transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] Oh, wait, you're listening.

Speaker 2:
[00:03] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[00:04] All right.

Speaker 3:
[00:11] Radiolab.

Speaker 4:
[00:12] WNYC.

Speaker 5:
[00:20] Simon.

Speaker 4:
[00:22] Back again. Look who it is.

Speaker 6:
[00:25] Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab.

Speaker 3:
[00:28] Prodical Son has returned.

Speaker 4:
[00:30] From the top, Matt.

Speaker 3:
[00:31] Okay, today we got Senior Producer Matt Kielty, former Senior Producer... Correspondent emeritus.

Speaker 6:
[00:37] Correspondent emeritus.

Speaker 4:
[00:39] Yeah, at least you got my hyphenated title in there.

Speaker 3:
[00:42] Back from the grave.

Speaker 4:
[00:44] Yeah, hope you're having fun.

Speaker 3:
[00:45] Having a great time.

Speaker 4:
[00:46] I'm having a ball.

Speaker 3:
[00:47] Great. So today, Simon and I, we have a weird story.

Speaker 7:
[00:54] Okay. I'm very excited that that was your reaction. I feel like this mystery does that to people. It's like people are like, what? What are you talking about?

Speaker 4:
[01:04] All right. So the story first came to us from...

Speaker 7:
[01:06] My name is Clara Grunnet.

Speaker 4:
[01:08] Clara Grunnet.

Speaker 7:
[01:09] I'm a Danish journalist. Should I say more? Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[01:12] Like, how are you?

Speaker 7:
[01:13] I'm very happy, very ecstatic and excited.

Speaker 3:
[01:15] I can tell. The enthusiasm in your voice.

Speaker 4:
[01:17] That's just the Danish way, right?

Speaker 7:
[01:19] No, no.

Speaker 3:
[01:20] So Clara lives and works in Copenhagen.

Speaker 7:
[01:22] It's been a long day, but honestly, this is definitely the highlight. So I am excited.

Speaker 3:
[01:26] She works for this audio journalism company called Zetland.

Speaker 7:
[01:29] We produce audio stories, features and news. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[01:33] Well, first question is like, how the heck did you come upon this?

Speaker 7:
[01:40] 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, Mystique om vandet på danske landbror. Kørende nægter at drikke.

Speaker 4:
[02:04] Translation.

Speaker 7:
[02:05] A mystery about the water on Danish farms. The cows refuse to drink.

Speaker 6:
[02:10] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[02:11] Cows refuse to drink water.

Speaker 7:
[02:12] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[02:13] A little strange.

Speaker 4:
[02:14] But as she keeps reading this article.

Speaker 7:
[02:16] I was just like, this seems like something's very off.

Speaker 3:
[02:21] So Clara grabs a colleague.

Speaker 7:
[02:22] Fredrik.

Speaker 3:
[02:25] And the two of them drive out of Copenhagen. See some windmills out into the countryside.

Speaker 7:
[02:30] You'll see those everywhere, especially out there.

Speaker 3:
[02:32] It's mostly just flat farmland of just grass and nothing else.

Speaker 4:
[02:38] And after a couple of hours, they pull off the road onto this little gravel driveway where sitting there waiting for them is Greger's. Greger's.

Speaker 7:
[02:46] Greger's. Christensen.

Speaker 4:
[02:48] Hi, Greger's. The man whose cows won't drink. Let's walk down this path through this grassy field to the barn.

Speaker 7:
[03:25] Big red barn with a tin roof. He starts rolling up the door, and we're like not really sure what to expect.

Speaker 4:
[03:34] And then Gregor opens the door.

Speaker 7:
[03:36] We go in.

Speaker 4:
[03:37] And there's about 200.

Speaker 7:
[03:39] Reddish cows.

Speaker 4:
[03:41] Sort of just standing around in this barn.

Speaker 7:
[03:43] And you know, immediately it's not super clear to us that they're not well, but he's like.

Speaker 3:
[04:18] There's piss.

Speaker 7:
[04:20] 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.

Speaker 3:
[04:31] Like it like shoots out. I've never seen a cow pee.

Speaker 7:
[04:34] It's like a waterfall.

Speaker 4:
[04:35] Like a bubbler or a water fountain.

Speaker 7:
[04:36] A water fountain.

Speaker 3:
[04:37] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[04:37] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3:
[04:38] 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.

Speaker 7:
[04:46] And Greger says like, oh, they do that to get them to pee because they're so thirsty.

Speaker 3:
[04:52] And Clara turned to Greger, and she's like, is this normal in any way?

Speaker 7:
[04:57] Like, is this normal cow behavior?

Speaker 8:
[04:59] And he's like, no.

Speaker 9:
[05:01] It's not normal.

Speaker 3:
[05:03] He's farmed his whole life, his father before him.

Speaker 7:
[05:05] I've never seen cows do this before.

Speaker 6:
[05:08] But how long has this been happening?

Speaker 3:
[05:10] So apparently, like, months. Months?

Speaker 6:
[05:13] But how are they even...

Speaker 3:
[05:16] How are they surviving? Yeah. Well, Gregus said he could get the cows to drink water that he brought from off-site.

Speaker 4:
[05:22] 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.

Speaker 7:
[05:28] He was like, I can't bring them water all the time.

Speaker 3:
[05:31] So he ran tests on the barn water.

Speaker 4:
[05:33] Yeah, clean water.

Speaker 3:
[05:34] Yeah, nothing wrong with it, totally clean. Weird.

Speaker 7:
[05:37] He was super desperate.

Speaker 4:
[05:39] He told Clara he felt like he was running out of options. And so he started asking other farmers, like, what should he do?

Speaker 7:
[05:46] Some people are like, hmm, yeah, maybe you should contact Gide.

Speaker 3:
[05:50] Gide?

Speaker 7:
[05:51] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[05:51] She's like the cow whisperer?

Speaker 4:
[05:53] Not quite.

Speaker 7:
[05:54] Gide is the person farmers in Denmark call when they have no one else to turn to.

Speaker 4:
[06:00] So Greggers calls Gide.

Speaker 7:
[06:02] And she comes out.

