began.
17:40 Speaker 04 You had.
17:44 Speaker 16 Electric light. The stock exchange had it. The apartment stores, railway stations. Factories that could run at night had it.
17:51 Speaker 06 The wealthy.
17:52 Speaker 16 It's a prestige thing.
17:53 Speaker 06 They had it.
17:53 Speaker 16 So it starts there.
17:54 Speaker 15 But then.
17:55 Speaker 17 The country's still in the dark.
17:56 Speaker 06 It starts spreading.
17:57 Speaker 17 Lights up.
17:58 Speaker 04 It spreads from New York to Boston.
17:59 Speaker 06 From Detroit to Chicago.
18:00 Speaker 17 Lights up north, south, east, west.
18:03 Speaker 04 Out to farms.
18:04 Speaker 06 Rural schools, homes.
18:05 Speaker 17 New lines going up almost everywhere at the rate of 500 miles a day.
18:10 Speaker 06 The whole country lighting up.
18:11 Speaker 15 And then Edison and others came up with.
18:14 Speaker 17 So smart to own an automatic dishwasher.
18:16 Speaker 15 Appliances.
18:17 Speaker 04 Electric stoves.
18:18 Speaker 06 Refrigerators.
18:19 Speaker 15 Fans.
18:19 Speaker 02 A complete electric laundry.
18:21 Speaker 15 And motors.
18:22 Speaker 04 Electric razors.
18:23 Speaker 15 Radios.
18:23 Speaker 17 You're not running out of hot water, are you?
18:25 Speaker 06 Vacuum cleaners, water heaters.
18:26 Speaker 04 The miracles of electricity. So by the time you get to the 1960s.
18:30 Speaker 18 We've become dependent on electrical power.
18:33 Speaker 04 The whole country is humming and buzzing with electricity.
18:38 Speaker 18 We like it because it's clean, it's inexpensive, and it will do almost any work you can think of.
18:44 Speaker 06 And this becomes a problem. Because as more and more people move to the cities, the cities begin demanding more and more electricity.
18:53 Speaker 04 And so power companies, to meet this demand, start to build more and more.
18:57 Speaker 05 Oil and gas could be here in quantity.
18:59 Speaker 04 Oil plants, gas plants, coal plants.
19:02 Speaker 05 A nuclear power program.
19:04 Speaker 04 Nuclear power plants to generate more electricity.
19:07 Speaker 06 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.
19:19 Speaker 04 Power lines that had to cut through.
19:21 Speaker 14 They now look out in the pasture and see power lines growing.
19:24 Speaker 04 Farmland.
19:25 Speaker 06 And for a lot of farmers across America. Farmers angry about a power line being built through their fields. They hated them.
19:30 Speaker 14 Farmers still don't want a high-powered electric line across their land. Farmers are fighting construction of the power line on their land.
19:37 Speaker 06 And one of the most famous examples of this is called the power line protests, which was in the 70s in western Minnesota.
19:43 Speaker 10 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.
19:52 Speaker 06 Farmers shot out components of thousands of power lines. They managed to topple towers by chopping out the legs of them. They ended up toppling like 15 of these towers.
20:01 Speaker 04 And a lot of it had to do with a concern about electricity.
20:04 Speaker 10 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.
20:23 Speaker 05 Were they dangerous? Like, had there been safety testing for this technology before it was deployed?
20:28 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There'd been testing done to make sure like that the lines were safe and insulated and, you know, things like that.
20:35 Speaker 05 Right.
20:36 Speaker 04 But the idea here is that there was just this ambient concern that there was something wrong about these power lines.
20:43 Speaker 15 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.
20:56 Speaker 06 Really?
20:57 Speaker 15 Oh, yeah, yeah. The electric fields were so intense underneath the power lines that the bulb illuminated.
21:05 Speaker 06 That's wild.
21:06 Speaker 15 You know, I, my mother-in-law, lived near some power lines, and I always thought, well, I don't want to live there.
