The Resistance of a Cow

Introduction

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Episode Start

1:19Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. See? Yeah.

1:40Simon. Back again. Back again. Look who it is. Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radio Lab. Prodigal son has returned. From the top, Matt. Okay. Today, we got senior producer Matt Kilty. Former senior producer. Emeritus. Correspondent. Correspondent emeritus. Correspondent emeritus Simon Adler. At least you got my hyphenated title in there. Back from the grave. Yeah. Hope you're having fun. Having a great time. I'm having a ball.

Weird Story Introduction

2:08Great.

Weird Story Introduction

2:08So, today, Simon and I, we have a weird story. Okay. 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? All right. So, the story first came to us from... My name is Klara Grunel. Klara Grunel. I'm a Danish journalist. Should I say more? 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?

Klara Grunel Introduction

2:39No, no. So, Klara lives and works in Copenhagen. It's been a long day, but honestly, this is definitely the highlight. So, I am excited. She works for this audio journalism company called Zetland. We produce audio stories, features, and news. Yeah. Well, first question is, like, how the heck did you come upon this? Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

3:10Yep. Yep. 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, Translation? A mystery about the water on Danish farms the cows refused to drink. Okay. Cows refusing to drink water. Yeah. A little strange. Uh-huh. But as she keeps reading this article... I was just like, this seems like something's very off.

Stray Voltage Investigation

3:41So, Clara grabs a colleague. Fredrik.

3:46And the two of them drive out of Copenhagen. See some windmills. Out into the countryside. You'll see those everywhere, especially out there. It's mostly just flat farmland. Of just grass and nothing else. Kombucha. And after a couple hours, they pull off the road. Onto this little gravel driveway. Where sitting there waiting for them is... Gregers. Gregers. Gregers. Christensen. Hi, Gregers. The man whose cows won't drink.

4:14He's about in his early 40s. With a sweatshirt, with a lot of, like, painting stains on it. Steel-toed boots. And we're like, hi.

4:23And Clara says, almost, like, immediately...

4:28He was just like, I don't know what to do.

4:32I'm about to sell all of my cows. This is my life's work. Clara said he almost seemed a little bewildered. That there was something wrong here. So, the three of them walk down this path through this grassy field to the barn. Big red barn with a tin roof. And he starts rolling up the door. And we're, like, not really sure what to expect. And then... Gregers opens the door. We go in. And there's about 200... And there's about 200... ...reddish cows... ...sort of just standing around in this barn.

5:03And, 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. And the cows come over, and you sort of see them sniffing the water. But they never touch it. And then something weird happens. All of the cows... They start pissing. They start urinating. And then they start drinking. What?

5:34The cows start drinking each other's piss. Oh. Like, the moment a cow starts peeing. All these other cows... ...will immediately run over. And turn their head to sort of, like, catch the piss in the air. Cool. Like, it, like, shoots out? I mean... I've never seen a cow pee. It's like a waterfall. Like a bubbler or a water fountain. A water fountain. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. 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.

6:06And then Gregus is like, oh, they do that to get them to pee because they're so thirsty.

6:12And Clara turned to Gregus and she's like... Is this normal in any way? Like, is this normal cow behavior? And he's like, no.

6:22It's not normal. He's farmed his whole life, his father before him. I've never seen cows do this before. But how long has this been happening? So apparently, like, months? Months? Yeah, months. But how are they... Like, how are they even... How are they surviving? Yeah.

Stray Voltage Explanation

6:38Well, Gregus 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 150 pounds worth of water goes into a cow a day. He was like, I can't bring them water all the time. So he ran tests on the barn water and... Yeah, 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, hmm, yeah, maybe you should contact Gide.

7:11Gide? Yeah. She's like the cow whisperer? Not quite. Gide is the person farmers in Denmark call when they have no one else to turn to. So Gregus calls Gide. And she comes out. She's about in her 60s. Great, short hair. And apparently she has brought with her... A copper wire. A long copper wire. And also this gold chain. Like a little pendulum. Oh, okay. Which is swinging. And she starts going around the farm. Dangling this little gold pendulum around the water trough, around the cows.