Speaker 4:
[06:03] She's about in her 60s.

Speaker 7:
[06:05] Great, short hair.

Speaker 4:
[06:06] And apparently she has brought with her a copper wire. A long copper wire.

Speaker 3:
[06:11] And also this gold chain.

Speaker 7:
[06:13] Like a little pendulum, which is swinging. And she starts going around the farm.

Speaker 3:
[06:19] Dangling this little gold pendulum around the water trough, around the cows.

Speaker 4:
[06:24] And then suddenly.

Speaker 7:
[06:26] She just freezes, looks up and turns away, walks very fast over to her car and drives away.

Speaker 4:
[06:35] Like, I'm out of here.

Speaker 7:
[06:36] I need to get out of here.

Speaker 3:
[06:37] His farm is possessed.

Speaker 7:
[06:39] I mean, so she drives away and Gregas is like, what the fuck? Like, what is this? And Gregas calls Gide, I think the next day or something, and is like, hey, so there's still some of your stuff here. What's going on? And she's just like, you'll have to mail me my stuff because I'm never going back to the place ever again.

Speaker 6:
[07:04] What did she say more than that?

Speaker 3:
[07:06] Well, what she said is that when she was near the barn, she detected this energy.

Speaker 7:
[07:11] This horrible energy.

Speaker 3:
[07:13] That was coursing through Gregas' farm, that she believed was coming from.

Speaker 7:
[07:18] This like, huge- Building.

Speaker 4:
[07:22] Picture almost like a Walmart, but black.

Speaker 7:
[07:24] With these big, like, Viking runes?

Speaker 3:
[07:27] Viking symbols on it.

Speaker 7:
[07:28] The Viking Link.

Speaker 4:
[07:30] It's a power station called Viking Link.

Speaker 7:
[07:32] That receives all of the energy that comes from the UK to Denmark.

Speaker 4:
[07:37] And then sends that energy across Denmark.

Speaker 3:
[07:40] And it sits right next to Gregas' farm.

Speaker 7:
[07:43] And so what Gide is convinced of is that the big black box next to the barn is sending out so much electricity.

Speaker 3:
[07:53] That somehow that electricity is getting into the water on Gregas' farm. And shocking the cows. What?

Speaker 6:
[08:02] This is like a Twin Peaks episode. This is crazy. What are you talking about?

Speaker 4:
[08:07] This is Gita's theory, Latif.

Speaker 6:
[08:09] This sounds like nonsense.

Speaker 3:
[08:10] I know, I know.

Speaker 6:
[08:11] Is any of this physically possible?

Speaker 3:
[08:14] Well, this is where things get even weirder.

Speaker 7:
[08:18] So I think we got a mystery on our hands.

Speaker 4:
[08:21] Clara and her colleague go back to their office.

Speaker 7:
[08:23] And we start googling.

Speaker 4:
[08:25] Like, is this a unique thing to this guy?

Speaker 7:
[08:27] If this is something that other people have experienced.

Speaker 4:
[08:30] And she starts googling and finds out that this is not only happening at Gregor's farm.

Speaker 3:
[08:36] She finds another farmer in Denmark. His cows won't drink water.

Speaker 4:
[08:40] They're drinking each other's pee.

Speaker 3:
[08:43] Then another farmer in Denmark.

Speaker 4:
[08:44] Same thing.

Speaker 7:
[08:45] We quickly found that it was the same story again and again.

Speaker 4:
[08:48] Farmers whose cows stopped drinking water and started drinking their pee.

Speaker 3:
[08:51] That either lived next to power lines or a power station.

Speaker 4:
[08:54] And as Clara kept looking into this, she realized that this wasn't something that was just happening in Denmark. It was also happening in the United States.

Speaker 7:
[09:03] Come on in.

Speaker 3:
[09:04] Okay, okay. So she hears about this farmer named Jill Nelson.

Speaker 7:
[09:08] I think she's from Minnesota.

Speaker 4:
[09:09] Yeah, well, like, okay, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[09:11] A dairy farmer in southwest Minnesota.

Speaker 4:
[09:13] You've got a family that's been on this farm for how long?

Speaker 10:
[09:15] Yeah, so my family's been on the farm here since 1884. And I'm the fifth generation.

Speaker 4:
[09:22] And she said she started noticing problems with her cows long before Greggers, way back in 2008.

Speaker 10:
[09:27] I started noticing that cows were becoming more reluctant to come into the parlor.

Speaker 4:
[09:32] Her cows didn't want to come into the milking parlor where they all get milked.

Speaker 3:
[09:36] Like they would get really fidgety around the entrance to the parlor.

Speaker 10:
[09:39] And kind of jump into the parlor.

Speaker 3:
[09:41] Which was odd.

Speaker 10:
[09:42] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[09:42] And then she started noticing the kind of telltale sign.

Speaker 10:
[09:45] They started lapping at the water, not, you know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink.

Speaker 4:
[09:51] Her cows suddenly didn't want to drink.

Speaker 10:
[09:53] 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.

Speaker 3:
[10:01] And it was right around here.

Speaker 10:
[10:02] I just thought, this isn't normal, this isn't right. Something's wrong here.

Speaker 3:
[10:06] Jill said she remembered this thing she had heard of called...

Speaker 10:
[10:09] Stray voltage.

Speaker 3:
[10:12] What did you have heard about the stray voltage?

Speaker 10:
[10:14] Um, I just, I had some customers in Wisconsin that had gone through it.

Speaker 3:
[10:19] Where they had told Jill that they had electricity that had gotten into their cows.

Speaker 4:
[10:24] 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. Have you ever dealt with stray voltage on your farm? And almost every single one of them was like, Yes. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 11:
[10:42] I dealt with stray voltage way back when they didn't know what stray voltage was.

Speaker 4:
[10:45] 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?

Speaker 12:
[10:51] Well, I used to do one a day.

Speaker 4:
[10:53] And actually, Matt and I talked to this dairy electrician.

Speaker 3:
[10:56] Yeah, a guy named Larry Neubauer.

Speaker 4:
[10:57] Who told us the number of stray voltage cases he's worked on.

