Radiolab - The Resistance of a Cow

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

There’s something rotten in the cows of Denmark. And Minnesota. And Wisconsin. And Idaho. What could cause a previously thriving herd of majestic dairy cattle to stop drinking water and start drinking … urine? A Danish farmer calls a special investigator, who takes one look at his farm and nopes the heck out of there, refusing to return, citing “bad energy” coming from something nearby … a big building covered in Viking runes.  It’s not magic. It’s an invisible force that’s far more common. And yet deeply mysterious. This episode plunges producers Matt Kielty and Simon Adler knee-deep in a decades-old dairy farm controversy, rooted in a fundamental suspicion of the invisible streams of electrons that keep our world humming. Special thanks to Dr. Liz Brock EPISODE CREDITS:  Reported by - Matt Kielty and Simon Adler with help from - Clara Grunnet and Rebecca Rand Produced by - Matt Kielty with help from - Maria Paz Gutierrez Original music from - Jeremy Bloom and Matt Kielty Sound design contributed by - Jeremy Bloom Mixed by - Jeremy Bloom Fact-checking by - Angely Mercado and Sophie Samiee and Edited by  - Pat Walters EPISODE CITATIONS: Books - The Great Energy Transition: America from 1876 to 1929 (https://zpr.io/3PStsDgidpj5), by David Nye Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification (https://zpr.io/GdQ4pMCy4DAV), by Richard Hirsch Beyond the Barn – Dodging Cow Patties for 50 Years by a Country Vet (https://zpr.io/S8qS9HLEQBJe), by Don Sanders a memoir about his long career. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. Simon. Back again. Look at who it is. Hey, I'm Latsip Nassar. This is Radio Lab. Prodical's son has returned. From the top, Matt.

Okay. Today, we got senior producer, Kilti, former senior producer Amerit. Correspondent. Correspondent Ameritist. Yeah, at least you got my hyphenated title in there.

Back from the gray. Yeah. Hope you're having fun. Having a great time. I'm having a ball. Great. So 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 Clara Grunnel. 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? No, no. So Clara lives and works in Copenhagen. It's been a long day, but honestly, this is definitely the highlight. So I am excited. She works for this audio journalism company called Zetland. We produce audio stories, features and news.

Well, first question is, like, how the heck did you come upon this? Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. I think the first thing that really happened was that we have this internal work. You select, do you slag? 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, mystic on wendl on Danish land, Kurna nectar drink.

Translation. A mystery about the water on Danish farms, the cows refuse to drink. Okay. Cows refuse and 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. So Clara grabs a colleague. Friedrich. And the two of them drive out of Copenhagen. See some windmills. Out into the countryside.

You'll see those everywhere, especially on. It's mostly just flat farmland. Of just grass and nothing else. Come out to him. And after a couple hours, they pull off the road. Under this little gravel driveway. Where sitting there waiting for them is... Gregos.

Gregus. Gregus. Hi, Gregas. Hi. The man whose cows won't drink. Hi. Fredik, Gregus. Hi.

He's about in his early 40s. With a sweatshirt, with a lot of painting stains on it. Stiltop boots. And we're like, hi. And Clarice says almost like immediately. He was just like, I don't know what to do. I'm about to sell all of my cows. This is my life's work.

Clarki 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... Greggers opens the door.

We go in... And there's about 200 reddish cows. Sort of just standing around in this barn. And, you know, immediately it's not super clear to us that they're not well, but he's like, come with me over to the 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? The cows start drinking each other's piss. 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. Like it like shoots out?

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. Then Gregus is like, oh, they do that to get them to pee because they're so thirsty. And 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. It's not normal.

He's farmed his whole life, his father before him. I've never seen cows doing 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... Like, how are they surviving?