21:14 Speaker 06 And so what happened was, after these power lines started going up, and there were these protests in the 70s 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.
21:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
21:35 Speaker 06 Saying, this is because of you, because electricity is getting out into the ground, into our farms, and into our cows.
21:41 Speaker 05 Yeah.
21:41 Speaker 06 And they start to win those lawsuits.
21:44 Speaker 04 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.
21:53 Speaker 05 Those were like jury trials, probably?
21:55 Speaker 06 Yeah.
21:55 Speaker 05 And who, what was the sort of caliber of the scientific experts? I don't know, I just am 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-a-da, boop-a-da, boop.
22:10 Speaker 06 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.
22:16 Speaker 05 I see.
22:16 Speaker 06 There aren't really experts on this.
22:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
22:18 Speaker 06 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 1986, a stray voltage task force, which ends up getting in touch with this guy.
22:43 Speaker 19 Doug Reineman, professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
22:49 Speaker 04 Doug works on milking machines?
22:51 Speaker 19 In the modern context, robotic milking machines. But back in the 1990s, I was asked to investigate concerns about stray voltage.
23:00 Speaker 04 Now, had you heard of stray voltage before?
23:02 Speaker 19 Uh, no, no, not really.
23:04 Speaker 04 And so what was your first reaction to the idea?
23:07 Speaker 19 Well, um, I, my first reaction is to find out more about it.
23:12 Speaker 06 So Doug goes and reads whatever he can find.
23:14 Speaker 04 And what he finds is that stray voltage did not begin in Wisconsin.
23:17 Speaker 19 No.
23:18 Speaker 06 Actually, the earliest reports.
23:19 Speaker 19 Date back to the early 1960s.
23:22 Speaker 06 On the other side of the world.
23:23 Speaker 19 In New Zealand.
23:24 Speaker 04 Huh. And what were the reports?
23:26 Speaker 19 So it's a really interesting story. And in New Zealand, at that time, it was sort of the tradition for dairy farmers to go barefoot.
23:35 Speaker 06 So these farmers would be milking their cows.
23:37 Speaker 19 Not wearing any shoes or boots.
23:39 Speaker 06 And when they touched something like the metal pail or the metal water trough?
23:42 Speaker 19 They felt the tingle.
23:45 Speaker 04 Electricity somewhere on that farm, getting up into them.
23:49 Speaker 06 First documented case, people out on farms.
23:53 Speaker 06 But then Doug sees the reports we mentioned in North America.
23:56 Speaker 04 New York, Pennsylvania, all of them involving cows.
24:00 Speaker 06 Cows behaving strangely, cows not producing milk.
24:02 Speaker 04 So what Doug starts to do.
24:03 Speaker 19 Is design a study to investigate a very specific question.
24:08 Speaker 04 Which is basically, how much electricity does it take for a cow to feel it?
24:14 Speaker 05 Hmm. Wait, wait, wait. Can I stop you for a second?
24:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
24:17 Speaker 05 Why are we talking about cows? Why not any other animals?
24:21 Speaker 04 Like, why not a goat or a chicken?
24:22 Speaker 05 Yeah.
24:23 Speaker 04 Well, so Doug explained to us that.
24:24 Speaker 19 Cows.
24:25 Speaker 04 There's a couple of things.
24:26 Speaker 19 They're often in wet environments.
24:29 Speaker 04 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.
24:37 Speaker 06 Yeah. And then the other reason is actually.
24:39 Speaker 19 Because cows are bigger.
24:42 Speaker 06 Hmm. 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.
24:49 Speaker 05 Oh, no.
24:50 Speaker 06 But anyway, UW Madison, they've got a lot of cows.
24:53 Speaker 19 Something like 500 cows.
24:54 Speaker 06 And one by one, Doug and his team would take a cow into a barn stall.
24:58 Speaker 19 A specially designed stall.