Speaker 12:
[11:00] I would have to say probably close to over 4,000 to 5,000.

Speaker 4:
[11:04] What?

Speaker 12:
[11:05] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[11:06] We found cases of stray voltage reported in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Idaho.

Speaker 3:
[11:11] 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.

Speaker 4:
[11:31] 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.

Speaker 13:
[11:38] And when they don't drink water, they don't eat.

Speaker 10:
[11:40] And if they stop eating, that's it. There's nothing you can do. You can't force feed a cow.

Speaker 9:
[11:45] They kind of starve themselves to death.

Speaker 4:
[11:47] We heard of cows getting so weak, they couldn't stand back up.

Speaker 9:
[11:49] I feel like giving up, you know, if you have a big cow, just die before your eyes.

Speaker 4:
[11:53] Cows that were born with birth defects.

Speaker 1:
[11:55] You just didn't want to go to the barn after a while, so.

Speaker 10:
[11:58] I didn't know at any morning or any moment what I would find when I went out to the barn.

Speaker 4:
[12:04] We're talking cows that had died overnight or what? And that happened a couple of times.

Speaker 10:
[12:13] 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 do it anymore. I couldn't do it.

Speaker 4:
[12:41] We heard stories about dairy farmers going bankrupt after their cows started dying, stopped producing milk.

Speaker 3:
[12:47] But then, we also heard how none of this is really happening. Let's head for the break.

Speaker 6:
[13:28] Okay, welcome back. This is Radiolab. I am joined here with the one and onlys, Matt Kielty and Simon Adler.

Speaker 4:
[13:35] I like it. I'd take that.

Speaker 3:
[13:36] 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, who end up being told like, no, that's actually not what's happening. And this next part of the story is kind of a little bit of a history lesson of electricity. It's kind of a story about our relationship with electricity. And I think, to understand that...

Speaker 6:
[14:04] To understand that, we have to go back, Matt.

Speaker 3:
[14:07] Yeah, Latif. We do.

Speaker 14:
[14:09] What is electricity and where does it come from?

Speaker 6:
[14:13] To understand that, we have to invoke a cliché. Yes.

Speaker 3:
[14:16] So does the birth of electricity in America really start with Ben Franklin in a kite?

Speaker 12:
[14:21] No.

Speaker 3:
[14:22] Oh. So to take us back, we talk to...

Speaker 12:
[14:26] Hi, I'm Richard Hirsch. I am a professor of history of science and technology.

Speaker 4:
[14:30] Richard Hirsch from Virginia Tech.

Speaker 3:
[14:32] And also...

Speaker 15:
[14:33] David Nye. I'm a professor in Denmark.

Speaker 4:
[14:36] David Nye.

Speaker 3:
[14:37] He's written a bunch of books on energy and electricity.

Speaker 15:
[14:39] Which, of course, is why I'm being interviewed, I guess, for this program.

Speaker 3:
[14:42] Okay, turns out electricity in America is a little bit after Ben Franklin.

Speaker 12:
[14:46] Oh, yeah. Yeah. It didn't really get going until about 1800.

Speaker 3:
[14:51] When scientists first started figuring out how to make batteries, how to make generators, so that we could actually create our own electricity.

Speaker 4:
[14:58] And do things with it, like send it down a wire.

Speaker 3:
[15:00] And then turn that electricity on and off.

Speaker 4:
[15:02] To create a code.

Speaker 15:
[15:03] Which is the Morse Code.

Speaker 4:
[15:04] And suddenly you could send a message from California to New York like that. Nearly at the speed of light.

Speaker 15:
[15:12] So they suddenly realized electricity has got this sort of almost magical power.

Speaker 3:
[15:16] The first message ever sent by Telegraph. What hath God rocked?

Speaker 4:
[15:21] So 1830, you get the Telegraph.

Speaker 12:
[15:23] 1876.

Speaker 3:
[15:25] Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.

Speaker 12:
[15:27] Which seems to work nicely.

Speaker 4:
[15:29] And also in the 1870s, you get light.

Speaker 3:
[15:33] Most importantly, Edison's light bulb.

Speaker 12:
[15:35] And it was pretty wild stuff.

Speaker 15:
[15:37] 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.

Speaker 4:
[15:50] And when the electric light came along, David says light bulb makers would have these public demonstrations.

Speaker 15:
[15:55] Where, for example, they pick up the light bulb in their hand and hold it.

Speaker 4:
[15:58] Something you could just never do with fire.

Speaker 15:
[16:00] And then they take the light bulb and turn it upside down.

Speaker 4:
[16:02] With fire, the flame always wants to go up. But now you could point the light.

Speaker 15:
[16:07] Oh, that's amazing.

Speaker 3:
[16:08] And at the end of the demo, the demonstrator would take the light bulb and smash it in the light.

Speaker 15:
[16:14] Immediately it goes out.

Speaker 12:
[16:15] Now you don't have to worry about your house burning down if you knock over a kerosene lamp, for example.

Speaker 3:
[16:22] Now you have safe, controllable electric light.

Speaker 15:
[16:27] Yeah. I mean, the capitalists can see that this is going to make money.

Speaker 3:
[16:30] And in fact, on Pearl Street in New York City, down in the financial district. Oh, oh, it's right here.

Speaker 12:
[16:37] I have a picture of myself and my wife next to a plaque.

Speaker 3:
[16:40] Can we take a selfie together? Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[16:42] It's a big metal plaque. 1882. Like three feet tall, two feet wide.

Speaker 3:
[16:47] Above the text, we have an etching of five or six generators, men standing about.

Speaker 4:
[16:52] Turbines. Got electrical wires seemingly running out of the turbines. A plaque to commemorate.

Speaker 12:
[16:58] The first large scale power plant.

Speaker 15:
[17:01] The birthplace of power.

Speaker 12:
[17:04] In the world.

Speaker 3:
[17:05] This is the place.

Speaker 4:
[17:06] And so down there in lower Manhattan.

Speaker 3:
[17:08] This is where it began.

Speaker 4:
[17:10] You had electric light.