7:45And then suddenly... She just freezes, looks up. And turns away, walks very fast over to her car and drives away. Like, I'm out of here. I need to get out of here. His farm's possessed. I mean... So she drives away and Gregus is like, what the fuck? Like, what is this? And she calls... Gregus calls Gide, I think the next day or something. And it's like, hey, so there's still some of your stuff here. What's going on?

8:16And she's just like, you'll have to mail me my stuff because I'm never going back to that 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. This, like, huge... Building. Picture almost like a Walmart, but black. With these big, like, Viking runes.

8:48Viking symbols on it. Yeah, Viking link. It's a power station called Viking link. That receives all of the energy that comes from the UK to Denmark. And then sends that energy across Denmark. And it sits right next to Gregus' farm. And so what Gide 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.

9:22What? This is like a Twin Peaks episode. This is crazy. What are you talking about? This is Gide's theory, Lager. This does not... This sounds like nonsense. I know, I know. Is any of this physically possible? Well, this is where things get even weirder. So... I think we got a mystery on our hands. Clara and her colleague... Oh, yeah. ...go back to their office. And we start Googling. Like, is this a unique thing to this guy? If this is something that other people have experienced. And she starts Googling and finds out that this is not only happening at Gregory's farm.

9:55No. What did you think first of it was? She finds another farmer in Denmark. His cows won't drink water. They're drinking each other's pee. Then, another farmer in Denmark. Same thing. We quickly found that it was the same story again and again. Farmers whose cows stopped drinking water and started drinking their pee. But either live next to power lines or a power station. And as Clara kept looking into this, she realized that this wasn't something that was just happening in Denmark. Get him lit. I forgot about it. All right.

US Cases

10:22It was also happening in the United States. Come on in. Okay, okay. So, she hears about this farmer named Jill Nelson. I think she's from Minnesota. Yeah, well, like, okay, you, yeah. A dairy farmer in southwest Minnesota. You've got a family that's been on this farm for how long? Yeah, so my family's been on the farm here since 1884. And I'm the fifth generation. And she said she started noticing problems with her cows long before Gregor's, way back in 2008. I started noticing that cows were becoming more reluctant to come into the parlor.

10:53Her cows didn't want to come into the milking parlor where they all get milked. Like, they would get really fidgety around the entrance to the parlor. And kind of jump into the parlor. Which was odd. Yeah. And then she started noticing the kind of telltale sign. They started lapping at the water. Not, you know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink. Her cows suddenly didn't want to drink. And they would walk over to a puddle of urine and drink that dry. It was really, I've never seen anything like it before. And it was right around here. I just thought, this isn't normal.

11:24This isn't right. Something's wrong here. Jill said she remembered this thing she had heard of called... Stray voltage. Stray voltage. What did you have heard about the stray voltage? Um, I just, I had some customers in Wisconsin that had gone through it. Where they had told Jill that they had electricity that had gotten into their cows. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. And I was actually back in Wisconsin this past summer. All right, here we are at the Barron County Fairgrounds. At a county fair. 4-H fair is underway. And I just went around asking dairy farms.

11:56Have you ever dealt with stray voltage on your farm? And almost every single one of them was like... Yes. Oh yeah. I 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. 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. Yeah, a guy named Larry Neubauer. 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.

12:31Basically 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. 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.

13:03There's nothing you can do. You can't force feed a cow. They kind of starve themselves to death. We heard of cows getting so weak they couldn't stand back up. I feel like giving up. You know, if 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 talking cows that had died overnight or what? Mm-hmm. And that happened a couple of times?

13:33I wish.

13:36My son's favorite cow, and she was my favorite cow, she literally died right in front of me. I, 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.

14:07But then, we also heard how none of this is really happening.

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16:29This is Ira Glass of This American Life. Do you know our show? Okay. Well, either way, I'm going to tell you about it. We make stories. Old-fashioned stories that hopefully pull you in at the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations. And then you just want to find out what is going to happen and cannot stop listening. That's right. I'm talking about stories that make you miss appointments and ignore your loved ones. This American Life. Every week. Wherever you get your podcasts.