Yeah. Well, 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 way. 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? Some people are like, hmm, yeah, maybe you should contact Gide. 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 Gida And she comes out She's about in her 60s Great short hair And apparently she has brought with her A copper wire A long copper wire

And also this gold chain Like a little pendulum Which is swinging And she starts going around the farm Dangling this little gold pendulum Around the water trough Around the cows And then suddenly

She just freezes looks up and turns away, walks very fast over to her car, and drives away. Like, I'm out of here. I need to get out of here. His farm's possessed. I mean, so she drives away, and Gregas is like, what the fuck? Like, what is this? And she called, Gregor calls Gideh, I think, the next day or something, and it's like,

hey, so you, there's still some of your stuff here. What's going on? And she's just like, you'll have to mail me my stuff because I'm never going back to the place ever again. What did she say more than that? What she said is that when she was near the barn, she detected this energy. This horrible energy.

That was coursing through Gregus's farm that she believed was coming from. This like huge... Kida, okay, DIA. Building. Picture almost like a Walmart, but black. with these big Viking ruins. Viking symbols on it.

The 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's farm and shocking the cows.

What? This is like a Twin Peaks episode. This is crazy. What are you talking about? This is Gita's theory, legend. 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 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. No. What do you first? 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, were a power station. 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.

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're, yeah. A dairy farmer in Southwest Minnesota. You 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 notice. with her cows long before Gregors, way back in 2008. I started noticing that cows were becoming more reluctant to come into the parlor. Her cows didn't want to come into the milking parlor where they all get milked. Like they would get really fidgety around the entrance to the parlor? And kind of jump into the parlor. Which was odd.

Yeah. And then she started noticing the kind of telltale sign. They started lapping at the water, not, you know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink. 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, this 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 this? Stray voltage? 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. Four 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. 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 Newbauer. Who told us the number of stray voltage cases he's worked on. I would have to say probably close to over 4,000 to 5,000. What? Yeah. We found cases of stray voltage reported in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Idaho. Basically, it farms all over the country, where what is happening, these farmers say, is that electricity is getting out of the cables, the cables that are in the ground,

near their farm somehow and finding the path of least resistance to their farms where they have concrete with rebar, they have metal, they have water, and this electricity is getting up into that stuff and into their cows. Stray voltage is horrible. It will destroy you. And some of these farmers that we talked to told us about how it starts with them not drinking water. And when they don't drink water, they don't eat.

And if they stop eating, that's it. There's nothing you can do. You can't force feed a cow. 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, 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? I wish. My son's favorite cow when 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. I couldn't do it. We heard stories about dairy farmers going bankrupt after their cows started dying, stopped producing milk. But then we also heard how None of this is really happening. It's after the break. Okay, welcome back. This is Radio Lab. I am joined here with the one and only's Matt Kilty and Simon Adler.

I like it. I'd take that. Yes. So, yeah, so we left off with basically you have thousands of farmers who have claimed to have experienced this thing called Stray Voltage. Right. Who end up being told, like, no, that's actually not what's happening. And this next part of the story is. Yes.

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.

We do. What is electricity? And where does it come from? To understand that, we have to invoke a cliche. Yes. So does the birth of electricity in America really start with Ben Franklin and a kite? No. Oh.

So to take us back, we talk to... Hi, I'm Richard Hirsch. I'm a professor of history of science and technology. Richard Hirsch from Virginia Tech. And also... David Nye. I'm a professor in Denmark. David Nye. These are in a bunch of books on energy and electricity.

Which, of course, is why I'm being interviewed, I guess, for this program. Okay, turns out electricity in America, it's a little bit after Ben Franklin. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It didn't really get going until about 1800. When scientists first started figuring out how to make batteries, how to make generators, so that we could actually create our own electricity. And do things with it, like send it down the wire. And then turn that electricity on and off to create a code, which is the Morse code.

And suddenly you could send a message from California to New York like that, nearly at the speed of light. So they suddenly realized electricity's got this sort of almost magical power. The first message ever sent by Telegraph? what hath god rocked. So 1830, you get the telegraph. 1876. Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.

Which seems to work nicely. And also in the 1870s, you get light. Most importantly, Edison's light bulb. And it was pretty wild stuff. Because up to that time, all of human history, light and fire were the same thing. You couldn't have fire without light or light without fire. that if you saw a light, it automatically meant something it 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. Oh, that's amazing.

And at the end of the demo, the demonstrator would take the light bulb and smash it. And 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, the 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. It's 1882.