Speaker 15:
[17:15] The stock exchange had it. The apartment store, railway stations, factories that could run at night had it.

Speaker 3:
[17:21] The wealthy.

Speaker 15:
[17:22] It's a prestige thing.

Speaker 3:
[17:23] They had it.

Speaker 15:
[17:23] So it starts there.

Speaker 14:
[17:24] But then the country is still in the dark.

Speaker 3:
[17:26] It starts spreading.

Speaker 14:
[17:27] Lights up.

Speaker 4:
[17:28] It spreads from New York to Boston.

Speaker 3:
[17:29] From Detroit to Chicago. The whole country lighting up.

Speaker 16:
[17:41] And then Edison and others came up with So smart to own an automatic dishwasher.

Speaker 9:
[17:46] Appliances.

Speaker 4:
[17:47] Electric stoves.

Speaker 3:
[17:48] Refrigerators.

Speaker 9:
[17:49] Fans.

Speaker 16:
[17:49] For complete electric laundry. The motors.

Speaker 4:
[17:52] Electric razors.

Speaker 14:
[17:53] Radios.

Speaker 16:
[17:53] You're not running out of hot water, are you?

Speaker 3:
[17:55] Vacuum cleaners. Water heaters.

Speaker 14:
[17:56] The miracles of electricity.

Speaker 8:
[17:58] So by the time you get to the 1960s, We've become dependent on electrical power.

Speaker 4:
[18:03] The whole country is humming and buzzing with electricity.

Speaker 8:
[18:08] We like it because it's clean. It's inexpensive. And it will do almost any work you can think of.

Speaker 3:
[18:13] And this becomes a problem. Because as more and more people move to the cities, the cities begin demanding more and more electricity.

Speaker 4:
[18:23] And so power companies, to meet this demand, start to build more and more.

Speaker 8:
[18:27] Oil and gas could be here in quantity.

Speaker 4:
[18:29] Oil plants, gas plants, coal plants.

Speaker 17:
[18:32] Nuclear power program.

Speaker 4:
[18:34] Nuclear power plants to generate more electricity.

Speaker 3:
[18:37] 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.

Speaker 4:
[18:49] Power lines that had to cut through.

Speaker 14:
[18:51] They now look out in the pasture and see power lines growing.

Speaker 4:
[18:54] Farmland.

Speaker 3:
[18:55] And for a lot of farmers across America.

Speaker 14:
[18:56] Farmers angry about a power line being built through their fields.

Speaker 3:
[18:59] They hated them.

Speaker 18:
[19:00] Farmers still don't want a high-powered electric line across their land.

Speaker 14:
[19:04] Farmers are fighting construction of the power line on their land.

Speaker 3:
[19:07] And one of the most famous examples of this is called the power line protests, which was in the 70s in Western Minnesota.

Speaker 14:
[19:13] 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.

Speaker 3:
[19:22] 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.

Speaker 4:
[19:31] And a lot of it had to do with a concern about electricity.

Speaker 14:
[19:34] 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.

Speaker 18:
[19:45] They are tipping us off that this line is dangerous to us, to our families, and to our farm animals.

Speaker 6:
[19:53] Were they dangerous? Like, had there been safety testing for this technology before it was deployed?

Speaker 3:
[19:58] Yeah, yeah, yeah, they've been testing done to make sure that the lines were safe and insulated and things like that.

Speaker 4:
[20:05] But the idea here is that there was just this ambient concern that there was something wrong about these power lines.

Speaker 12:
[20:13] 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.

Speaker 3:
[20:26] Really?

Speaker 12:
[20:27] Oh, yeah. The electric fields were so intense underneath the power lines that the bulb illuminated.

Speaker 3:
[20:35] That's wild.

Speaker 12:
[20:36] My mother-in-law lived near some power lines, and I always thought, well, I don't want to live there.

Speaker 3:
[20:44] 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, saying, this is because of you, because electricity is getting out into the ground, into our farms, and into our cows. And they start to win those lawsuits.

Speaker 4:
[21:14] 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 cattle due to this stray voltage.

Speaker 6:
[21:23] Those were like jury trials, probably?

Speaker 3:
[21:25] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[21:26] And 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.

Speaker 3:
[21:40] 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, 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.

Speaker 19:
[22:13] Doug Reineman, Professor of Biological Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Speaker 4:
[22:19] Doug works on milking machines.

Speaker 19:
[22:21] In the modern context, robotic milking machines. But back in the 1990s, I was asked to investigate concerns about stray voltage.

Speaker 4:
[22:30] Now, had you heard of stray voltage before?

Speaker 19:
[22:32] Uh, no. No, not really.

Speaker 4:
[22:34] And so, what was your first reaction to the idea?

Speaker 19:
[22:36] Well, um, my first reaction is to find out more about it.

Speaker 3:
[22:42] So, Doug goes and reads whatever he can find.

Speaker 4:
[22:44] And what he finds is that stray voltage did not begin in Wisconsin.

Speaker 19:
[22:47] No. Actually, the earliest reports date back to the early 1960s.

Speaker 3:
[22:52] On the other side of the world.

Speaker 19:
[22:53] In New Zealand.

Speaker 3:
[22:54] Huh.

Speaker 4:
[22:54] And what were the reports?

Speaker 19:
[22:56] 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.

Speaker 3:
[23:05] So, these farmers would be milking their cows.

Speaker 19:
[23:07] Not wearing any shoes or boots.

Speaker 3:
[23:09] And when they touched something like the metal pail or the metal water trough, they felt the tingle.

Speaker 4:
[23:14] Electricity somewhere on that farm. Getting up into them.

Speaker 3:
[23:19] First documented case, people out on farms. But then, Doug sees the reports we mentioned in North America.

Speaker 4:
[23:26] New York, Pennsylvania, all of them involving cows.

Speaker 3:
[23:30] Cows behaving strangely, cows not producing milk.

Speaker 19:
[23:32] So, what Doug starts to do is design a study to investigate a very specific question.

Speaker 4:
[23:38] Which is basically, how much electricity does it take for a cow to feel it?

Speaker 6:
[23:45] Wait, wait, wait. Can I stop you for a second?