25:00 Speaker 06 The cow would stand on this fancy scale.
25:02 Speaker 19 So we can measure when the cow shifted their body weight.
25:04 Speaker 06 When they would flinch.
25:06 Speaker 04 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 bzzt, send a small, little pulse of electricity through the cow.
25:20 Speaker 19 Like 10 pulses.
25:21 Speaker 04 And then watch. From there, they'd increase the electricity a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more.
25:30 Speaker 19 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, it's a fairly subtle response.
25:43 Speaker 06 The tiniest little indication that the cow feels something that it might not like.
25:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:49 Speaker 06 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.
25:58 Speaker 05 And so at what point is that?
26:00 Speaker 19 So if you want to imagine what the cow experiences, put a 9-volt battery on your tongue. That's the sort of experience.
26:08 Speaker 04 Which I did for this story.
26:10 Speaker 06 For this story.
26:10 Speaker 04 You're telling me this is safe?
26:12 Speaker 06 He is now going to place the battery on his tongue.
26:15 Speaker 04 I'm sort of nervous.
26:16 Speaker 06 I know, I am. I'm actually scared too.
26:17 Speaker 04 Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's no fun. Okay.
26:22 Speaker 06 What did you feel?
26:23 Speaker 04 Oh, it's like, it's almost like, um, something really cold touching your tongue for a second. Yes.
26:28 Speaker 06 Oh, that's not bad.
26:29 Speaker 04 Hey, Matt, don't tell me.
26:30 Speaker 06 What are you crying about?
26:31 Speaker 19 It's often experienced as a thermal sensation.
26:34 Speaker 06 I'd say he reacted a little stronger than warranted.
26:36 Speaker 04 Matt.
26:37 Speaker 05 But you haven't even done it, so how could you say that?
26:39 Speaker 04 You haven't even done it, yeah.
26:40 Speaker 06 I'm too scared to.
26:40 Speaker 05 But, well, wait, sorry, but the 9-volt analogy works, the coldness, except the coldness has to be so bad that pee is better than that.
26:48 Speaker 06 Right, and they're not even saying that. They're just saying at 9 volts, this is when you start to see behavioral changes, adverse behavioral changes.
26:54 Speaker 05 Right.
26:54 Speaker 06 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.
27:04 Speaker 05 Okay, which makes sense.
27:05 Speaker 06 Now.
27:05 Speaker 05 Like, a lot below that, or a little below that, or like, how below?
27:08 Speaker 06 Doug says well below that.
27:09 Speaker 05 Well below that, okay.
27:11 Speaker 06 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.
27:32 Speaker 05 Oh, weird.
27:34 Speaker 04 And again, that threshold, that's just for behavior.
27:36 Speaker 19 You know, one of the reasons we spend a lot of time looking at behavior, because it is the most sensitive indicator.
27:42 Speaker 04 Like, if electricity is harming a cow, hurting a cow, the first thing you're gonna notice is some change in the cow's behavior.
27:49 Speaker 19 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.
27:59 Speaker 06 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.
28:16 Speaker 19 Yeah, wires, wires will always break.
28:20 Speaker 19 You know, hopefully not often, but there's always the possibility that the electrical system can be damaged. But, you know.
28:28 Speaker 06 Doug says in the rare case that does happen, you get a lot of stray voltage.
28:31 Speaker 19 Find it and fix it. It's not hard to find and it's not hard to fix.
28:36 Speaker 05 But then if it's not electricity, what is happening with the cows? Like, why, why are they not drinking water and yes, drinking pee?
28:45 Speaker 20 Well, there can be a thousand different issues of what's going on and you just simply gotta look through those.
28:52 Speaker 04 So we talked to a veterinarian.
28:53 Speaker 20 Dr. Don Sanders, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine.
28:56 Speaker 06 How many years did you practice as a vet?
28:58 Speaker 20 50.
28:58 Speaker 04 Wow. And Don told us from his 50 years, what he'd mostly seen.