16:59Okay, welcome back. This is Radiolab. I am joined here with the one and onlys, Matt Kielty and Simon Adler. I like it. I'd take that. Yes. So, yeah.

History of Electricity

17:11So, we left off with basically you have thousands of farmers who have claimed to have experienced this thing called stray voltage. Right. Who end up being told, like, no, that's actually not what's happening. And this next part of the story. Yes. Is kind of a little bit of a history lesson. Of? Electricity. Okay. It's kind of a story about our relationship with electricity. And I think, to understand that. To understand that, we have to go back, Matt. Yeah, Latif.

17:42We do. What is electricity? And where does it come from? To understand that, we have to invoke a cliché. Yes. So, does the birth of electricity in America really start with Ben Franklin in a kite? No. Oh. So, to take us back, we talked to... Hi, I'm Richard Hirsch. I am a professor of history of science and technology. Richard Hirsch. From Virginia Tech. And also... David Nye. I'm a professor in Denmark. David Nye. He's written a bunch of books on energy and electricity.

18:13Which, 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. It didn't really get going until about 1800. When scientists first started figuring out how to make batteries, how to make generators, so that we could actually create our own electricity. And do things with it, like send it down a wire. And then turn that electricity on and off. To create a code. Which is the Morse code. And suddenly, you could send a message from California to New York like that.

18:43Nearly 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 telegraph. 1876. Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone. Which seems to work nicely. And also, in the 1870s, you get light. 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.

19:16You 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. Where, 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. It's kind of, oh, that's amazing. And at the end of the demo, the demonstrator would take the light bulb and smash it.

19:47And 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, capitalists can see that this is going to make money. And in fact... Pearl and Fulton... On Pearl Street in New York City... Down in the financial district... Oh, oh, it's right here! I have a picture of myself and my wife next to a plaque. Should we take a selfie together? Yeah. It's a big metal plaque. Cute!

20:171882. Like, three feet tall, two feet wide. Above the text, we have an etching of five or six generators, men standing about. Turbines, got electrical wires seemingly running out of the turbines. A plaque to commemorate... The first large-scale power plant... The birthplace of power!

20:37In the world. This is the place. And so, down there in lower Manhattan... This is where it began. You had... Electric light. The stock exchange had it. The apartment store, railway stations... Factories that could run at night had it. The wealthy. It's a prestige thing. They had it. So it starts there. But then... The country's still in the dark. It starts spreading. Lights up! It spreads from New York to Boston. From Detroit to Chicago. Lights up north, south, east, west. Out to farms. Rural schools, homes.

21:08New lines going up almost everywhere at the rate of 500 miles a day. The whole country lighting up. And then Edison and others came up with... So smart to own an automatic dishwasher. Appliances. Electric stoves. Refrigerators. Fans. A complete electric laundry. Then motors. Electric razors. Radios. You're not running out of hot water, are you? Vacuum cleaners. Water heaters. The miracles of electricity. So by the time you get to the 1960s... We've become dependent on electrical power. The whole country is humming and buzzing with electricity.

21:41We like it because it's clean. It's inexpensive. And it will do almost any work you can think of. And this becomes a problem. Because as more and more people move to the cities, the cities begin demanding more and more electricity. And so power companies, to meet this demand, start to build more and more. Oil and gas could be here in quantity. Oil plants. Gas plants. Coal plants. A nuclear power program. Nuclear power plants to generate more electricity. And to get that electricity to the cities, power companies began building these huge towers that you see out in the countryside that had power lines that were carrying more electricity than we'd ever seen before.

22:22Power lines that had to cut through. They now look out in the pasture and see power lines growing. Farm land. And for a lot of farmers across America... Farmers angry about a power line being built through their fields. 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 line protests, which was in the 70s in western Minnesota. Western Minnesota farmers have resisted the high-voltage power line with harsh words, lawsuits, and sporadic clashes with sheriff's deputies trying to protect survey and construction crews.