Speaker 4:
[23:47] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6:
[23:47] Why are we talking about cows? Why not any other animals?

Speaker 4:
[23:51] Like, why not a goat or a chicken?

Speaker 6:
[23:52] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[23:52] Well, so Doug explained to us that cows, there's a couple of things.

Speaker 19:
[23:56] They're often in wet environments.

Speaker 4:
[23:59] 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.

Speaker 3:
[24:07] Yeah. And then the other reason is actually...

Speaker 19:
[24:09] Because cows are bigger.

Speaker 3:
[24:12] Simplest way to think about this is cows are bigger, so they're like a bigger wire, so it's easier for electricity to pass through them. Oh, no. But anyway, UW Madison, they've got a lot of cows.

Speaker 19:
[24:23] Something like 500 cows.

Speaker 3:
[24:24] And one by one, Doug and his team would take a cow into a barn stall.

Speaker 19:
[24:28] A specially designed stall.

Speaker 3:
[24:30] The cow would stand on this fancy scale.

Speaker 19:
[24:32] So we could measure when the cow shifted their body weight.

Speaker 3:
[24:34] When they would flinch.

Speaker 4:
[24:35] 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.

Speaker 19:
[24:50] Like ten pulses.

Speaker 4:
[24:51] And then watch. From there, they'd increase the electricity a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more.

Speaker 19:
[25:00] And then we would see the cow basically move, and they might move a hoof, they might move their head, they might move an ear. Generally is a fairly subtle response.

Speaker 3:
[25:13] The tiniest little indication that the cow feels something that it might not like. 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.

Speaker 6:
[25:28] And so at what point is that?

Speaker 19:
[25:30] So if you want to imagine what the cow experiences, put a 9-volt battery on your tongue. That's the sort of experience.

Speaker 6:
[25:38] Which I did, for this story.

Speaker 3:
[25:40] For this story.

Speaker 4:
[25:40] You're telling me this is safe?

Speaker 3:
[25:42] He is now going to place the battery on his tongue.

Speaker 4:
[25:45] I'm sort of nervous.

Speaker 3:
[25:46] I know I am, I'm actually scared too.

Speaker 19:
[25:47] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[25:49] Oh yeah, that's no fun.

Speaker 19:
[25:51] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[25:52] What'd you feel?

Speaker 4:
[25:53] Oh, it's like, it's almost like something really cold touching your tongue for a second.

Speaker 19:
[25:57] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[25:58] Oh, that's not bad.

Speaker 4:
[25:59] Hey, Matt, don't tell me.

Speaker 3:
[26:00] Yeah, what are you crying about?

Speaker 19:
[26:01] It's often experienced as a thermal sensation.

Speaker 3:
[26:04] I'd say he reacted a little stronger than warranted.

Speaker 6:
[26:07] But you haven't even done it, so how could you say that?

Speaker 11:
[26:08] You haven't even done it, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[26:10] I'm too scared to.

Speaker 6:
[26:10] But wait, sorry, but the 9-volt analogy works, the coldness, except the coldness has to be so bad that P is better than that.

Speaker 3:
[26:18] 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.

Speaker 6:
[26:24] Right.

Speaker 3:
[26:24] 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.

Speaker 6:
[26:34] Okay, which makes sense. Now, a lot below that or a little below that or like how below?

Speaker 3:
[26:38] Doug says well below that.

Speaker 6:
[26:39] Well below that. Okay.

Speaker 3:
[26:41] 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.

Speaker 6:
[27:02] Oh, weird.

Speaker 4:
[27:04] And again, that threshold, that's just for behavior.

Speaker 19:
[27:06] You know, one of the reasons we spent a lot of time looking at behavior because it is the most sensitive indicator.

Speaker 4:
[27:12] 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.

Speaker 19:
[27:19] But of course, we looked at milk production, we looked at water intake, we looked at things like feed consumption and things on blood chemistry. We did all kinds of things.

Speaker 3:
[27:29] 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.

Speaker 19:
[27:46] Yeah. Wires will always break. Hopefully not often, but there's always the possibility that the electrical system can be damaged. But you know.

Speaker 3:
[27:58] Doug says in the rare case that does happen, you get a lot of stray voltage.

Speaker 19:
[28:01] Find it and fix it. It's not hard to find and it's not hard to fix.

Speaker 6:
[28:06] But then if it's not electricity, what is happening with the cows? Like why are they not drinking water and yes, drinking pee?

Speaker 5:
[28:15] Well, there can be a thousand different issues of what's going on. And you just simply got to look through those.

Speaker 4:
[28:22] So we talked to a veterinarian.

Speaker 5:
[28:23] Dr. Don Sanders, doctor of veterinary medicine.

Speaker 3:
[28:26] How many years did you practice as a vet?

Speaker 5:
[28:28] 50. Wow.

Speaker 4:
[28:29] And Don told us from his 50 years, what he'd mostly seen.

Speaker 5:
[28:32] Is cows drinking urine is when they lack potassium in their diet.

Speaker 4:
[28:37] Cows will turn to drinking pee if they don't have enough minerals like potassium.

Speaker 5:
[28:41] Sodium or whatever like that. That generally is the major reason for drinking urine.

Speaker 4:
[28:46] 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 is it that these cows are so sensitive?

Speaker 5:
[29:04] Let me throw something out to stir the pot a little.

Speaker 4:
[29:06] 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.

Speaker 5:
[29:19] And it won't be all at once. It'll be when it's been that way for several months or maybe even longer.

Speaker 4:
[29:27] And then you start to get immune problems, utter infections or even pee drinking.

Speaker 5:
[29:31] Exactly.

Speaker 6:
[29:32] Okay, I get that. But that doesn't explain the not drinking water part.

Speaker 3:
[29:38] Right. So remember our farmer in Minnesota, Jill Nelson, how she said...

Speaker 10:
[29:43] And then they started lapping at the water.

Speaker 3:
[29:45] Her cows started lapping at the water, not drinking it normally.

Speaker 6:
[29:48] Yeah.

Speaker 10:
[29:48] You know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink.

Speaker 11:
[29:52] They slurp it up.