29:02 Speaker 20 Is cows drinking urine is when they lack potassium in their diet.
29:07 Speaker 04 Cows will turn to drinking pee if they don't have enough minerals like potassium.
29:11 Speaker 20 Sodium or whatever like that. That generally is the major reason for drinking urine.
29:16 Speaker 04 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 a 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?
29:33 Speaker 20 Let me, let me throw something out to stir the pot a little.
29:36 Speaker 04 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.
29:49 Speaker 20 And it won't be all at once. It'll be when it's been that way for several months or maybe even longer.
29:57 Speaker 04 And then you start to get immune problems, utter infections, or even pee drinking.
30:01 Speaker 20 Exactly.
30:03 Speaker 05 Okay, I get that. But, but that doesn't explain the not drinking water part.
30:08 Speaker 06 Right. So remember our farmer in Minnesota, Jill Nelson, how she said?
30:13 Speaker 09 And then they started lapping at the water.
30:15 Speaker 06 Her cow started lapping at the water, not drinking it normally?
30:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
30:18 Speaker 09 You know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink.
30:22 Speaker 21 They slurp it up.
30:24 Speaker 04 So we ended up talking to this guy Nigel Cook. He's another professor at UW Madison.
30:29 Speaker 21 In the School of Veterinary Medicine.
30:30 Speaker 04 And so he said, okay, so take a cow lapping water.
30:33 Speaker 21 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.
30:46 Speaker 06 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.
30:51 Speaker 21 And she's looking for other things to do.
30:53 Speaker 06 As Nigel put it.
30:54 Speaker 21 They like hobbies.
30:55 Speaker 06 Cows like doing stuff.
30:56 Speaker 21 And one of those things is hanging around water troughs and playing with water.
31:01 Speaker 04 And he also told us that cows are just like very social animals. They have social dynamics, hierarchies.
31:07 Speaker 21 Cows will sometimes stand in the water trough and they'll kind of be dominant around it, kind of shoo other cows away.
31:14 Speaker 06 Or they can be really sensitive to overcrowding.
31:16 Speaker 21 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 access.
31:29 Speaker 06 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 in the late 70s into the 80s, and then like really pick up in the 90s. And so what I'm wondering is like, clearly something happened or was happening with cows.
31:45 Speaker 21 Well, work 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 tie stalls.
31:58 Speaker 06 What's a tie stall?
31:59 Speaker 21 If you've driven around the upper Midwest, there are little red barns. Those are tie stalls.
32:05 Speaker 06 And Nigel explained, in a tie stall, what you have is each individual cow.
32:09 Speaker 21 Confined in a single stall.
32:11 Speaker 06 Tied to that stall.
32:13 Speaker 21 So she lived in that stall. She fed in front of the stall. She had a little water cup in front of every stall.
32:20 Speaker 06 And so the job of a dairy farmer.
32:22 Speaker 21 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.
32:38 Speaker 06 But in the 90s. As costs were rising, margins tightening, dairy farmers started modernizing. They started to build milking parlors.
32:46 Speaker 21 Now you're not milking them in the stall.
32:48 Speaker 06 You're bringing them over to the parlor, where you're milking them together with more elaborate milking machines.
32:52 Speaker 04 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.
33:01 Speaker 21 What's called a free stall. So they're free to move around.
33:04 Speaker 04 Now you can house more cows.
33:05 Speaker 21 They're not chained in a stall anymore.
33:07 Speaker 04 Which means now, instead of feeding a cow individually.
33:10 Speaker 21 You feed a group of cows.
33:12 Speaker 06 You make the cows all drink from the same water trough as a group.
33:15 Speaker 04 Which cuts costs, it cuts labor. And so now.
33:18 Speaker 21 Now you can have 150 cows, 250 cows, 500 cows, 1,000 cows. Now we're building 20,000 cow dairies.