22:56Farmers 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, 15 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.

23:27Were they dangerous? Like, had there been safety testing for this technology before it was deployed? Oh, 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 high-voltage transmission lines, and the lights would light up.

24:00Really? Oh, yeah, yeah. The electric fields were so intense underneath the power lines that the bulb illuminated. That's wild. You know, I, my mother-in-law lived near some power lines, and I always thought, well, I don't want to live there. And so what happened was, after these power lines started going up, and 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,

24:32their cows aren't drinking water, and they actually start filing lawsuits against the power companies. Yeah. 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 think you said, Matt, that one of them, it was like a million-dollar payout for a farm. They argued that the losses were in the milk productivity of their cattle due to this stray voltage. Those were like jury trials, probably? Yeah. And who, what was the sort of caliber of the scientific experts?

25:03I 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. 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 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.

25:35And 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. 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?

26:06No. No, not really. And so what was your first reaction to the idea? Well, my first reaction is to find out more about it. So Doug goes and reads whatever he can find. And what he finds is that stray voltage did not begin in Wisconsin. No. Actually, the earliest reports date back to the early 1960s. On the other side of the world. In New Zealand. Huh. And what were the reports? So it's a really interesting story. In New Zealand at that time, it was sort of the tradition for dairy farmers to go barefoot.

26:38So these farmers would be milking their cows. Not wearing any shoes or boots. And when they touched 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. New York, Pennsylvania. All of them involving cows. Cows behaving strangely. Cows not producing milk. So what Doug starts to do. Is design a study to investigate a very specific question.

27:11Which is basically, how much electricity does it take for a cow to feel it? Wait, wait, wait. Can I stop you for a second?

Cow Behavior

27:20Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cow Behavior

27:20Why are we talking about cows? Why not any other animals? Like, why not a goat or a chicken? Yeah. Well, so Doug explained to us that cows... There's a couple things. They're often in wet environments. So cows spend a ton of time on wet concrete. And also are drinking, as we said, just a ton of water. Which are both highly, highly conductive. Yeah. And then the other reason is actually... Because cows are bigger. 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.

27:53Oh, no. But anyway, UW-Madison, they've got a lot of cows. Something like 500 cows. And one by one, Doug and his team would take a cow into a barn stall. A specially designed stall. The cow would stand on this fancy scale. So we could measure when the cow shifted their body weight. When they would flinch. And then they would take an electrode, clip it to the snout of the cow, and then clip four more electrodes, one to each hoof. Turn on a tiny little generator and... Send a small little pulse of electricity through the cow.

28:23Like 10 pulses. And then watch. From there, they'd increase the electricity a little bit more. And a little bit more. And a little bit more. And then we would see the cow basically move. And they might move a hoof. They might move their head. They might move an ear. Generally, it's 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

28:54most 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 sort of nervous. I know I am. I'm actually scared too. Oh, yeah. I don't know. That's no fun. Okay.

29:25What did you feel? Oh, it's like, it's almost like something really cold touching your tongue for a second. Yes. Oh, that's not bad. Hey, Matt, don't tell me. Yeah, what are you crying about? It's often experienced as a thermal sensation. I'd say he reacted a little stronger than warranted. Matt. But you haven't even done it. So how could you say that? You haven't even done it. Yeah. I'm too scared to. But wait, sorry. But the nine-volt analogy works, the coldness, except the coldness has to be so bad that P is better than that. Right. And they're not even saying that. They're just saying at nine volts, this is when you start to see behavioral changes, adverse behavioral changes.

29:57Right. And so what the state of Wisconsin does is they set the threshold for what is an acceptable level of stray voltage of electricity on the farm below that. Okay. Which makes sense. Now. A lot below that or a little below that or like how below? Doug says well below that. Well below that. Okay. So now Doug also says if you take that threshold and you take that out into the real world, into farms, which in the state of Wisconsin since 1990, there have been over 9,000 stray voltage investigations conducted by the state.