Speaker 3:
[29:54] So we ended up talking to this guy, Nigel Cook.

Speaker 4:
[29:56] He's another professor at UW-Madison.

Speaker 11:
[29:59] In the School of Veterinary Medicine.

Speaker 4:
[30:00] So he said, okay, so take a cow lapping water.

Speaker 11:
[30:03] 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.

Speaker 3:
[30:16] 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.

Speaker 11:
[30:21] And she's looking for other things to do.

Speaker 3:
[30:23] As Nigel put it, they like hobbies. Cows like doing stuff.

Speaker 11:
[30:26] And one of those things is hanging around water troughs and playing with water.

Speaker 4:
[30:31] And he also told us that cows are just like very social animals. They have social dynamics, hierarchies.

Speaker 11:
[30:37] Cows will sometimes stand in the water trough and they'll kind of be dominant around it, kind of shoo other cows away.

Speaker 3:
[30:44] Or they can be really sensitive to overcrowding.

Speaker 11:
[30:46] 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.

Speaker 3:
[30:59] 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.

Speaker 11:
[31:15] 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.

Speaker 3:
[31:28] What's a tie stall?

Speaker 11:
[31:29] If you've driven around the upper Midwest, there are little red barns. Those are tie stalls.

Speaker 3:
[31:35] And Nigel explained in a tie stall, what you have is each individual cow.

Speaker 11:
[31:39] Confined in a single stall.

Speaker 3:
[31:41] Tied to that stall.

Speaker 11:
[31:43] And 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.

Speaker 3:
[32:08] But in the 90s, as costs were rising, margins tightening, dairy farmers started modernizing. They started to build milking parlors.

Speaker 11:
[32:16] Now you're not milking them in the stall.

Speaker 3:
[32:18] You're bringing them over the parlor, where you're milking them together with more elaborate milking machines.

Speaker 4:
[32:22] 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.

Speaker 11:
[32:31] What's called a free stall, so they're free to move around.

Speaker 4:
[32:34] Now you can house more cows.

Speaker 11:
[32:35] They're not chained in a stall anymore.

Speaker 4:
[32:37] Which means now, instead of feeding a cow individually, you feed a group of cows.

Speaker 3:
[32:42] You make the cows all drink from the same water trough as a group.

Speaker 4:
[32:45] Which cuts costs, it cuts labor.

Speaker 11:
[32:47] And so now, Now you can have 150 cows, 250 cows, 500 cows, a thousand cows. Now we're building 20,000 cow dairies.

Speaker 3:
[32:56] Nigel says in that transition to bigger dairy farms, some of these farmers just couldn't make it.

Speaker 11:
[33:02] 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, 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.

Speaker 10:
[33:46] And I would say, you come and milk my cows and tell me that. Because I know, I know my cows. I know that this is affecting them. And I really love my cows. And I feel, I mean, I'm their caretaker. So when, when you're not able to take care of them, it was really hard. And it was really hard on my husband, because when the cows would get to the point where, you know, they were just suffering, we'd have to put 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, you know, it's been, it's been a lot.

Speaker 3:
[34:40] 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 same arguments that we just heard that the electricity found on Jill's farm didn't meet the threshold. How a lot of the problems on Jill's farm started after she built this big milking parlor. She had increased her herd size. They made arguments about how her feed composition wasn't right, how the milking machines were causing infections. But also, there's this other argument taking place in these documents about something that's very tricky but very fundamental to this whole story, which is, what is the resistance of a cow? What is the resistance of a cow? This is what we're going to get to when we come back from break.

Speaker 6:
[35:35] I'm back with the dime a dozen, Matt Kielty and Simon Adler. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[35:41] Yeah. Okay. So we left off with the question, what is the resistance of a cow?

Speaker 6:
[35:48] Feels epic somehow.

Speaker 3:
[35:49] It kind of is.

Speaker 6:
[35:50] Okay. Explain.

Speaker 4:
[35:52] Well, okay. Sort of physics 101 here, electricity 101.

Speaker 6:
[35:55] Love it.

Speaker 4:
[35:55] 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.

Speaker 3:
[36:06] And sort of try to help you make sense of that. We're going to do a little analogy, which is imagine it's springtime.

Speaker 6:
[36:13] It is actually springtime. I don't really need to imagine.

Speaker 3:
[36:15] Okay, it's springtime.

Speaker 6:
[36:16] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[36:17] You're outside.

Speaker 4:
[36:18] And what do you do in the spring?

Speaker 3:
[36:19] You tend to your garden.

Speaker 4:
[36:20] You tend to your garden, exactly.

Speaker 3:
[36:22] And in your garden, in your hand, you have a hose.

Speaker 6:
[36:24] Okay, yeah. Here I am.

Speaker 4:
[36:26] 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.

Speaker 6:
[36:37] Right.

Speaker 4:
[36:37] The spigot that can turn the water up or turn the water down.

Speaker 6:
[36:40] Sure.

Speaker 3:
[36:40] 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.

Speaker 6:
[36:48] Like it's like how much push is coming out from the beginning.

Speaker 3:
[36:50] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[36:51] From that, you've got the water that is then actually moving, right?

Speaker 6:
[36:55] Water is moving, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[36:56] That is your current.

Speaker 3:
[36:57] The flow of electricity.

Speaker 6:
[36:59] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[36:59] So it stands to reason more volts, more flow, more current. Fewer volts, less flow, less current.

Speaker 6:
[37:05] Totally. Makes sense.

Speaker 4:
[37:06] However, there is one final piece to this.

Speaker 3:
[37:09] This is the important part. Okay. The resistance.

Speaker 6:
[37:12] The resistance.

Speaker 4:
[37:13] 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.

Speaker 16:
[37:21] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[37:22] So it's like if you think if you have like a huge wide fire hose or something, and you crank that spigot, you're going to get... But if you had like...

Speaker 6:
[37:30] You can get sleep apnea.

Speaker 16:
[37:32] Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3:
[37:34] 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 going to get a tiny little bit of flow, of current.

Speaker 6:
[37:48] Correct.

Speaker 3:
[37:48] That's why resistance is so important because it affects the flow, the current, how much electricity is actually passing through something.