33:26 Speaker 06 Nigel says, in that transition to bigger dairy farms, some of these farmers just couldn't make it.
33:32 Speaker 21 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 tie 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.
34:17 Speaker 12 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, I mean, I'm their caretaker. So when you're not able to take care of them, it's 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 them down and he was the one that had to do that. So, yeah. When you stop crying because you're putting a cow down,
35:02 Speaker 12 you know, it's been, it's been a lot.
35:10 Speaker 06 So Jill sued her power company. And I've been reading through those court documents. And in them, the power company is 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?
35:50 Speaker 05 What?
35:51 Speaker 06 Which we will get to.
35:52 Speaker 05 Is the resistance of a cow?
35:54 Speaker 06 That's what we're going to get to when we come back from break.
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36:27 Speaker 23 This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?
36:32 Speaker 24 Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment. Let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox that's always there.
36:43 Speaker 23 Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
37:00 Speaker 06 Ba-da-bang, ba-da-boom. Here we are.
37:01 Speaker 05 Okay. I'm back with the dime a dozen Matt Kielty and Simon Adler.
37:06 Speaker 06 Great, yeah.
37:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
37:08 Speaker 06 Okay, so we left off with the question, what is the resistance of a cow?
37:13 Speaker 05 Feels epic somehow.
37:15 Speaker 06 I'd say it kind of is.
37:16 Speaker 05 Okay, explain.
37:18 Speaker 04 Well, okay, sort of physics 101 here, electricity 101.
37:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, love it.
37:22 Speaker 04 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.
37:32 Speaker 06 And to sort of try to help you make sense of that, we're going to do a little analogy, which is... Imagine it's springtime.
37:39 Speaker 04 It is actually springtime. I don't really need to imagine.
37:41 Speaker 06 Okay, it's springtime.
37:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
37:43 Speaker 06 You're outside.
37:44 Speaker 04 And what do you do in the spring?
37:45 Speaker 06 You tend to your garden.
37:46 Speaker 04 You tend to your garden, exactly.
37:48 Speaker 06 And in your garden, in your hand, you have a hose.
37:51 Speaker 04 Okay, yeah, here I am. We're 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.
38:03 Speaker 06 Right.
38:03 Speaker 04 The spigot that can turn the water up or turn the water down.
38:06 Speaker 06 Sure. So the spigot is basically the voltage. So open the spigot way up, you got a lot of volts. Open it a little bit, tiny little bit of volts.
38:14 Speaker 04 Like it's like how much push is coming out from the beginning?
38:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
38:17 Speaker 04 From that, you've got the water that is then actually moving, right?
38:21 Speaker 06 Water's moving, yeah.
38:22 Speaker 04 That is your current.
38:23 Speaker 06 The flow of electricity.
38:25 Speaker 04 Okay.
38:25 Speaker 06 So it stands to reason, more volts, more flow, more current. Fewer volts, less flow, less current.
38:31 Speaker 04 Totally, makes sense. However, there is one final piece to this.
38:35 Speaker 06 This is the important part.
38:37 Speaker 04 Okay.
38:37 Speaker 06 The resistance.
38:39 Speaker 04 The resistance. Yes. So think of it almost like the hose itself. It has a set diameter, a sort of amount of space that the water can flow through.
38:48 Speaker 06 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...
38:56 Speaker 06 But if you had like-
38:57 Speaker 04 You're gonna get sleep apnea. Yeah, okay.
39:00 Speaker 06 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.
39:13 Speaker 04 Right, correct.
39:14 Speaker 06 That's why resistance is so important, because it affects the flow, the current, how much electricity is actually passing through something.
39:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, okay, okay.
39:23 Speaker 06 So in the real world of electricity, something like rubber, and this stuff gets measured in ohms, we're not gonna get into it, but that's what it's measured in.
39:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:31 Speaker 06 Rubber is, has the resistance of something like 10 to the 13th power ohms.
39:37 Speaker 04 So rubber is like the brickiest of brick walls?