30:28You find that less than 3% of farms ever hit this threshold. Oh, weird. And again, that threshold, that's just for behavior. You know, one of the reasons we spent a lot of time looking at behavior because it is the most sensitive indicator. Like if electricity is harming a cow, hurting a cow, the first thing you're going to notice is some change in the 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.

31:00We did like all kinds of things. And what they found is that the amount of electricity it takes to get a cow to stop drinking water or to mess up its immune system or have all these infections is so much electricity that out on a farm, like you're just not going to find this unless it's a real serious problem. Yeah. Wires will always break. You know, hopefully not often, but there's always the possibility that the electrical system can be damaged.

31:31But, you know. Doug says in the rare case that does happen, you get a lot of stray voltage. Find it and fix it. It's not hard to find and it's not hard to fix. But then if it's not electricity, what is happening with the cows? Like why are they not drinking water and yes, drinking pee? Well, there can be a thousand different issues of what's going on and you just simply got to look through those. So we talked to a veterinarian. Dr. Don Sanders, doctor of veterinary medicine. How many years did you practice as a vet?

32:0150. Wow. And Don told us from his 50 years what he'd mostly seen. Is cows drinking urine is when they lack potassium in their diet. Cows will turn to drinking pee if they don't have enough minerals like potassium. Sodium or whatever like that. That generally is the major reason for drinking urine. I guess I'm also a little surprised. Like the, I don't know, I'm sure I'm deficient. I know I'm deficient in vitamin D. I don't know. I'm sure there are a dozen things that I don't have enough of. And yet I'm not going around drinking urine.

32:32But why is it that these cows are so sensitive? Let me throw something out to stir the pot a little. 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, utter infections, or even pee drinking.

33:05Exactly. Okay, I get that. But that doesn't explain the not drinking water part. Right. So remember a farmer in Minnesota, Jill Nelson, how she said... And then they started lapping at the water. Her cows started lapping at the water, not drinking it normally. Yeah. You know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink. They slurp it up. So we ended up talking to this guy, Nigel Cook. He's another professor at UW-Madison. In the School of Veterinary Medicine. So he said, okay, so take a cow lapping water.

33:37Oh my God, we've got stray voltage because the cows are lapping the water. That's normal. You could go to 100% of farms and find cows that lick and lap and play with water. And he also said a dairy cow, when she's not eating or being 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. Cows 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.

34:08They have social dynamics, hierarchies. Cows will sometimes stand in the water trough and they'll kind of be dominant around it, kind of shoo other cows away. Or they can be really sensitive to overcrowding. 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. 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,

34:40and then like really pick up in the 90s. 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 90s. So let's take Wisconsin. When I arrived in 1999, we had 25,000 dairy herds and most of them were tie stalls. What's a tie stall? If you've driven around the upper Midwest, there are little red barns. Those are tie stalls. And Nigel explained in a tie stall, what you have is each individual cow...

35:13Confined in a single stall. Tied to that stall. So she lived in that stall. She fed in front of the stall. She had a little water cup in front of every stall. And so the job of a dairy farmer... Was deliver feed, scoop the poop out in the morning, and milk the cow twice a day. So relatively simple cow management where you could see if a cow wasn't eating enough or wasn't drinking enough, you could pick up a sick cow. But in the 90s, as costs were rising, margins tightening, dairy farmers started modernizing.

35:48They started to build milking parlors. Now you're not milking them in the stall. You're bringing them over to the parlor where you're milking them together with more elaborate milking machines. And now, because you can milk more cows more efficiently, you don't need that old red tie stall barn. Instead, you need a new bigger barn. What's called a free stall. So they're free to move around. Now you can house more cows. They're not chained in a stall anymore. Which means now, instead of feeding a cow individually... You feed a group of cows... You make the cows all drink from the same water trough as a group...

36:19Which cuts costs, it cuts labor, and so now... Now you can have 150 cows, 250 cows, 500 cows, 1,000 cows. Now we're building 20,000 cow dairies. 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 is 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.

36:50That 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've got stray voltage. It's somebody else's problem. It's the utility's 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.

37:24Because I know, I know my cows. I, you know, know that this is affecting them. And I really love my cows.