Speaker 6:
[37:56] Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Speaker 3:
[37:57] So in the real world of electricity, something like rubber, and this stuff gets measured in ohms, we're not going to get into it, but that's what it's measured in. Rubber has the resistance of something like 10 to the 13th power ohms.

Speaker 6:
[38:11] So rubber is like the brickiest of brickwalls.

Speaker 3:
[38:14] Yeah, or the tiniest of straws of straws.

Speaker 6:
[38:16] Tiniest of straws of straws.

Speaker 3:
[38:18] So very resistant, so it means you don't get a lot of current, a lot of electricity passing through.

Speaker 6:
[38:22] Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[38:23] And then to keep us going, dry human skin can be about as low as 10,000 ohms.

Speaker 6:
[38:29] Feeble resistance. We have very little to no resistance.

Speaker 4:
[38:33] And then wet human skin can be about a thousand ohms.

Speaker 6:
[38:37] Oh, even less. So like nothing.

Speaker 4:
[38:40] Not very much.

Speaker 6:
[38:40] We're one of those like boba straws.

Speaker 3:
[38:43] Yeah, human boba. Now a cow.

Speaker 4:
[38:45] This is the question.

Speaker 3:
[38:47] What is its resistance? So back in the 80s and 90s, when researchers doing all this work on cows, they came up with a number, they settled on a number 500 ohms. So less than wet human.

Speaker 6:
[39:00] So it's like we're, yeah. Okay. So we're, we have to take even better care of them. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[39:04] Cause they've always been trying to be cautious and conservative for the sake of the cow. So yeah, they come up with this number.

Speaker 6:
[39:10] As they should be. I think as they should be.

Speaker 3:
[39:12] Yeah, of course. And so they come up with this number 500.

Speaker 4:
[39:15] This is known in the world as 500 ohm cow.

Speaker 3:
[39:18] The 500 ohm cow.

Speaker 12:
[39:19] But the thing is, And in my world, that just does not exist.

Speaker 1:
[39:23] Okay.

Speaker 4:
[39:23] 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.

Speaker 12:
[39:31] It's nowhere near 500 ohms.

Speaker 1:
[39:33] Huh.

Speaker 6:
[39:33] Why does he think that?

Speaker 3:
[39:35] Well, yeah. So Larry told us.

Speaker 12:
[39:36] Well, how is that 500 ohms determined?

Speaker 3:
[39:38] How that was determined makes a big difference.

Speaker 12:
[39:41] 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?

Speaker 3:
[39:48] Yeah, the old school red barn.

Speaker 12:
[39:50] Right on.

Speaker 3:
[39:51] One cow in a stall.

Speaker 12:
[39:52] Right. Well, today, they never get tied up in a tie stall barn.

Speaker 3:
[39:55] Yeah, they're all in free, free stall. It's all there.

Speaker 12:
[39:57] Free stall barn.

Speaker 3:
[39:58] They roam around now.

Speaker 6:
[39:59] But why should that matter where the cow is?

Speaker 3:
[40:01] Well, because, so Larry explained, in a free stall barn or in a big milking parlor, you have all these cows grouped together, where they are often coming into contact with this slurry. A slurry of manure, cow urine, and like water or milk. And Larry explained that slurry is highly conductive. Is very conductive. And as we already know, when something gets wet, its resistance drops.

Speaker 6:
[40:28] Yeah. It's like a straw that when it gets wet, those straw opens up.

Speaker 3:
[40:32] Right. It's the same thing here with the cows.

Speaker 6:
[40:34] Right. Yes. They are becoming bigger electricity straws.

Speaker 3:
[40:38] Right. That's Larry's theory.

Speaker 12:
[40:39] The cows are nothing more than like goldfish in a pond. If I gave you an extension cord, I plugged in the drill and I said, go walk across the grass here and go drill into that post. Okay. You wouldn't think twice about it. You go over there, drill the hole in the post, come back. Right?

Speaker 3:
[40:53] Yeah.

Speaker 12:
[40:54] 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?

Speaker 3:
[41:02] 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 Dairymen told Larry, well, how about we do a study trying to determine the resistance of a cow in these freestyle barns?

Speaker 12:
[41:22] So we called up Richard Norrell out of the state of Idaho.

Speaker 20:
[41:25] And they invited me out to do some resistance measurements on cows.

Speaker 4:
[41:30] So this is Rick.

Speaker 20:
[41:31] I have a Ph.D. in Dairy Science.

Speaker 3:
[41:33] And the reason they reached out to Rick, well, my Ph.D.

Speaker 20:
[41:37] I collected information on resistance of cows.

Speaker 3:
[41:40] Because Rick had actually done cow resistance studies back in the 80s.

Speaker 4:
[41:43] And he's like, sure, I can run this study.

Speaker 20:
[41:44] And then we had a meeting with the dairy industry, with Idaho Power, to be like, can you guys help out?

Speaker 4:
[41:50] Can you fund any of this?

Speaker 3:
[41:51] And Idaho Power brought in Doug Reineman. Our Wisconsin guy.

Speaker 20:
[41:56] He was representing Idaho Power as their expert.

Speaker 6:
[41:59] Interesting.

Speaker 3:
[42:00] But it's also like Doug is the national expert, like the go-to person on this.

Speaker 20:
[42:04] 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.

Speaker 3:
[42:16] Did Idaho Power sign off on the research?

Speaker 20:
[42:19] Not really. I mean, they sent us a letter and said that they didn't believe we were going to find anything and they were not going to support it anyway.

Speaker 3:
[42:27] Oh, that sounds like a pretty definitive note.

Speaker 20:
[42:30] Right.

Speaker 4:
[42:30] But anyhow, Rick goes out with the dairymen, with Larry.

Speaker 20:
[42:35] Looked at six different Idaho dairies.

Speaker 4:
[42:37] Modern commercial dairy farms.

Speaker 3:
[42:39] Where the cows.

Speaker 20:
[42:39] They're walking in manure.

Speaker 3:
[42:41] They're all together.

Speaker 20:
[42:42] They're wet.