39:40 Speaker 06 Yeah, or the tiniest of straws of straws.
39:43 Speaker 04 Tiniest of straws of straws, right.
39:45 Speaker 06 So very resistant, so it means you don't get a lot of current. A lot of electricity passing through.
39:48 Speaker 05 Sure. Yeah.
39:49 Speaker 04 And then to keep us going, uh, dry human skin can be about as low as 10,000 ohms.
39:55 Speaker 05 Feeble resistance. We, we have very little to no resistance.
39:59 Speaker 04 And then wet human skin can be about a thousand ohms.
40:03 Speaker 05 Oh, even less. So like nothing.
40:05 Speaker 04 Not, not very much.
40:06 Speaker 05 We're one of those like boba straws.
40:09 Speaker 06 Yeah. Human boba. Now a cow.
40:12 Speaker 04 This is the question.
40:13 Speaker 06 What is its resistance?
40:15 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
40:15 Speaker 06 So back in the eighties and nineties, when researchers doing all this work on cows, uh, they came up with a number, they settled on a number 500 ohms. So less than wet human.
40:27 Speaker 05 It's like we're, yeah. Okay. So we're, we're, we have to take even better care of them.
40:30 Speaker 06 Yeah. Cause they're, they've always been trying to be cautious and conservative for the sake of the cow. So yeah, they come up with this number.
40:36 Speaker 05 Okay. As they should be. I think as they should be. Right.
40:38 Speaker 06 Yeah, of course. And so they come up with this number 500. This is known in the world.
40:42 Speaker 04 500 ohm cow.
40:44 Speaker 06 The 500 ohm cow.
40:46 Speaker 04 But the thing is.
40:46 Speaker 11 And in my world, that just does not exist. Okay?
40:50 Speaker 04 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.
40:57 Speaker 11 It's nowhere's near 500 ohms.
40:59 Speaker 05 Huh. Why does he think that?
41:01 Speaker 06 Well, yeah. So Larry told us.
41:02 Speaker 11 Well, how is that 500 ohms determined?
41:04 Speaker 06 How that was determined makes a big difference.
41:07 Speaker 11 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?
41:14 Speaker 06 Yeah. The old school.
41:15 Speaker 11 Yes.
41:15 Speaker 06 Red barn.
41:16 Speaker 11 Right on.
41:17 Speaker 06 One cow in a stall.
41:18 Speaker 11 Right. Well, today they never get tied up in a tie stall barn. They stand on.
41:21 Speaker 06 Yeah. They're all in free, freestyle. It's all they roam around now.
41:25 Speaker 11 Yep.
41:25 Speaker 05 But why should that matter where the cow is?
41:27 Speaker 06 Well, because, so Larry explained in a freestyle 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.
41:44 Speaker 05 Yeah.
41:45 Speaker 06 And Larry explained that slurry.
41:47 Speaker 11 Is highly conductive.
41:48 Speaker 06 Is very conductive. And as we already know, when something gets wet, its resistance drops.
41:54 Speaker 05 Yeah. And something, it's like a straw that. When it gets wet, the straw opens up.
41:59 Speaker 06 Right. It's the same thing here with the cows.
42:00 Speaker 05 Right. Yes. They are becoming bigger electricity straws.
42:04 Speaker 06 Right. That's Larry's theory.
42:05 Speaker 11 The cows are nothing more than like goldfish in a pond. If I gave you an extension cord and I plugged in the drill and I said, go walk across the grass here and go drill into that post. Okay. You you wouldn't think twice about it. You go over there, drill the hole in the post, come back, right?
42:20 Speaker 05 Yeah.
42:20 Speaker 11 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?
42:29 Speaker 06 So what happened was in 2016, 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 freestyle barns?
42:48 Speaker 11 So we called up Richard Norrell out of the state of Idaho.
42:51 Speaker 25 And they invited me out to do some resistance measurements on cows.