37:37And 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.

38:00So, yeah. When you stop crying because you're putting a cow down, you know, it's been, it's been a lot. 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.

38:32She had increased her herd size. They made arguments about how her feed composition wasn't right. How the milking machines were causing infections. But also there's this other argument taking place in these documents about something that's very tricky but very fundamental to this whole story, which is what is the resistance of a cow? What is the resistance of a cow? This is what we're going to get to when we come back from break.

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41:32Ask more from your CRM. Ask Adio. Try Adio for free by going to Adio.com slash Radiolab. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash Radiolab. On this week's On the Media, I spoke to the MAGA warrior who ended up defending the Federal Emergency Management Agency against the administration's assault. He proceeded to berate me over the fact that the media got a hold of a story and was running a topic that they felt was too sensitive and not fit for public domain.

42:02The topic was abolishing FEMA. Correct. You don't want to miss this one. Tune in to On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. Here we are. I'm back with the dime-a-dozen Matt Kilty and Simon Adler. Great, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we left off with the question, what is the resistance of a cow?

Resistance of a Cow

42:31Feels epic. I'd say it kind of is. Okay, explain. Well, okay, sort of physics 101 here, electricity 101. Yeah, love it. So when it comes to electricity, you're dealing with basically three things, voltage, current, and resistance. Okay. And these three things are always kind of in relation to one another. And to sort of try to help you make sense of that, we're going to do a little analogy. Okay. Which is, imagine it's springtime. It is actually springtime. I don't really need to imagine. Okay, it's springtime. Yeah, right. You're outside.

43:02And what do you do in the spring? You tend to your garden. You tend to your garden, exactly. And in your garden, in your hand, you have a hose. 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. Right. The spigot that can turn the water up or turn the water down. Sure. So the spigot is basically the voltage. So, open the spigot way up, you've got a lot of volts. Open it a little bit, tiny little bit of volts.

43:32Like, it's like how much push is coming out from the beginning. Yeah. From that, you've got the water that is then actually moving, right? Water's moving, yeah. That is your current. The flow of electricity. Okay. So, it stands to reason more volts, more flow, more current. Fewer volts, less flow, less current. Totally. Makes sense. However, there is one final piece to this. This is the important part. Okay. The resistance. The resistance. Yes. So, think of it almost like the hose itself. It has a set diameter, a sort of amount of space that the water can flow through.

44:05Yeah. So, it's like if you think if you have like a huge, wide fire hose or something and you crank that spigot, you're going to get.

44:14But if you had like. You're going to get sleep apnea. Yeah. Okay. If you have a hose, it's like the diameter of like a little tiny straw, like a little cocktail straw. Okay. It doesn't matter how open that spigot is, how many volts you're trying to shove through there, you're still just going to get a tiny little bit of flow, of current. Correct. That's why resistance is so important because it affects the flow, the current, how much electricity is actually passing through something. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, in the real world of electricity, something like rubber, and this stuff gets measured

44:46in ohms, so we're not going to get into it, but that's what it's measured in. Yeah. Uh, rubber is, has the resistance of something like 10 to the 13th power ohms. So, 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 to keep this going, dry human skin can be about as low as 10,000 ohms. Feeble resistance. We have very little to no resistance.

45:17And then wet human skin. Can be about 1,000 ohms. Oh, even less. So, like, nothing. Not very much. We're one of those, like, boba straws. Yeah. Human boba. Now, a cow. This is the question. What is its resistance? Mm-hmm. So, back in the 80s and 90s, when researchers were doing all this work on cows, they came up with a number. They settled on a number, 500 ohms. So, less than wet human. So, it's like, we're, yeah. Okay. So, we have to take even better care of them.

45:48Yeah. Because they've always been trying to be cautious and conservative for the sake of the cow. So, yeah. They come up with this number. Okay. As they should be. I think as they should be. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. And so, they come up with this number, 500. This is known in the world as- 500 ohm cow. The 500 ohm cow. But the thing is- And in my world, that just does not exist. Okay? There are people like Larry 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 500 ohms.