Speaker 4:
[42:42] They set up all these tests where they hook up different electrodes to different parts of the cows.

Speaker 20:
[42:46] Castrate voltage can go from front feet to rear feet.

Speaker 3:
[42:49] It can go from mouth to all four feet.

Speaker 20:
[42:51] It can touch the belly of the cow and that goes out through all four feet.

Speaker 3:
[42:54] And so they ran all these different tests on like over 170 cows and ultimately come up with a number.

Speaker 6:
[43:01] What is it?

Speaker 3:
[43:02] 200.

Speaker 6:
[43:03] 200?

Speaker 3:
[43:04] From 500 to 200.

Speaker 6:
[43:06] So what does that actually mean?

Speaker 12:
[43:08] Well, if you take a 500 ohm cow and you put one volt across it, that would be 2 milliampere.

Speaker 3:
[43:15] Two milliamps of current, which is the current threshold.

Speaker 12:
[43:18] Well, yeah, according to them at 500. If you take a 250 ohm cow and you had one volt, under the perfect conditions, you would have 4 milliamps through her.

Speaker 3:
[43:28] So it would be double. It would be double what's allowed under regulatory thresholds.

Speaker 12:
[43:32] And if you had a 200 ohm cow, okay?

Speaker 3:
[43:35] No, even higher.

Speaker 12:
[43:36] It would be even higher.

Speaker 4:
[43:37] And so the idea here is that if the homage 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.

Speaker 12:
[44:02] In a wet environment like that, yes.

Speaker 4:
[44:04] Based on your studies, if public policy was strictly directed by the scientific evidence, should that 500 ohm cow be reduced to something closer to a 200 ohm resistance?

Speaker 20:
[44:21] I believe it should, but I also believe that my data needs to be published, and it needs to be critically evaluated. I'm sure there'll be some people poking some holes on it, but I think it's pretty good.

Speaker 3:
[44:34] Do you have a timetable for when you might publish?

Speaker 20:
[44:37] I don't.

Speaker 3:
[44:39] The weight of the dairy world is on your shoulders, Rick.

Speaker 20:
[44:42] I know. 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. I know I put it in my vehicle to bring it home, but it's just gone.

Speaker 3:
[45:12] Now, okay. 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 freestyle cows that continue to suggest that 500 ohms is actually the correct number. Like that's what the data supports.

Speaker 6:
[45:40] That fight is still strong. That fight is still, nobody has changed their minds.

Speaker 3:
[45:43] 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.

Speaker 6:
[45:52] 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.

Speaker 3:
[46:03] Right. Other things we can definitively say. So where we started this whole story with that guy, Craigus. What happened with Craigus?

Speaker 7:
[46:11] He sold the cows.

Speaker 3:
[46:12] Oh, he did? Yeah. And he started growing potatoes. No. Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[46:16] Really?

Speaker 3:
[46:17] He's now a potato farmer.

Speaker 6:
[46:18] He gave up. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[46:19] And apparently his cows, which are on a different farm in a different part of Denmark now.

Speaker 7:
[46:23] From what I hear, they are thriving and drinking water.

Speaker 3:
[46:28] Here are the cows.

Speaker 4:
[46:30] And then there's Jill.

Speaker 3:
[46:31] Oh my God, there's so many cows.

Speaker 4:
[46:33] Who, after years of being told she did not have stray voltage on her farm, got in touch with our guy, Larry.

Speaker 12:
[46:39] I said, I'll take a look at it and whatever I find, I'll tell you.

Speaker 4:
[46:42] Told her, you're not imagining things, there is stray voltage here.

Speaker 3:
[46:45] He got in touch with the power company.

Speaker 10:
[46:47] You know, he knew how to talk the talk and talk the language with them.

Speaker 3:
[46:51] Eventually they came out, made a bunch of changes to Jill's electrical system and- So how many cows are here?

Speaker 10:
[46:56] There's 130 in this barn.

Speaker 3:
[46:58] Things went back to normal. Wild. They're so big and pretty.

Speaker 10:
[47:03] Thank you. I kind of think so too.

Speaker 3:
[47:05] Yeah, no, they're gorgeous. What is it again? Stardazzle? Stardazzle.

Speaker 18:
[47:11] Oh, is it baby?

Speaker 13:
[47:12] Oh, your tongue is so big.

Speaker 10:
[47:16] It's going to be at the Minnesota State Fair.

Speaker 3:
[47:18] Because you're so pretty?

Speaker 10:
[47:19] Because she's so pretty.

Speaker 3:
[47:20] Because you're so pretty, you get to go to the fair to bellow the ball. That's right.

Speaker 6:
[47:24] Well, that's because that's hard to argue with. That is really the proof is in the pudding kind of thing.

Speaker 3:
[47:30] Well, baby calves, oh my god, Jill, this is amazing. It's a really compelling story, but it is like, it's one story. Stardazzles baby, do you also love petting?

Speaker 5:
[47:40] She does. Come on, come on sweetie.

Speaker 3:
[47:43] I don't think it definitively proves anything.

Speaker 4:
[47:47] 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.

Speaker 13:
[47:56] But the growing demand for power to fuel AI data center, record demand for electricity today, energy hungry tech, because again, much of the state is about to go through another very hot day.

Speaker 1:
[48:09] With an eye towards the future, a 70-mile transmission line capable of carrying 500,000 volts.

Speaker 5:
[48:15] These towers that carry the power mess up our farms.

Speaker 21:
[48:19] We know across the country we need to generate more power.

Speaker 17:
[48:23] It's a big day for Caltrain, an agency rolling out its new fully electric fleet.

Speaker 21:
[48:28] Meet the state's mandate to transition bus fleets to completely electric fleets.

Speaker 4:
[48:32] What they basically want to do is come from over the hill there, and come straight across everything, come across the crop land, across the plains.

Speaker 6:
[48:42] 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 Angely Mercado and Sophie Samiee. 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. 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.

Speaker 22:
[49:43] 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. Soran Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Naina Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Mona Modgauker, Annie McEwan, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vitsa, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santos. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angely Mercado and Sophie Samiee.

Speaker 2:
[50:43] 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.