42:56 Speaker 04 So this is Rick.
42:57 Speaker 25 I have a PhD in dairy science.
42:59 Speaker 06 And the reason they reached out to Rick.
43:01 Speaker 25 Well, the my PhD, I collected information on resistance of cows.
43:06 Speaker 06 Is Rick had actually done cow resistance studies back in the 80s.
43:09 Speaker 04 And he's like, sure, I can run this study.
43:10 Speaker 25 And then we had a meeting with the dairy industry, with Idaho Power.
43:15 Speaker 04 To be like, can you guys help out? Can you fund any of this?
43:17 Speaker 06 And Idaho Power brought in.
43:19 Speaker 25 Doug Reiner.
43:20 Speaker 05 Ooh.
43:20 Speaker 06 Our Wisconsin guy.
43:22 Speaker 05 Yeah.
43:22 Speaker 25 He was representing Idaho Power as their expert.
43:25 Speaker 05 Interesting.
43:26 Speaker 06 But it's also like Doug is the national expert, like the go to person on this.
43:30 Speaker 25 So if he says thumbs down, well, then you have quite a hill to climb if you're going to 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.
43:42 Speaker 06 Did Idaho Power sign off on the research?
43:44 Speaker 25 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 in any way.
43:53 Speaker 06 Oh, that sounds like a pretty definitive note.
43:56 Speaker 25 Right.
43:57 Speaker 04 But anyhow, Rick goes out with the dairyman, with Larry.
44:01 Speaker 25 Looked at six different Idaho dairies.
44:03 Speaker 04 Modern, commercial dairy farms.
44:05 Speaker 06 Where the cows.
44:06 Speaker 25 They're walking in manure.
44:07 Speaker 06 They're all together.
44:08 Speaker 25 They're wet.
44:08 Speaker 04 They set up all these tests where they hook up different electrodes to different parts of the cows.
44:12 Speaker 25 Cause stray voltage can go from front feet to rear feet.
44:15 Speaker 06 It can go from mouth to all four feet.
44:17 Speaker 25 Can touch the belly of the cow and that goes out through all four feet.
44:20 Speaker 06 And so they ran all these different tests on like over 170 cows and ultimately come up. With a number.
44:28 Speaker 04 What is it?
44:29 Speaker 06 Two hundred.
44:30 Speaker 04 Two hundred?
44:30 Speaker 06 From five hundred to two hundred.
44:32 Speaker 04 So what does that actually mean?
44:34 Speaker 11 Well, if you take a five hundred ohm cow and you put one volt across it, that would be two milliampers.
44:41 Speaker 06 Two milliamps of current, which is the current threshold.
44:44 Speaker 11 Well, yeah, according to them at five hundred. If you take a two hundred and fifty ohm cow and you had one volt under the perfect conditions, you'd have four milliamps through her.
44:54 Speaker 06 So it'd be double, it'd be double what's allowed under regulatory thresholds.
44:59 Speaker 11 And if you had a two hundred ohm cow, okay?
45:02 Speaker 06 Even higher.
45:02 Speaker 11 You'd be even higher.
45:03 Speaker 04 And so the idea here is that if the ohmage 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.
45:28 Speaker 11 In a wet environment like that, yes.
45:31 Speaker 04 Based on your studies, if public policy was strictly directed by the scientific evidence, should that five hundred ohm cow be reduced to something closer to a two hundred ohm resistance?
45:47 Speaker 25 I believe it should, but I also believe that, 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.
46:00 Speaker 06 Do you have a timetable for when, when you might publish?
46:04 Speaker 25 I don't.
46:05 Speaker 06 The, the weight of the dairy world is on your shoulders, Rick.
46:08 Speaker 25 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 needed 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.
46:30 Speaker 25 I know I put it in my vehicle to bring it home, but it's, it's just gone.
46:38 Speaker 06 Now, okay.
46:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
46:40 Speaker 06 Here is everything that we can definitively 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 free stall cows that continue to suggest that 500 ohms is actually the correct number. Like, that's what the data supports.
47:06 Speaker 05 That fight is still strong. That fight is still, nobody has changed their mindset.
47:10 Speaker 06 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.
47:17 Speaker 05 So the, so the farmers are all like, low resistance. Look, like it's getting into 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.
47:29 Speaker 06 Right. Other things we can definitively say. So where we started this whole story with that guy, Kragus, what happened with Kragus?
47:37 Speaker 07 He sold the cows.
47:38 Speaker 06 Oh, he did?
47:39 Speaker 07 Yeah.
47:39 Speaker 06 And he started growing potatoes.
47:41 Speaker 05 No.
47:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
47:42 Speaker 05 Really?
47:43 Speaker 06 He's now a potato farmer.
47:44 Speaker 05 He gave up?
47:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, and apparently his cows, which are on a different farm in a different part of Denmark now.
47:49 Speaker 07 From what I hear, they are thriving and drinking water.
47:54 Speaker 06 Here are the cows.
47:56 Speaker 04 And then there's Jill.
47:57 Speaker 06 Oh my God, there's so many cows.
48:00 Speaker 04 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 here.
48:12 Speaker 06 He got in touch with the power company.
48:13 Speaker 09 You know, he knew how to talk the talk and talk the language with them.
48:17 Speaker 06 Eventually, they came out, made a bunch of changes to Jill's electrical system, and... So how many cows are here?
48:22 Speaker 09 There's 130 in this barn.
48:24 Speaker 06 Things went back to normal. Wild. They're so big and pretty.
48:29 Speaker 09 Thank you. I kind of think so, too.
48:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, no, they're, they're gorgeous. What is it again, stardazzle? Stardazzle. Oh, it's a baby. Oh, your tongue is so big.
48:42 Speaker 09 She's gonna be at the Minnesota State Fair.
48:44 Speaker 06 Because you're so pretty? Because you're so pretty. You get to go to the fair to bet on the ball. That's right.
48:51 Speaker 05 Well, that's because that's that's hard to argue it. That that is really the proof is in the pudding kind of thing.
48:56 Speaker 06 Well. Oh, baby calves. Oh, my God, Jill. Like, it's it's a really compelling story, but it is like it's one story. Star Dazzles baby, do you also love petting?
49:06 Speaker 04 She does. Come on, come on, sweetie.
49:09 Speaker 06 I don't think it definitively proves anything.
49:13 Speaker 05 But if I was a betting man, I'd wager we're only going to see more cases of stray voltage in the years to come.
49:22 Speaker 26 But the growing demand for power to fuel AI data center.
49:26 Speaker 27 Record demand for electricity today. Energy hungry tech. Because, again, much of the state is about to go through another very hot day.
49:35 Speaker 01 With an eye towards the future, a 70-mile transmission line capable of carrying 500,000 volts.
49:41 Speaker 02 These towers that carry the power mess up our farms. We know across the country, we need to generate more power.
49:49 Speaker 28 It's a big day for Caltrain, the agency rolling out its new fully electric fleet.
49:54 Speaker 29 Meet the state's mandate to transition bus fleets to completely electric.
49:58 Speaker 20 What they basically want to do is come from over the hill there and come straight across everything, come across the property and across the.
50:09 Speaker 05 This episode was reported by Matt Kielty and Simon Adler. The episode was produced by Matt Kielty 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 Kielty. The episode was mixed by Jeremy Bloom, fact checking by Angelique 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 do, just be comforted knowing that he is now going to be heading back to the greener pastures of his music, sound and performance art project, Windstar Enterprises.
50:53 Speaker 05 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.
51:09 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Sauron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback 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 Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Naina Sambhandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Modgauker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitsa, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly,
51:54 Speaker 03 Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angela Mercado, and Sophie Samai.
52:09 Speaker 30 Hi, I'm Maddie, and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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