Like three feet. tall, two feet wide. Above the text, we have an etching of five or six generators, men standing about. Turbines, got electrical wires seemingly running out of the turbines. A plaque to commemorate. The first large-scale power plant. The birthplace of power! In the world. This is the place. And so down there in lower Manhattan, this is where it began. You had electric light. The stock exchange had it. The apartment store, railway stations. Factories that could run at night at 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. New lines going up almost everywhere at the rate of 500 miles a day. The whole country lighting up. And then Edison and others came up with...

So smart to own an automatic... Appliances. Electric stove. Refrigerators. Fans. A complete electric laundry. Motor. Electric razors.

Radio. You're not running out of hot water, vacuum cleaners, water heaters. 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. We like it because it's clean.

It's inexpensive. And it will do almost any work you can think of. And this becomes a problem. because as more and more people move to the cities, the cities begin demanding more and more electricity. And so power companies to meet this demand 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. Power lines that had to cut through... They now look out in the pasture and see power lines growing.

Farmland. 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. Farmers shot out components of thousands of power lines. They managed to topple towers by topping out the legs of them. They end 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. Were they dangerous? Like, had there been safety testing for this technology before it was deployed? Oh, yeah, yeah. They've 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. Really? Oh, yeah, yeah. The electric fields were so intense underneath the power lines

that the bulb illuminated. That's wild. My mother-in-law lived near some power lines, and I always thought, well, I don't want to live there. 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. 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? 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 to boop to 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, 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, it's 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. 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? No, no, not really. And so what was your first reaction to the idea? Well, my first reaction is to find out more about it. So Doug goes and reads whatever you can find. And what he finds is that stray voltage did not begin in Wisconsin. No. Actually, the earliest reports. 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. So these farmers would be milking their cows. Not wearing any shoes or boots.

And when they touch something like the metal pale 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.

Which is basically, how much electricity does it take for a cow to feel it? Hmm. Wait, wait, wait. Can I stop you for a second? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why 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. Hmm. Simplest way to think about this is cows are bigger, so they're like a bigger wire, so it's easier for electricity to pass through them.

Oh, no. But anyway, UW Madison, they've got a lot of cows. Something like 500 cows. And one by one, Doug and his team would take a cow into a barn stall. The specially designed stall. The cow would stand on this fancy scale. So we can 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.

Like 10 pulses. And then watch. From there, they'd increase the electricity a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And then we would see the cow basically move and they might move a hoof.

They might move their head. They might move an ear. Generally is a fairly subtle response. The tiniest little indication the cow feels something that it might not like. Yeah. And they keep doing this until they get to the point where most of the cows are doing something, like a little head twitch or a little leg kick, something that shows they're reacting. And so at what point is that?

So if you want to imagine what the cow experience is, put a 9-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. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's no fun. Okay. What 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 Warren. 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 9-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 9 volts, this is when you start to see behavioral changes, adverse behavioral changes. Right. And so what the state of Wisconsin does is they set the threshold for what is an acceptable level of stray voltage of electricity on the farm 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, you find that less than 3% of farms ever hit this threshold. Oh, weird. And again, that threshold, that's just for behavior. You know, one of the reasons we 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. We did like all kinds of things. And what they found is that the amount of electricity it takes to get a cow to stop drinking water or to mess up its immune. system or have all these infections, is so much electricity that out on a farm, like, you're just not going to find this unless it's a real serious problem. Yeah, wires will always break. You know, hopefully not often, but there's always the possibility that the electrical system can be damaged.

But, you know. Doug says in the rare case, that does happen. You get a lot of stray voltage. Find it and fix it. It's not hard to find, and it's not hard to fix. But then if it's not electricity, what is happening with the cows? Like, why 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? 50. 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 a drinking urine. I guess I'm also a little surprised. Like the, I don't know, I'm sure I'm deficient. I know I'm deficient in vitamin

D. I don't know. I'm sure there are 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? 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. Exactly. Okay, I get that. But that doesn't explain the not drinking water part.

Right. So remember a farmer in Minnesota, Jill Nelson, how she said. And then they started lapping at the water. Her cow started lapping at the water, not drinking in 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. And so he said, okay, so take a cow lapping water. Oh my God, we've got stray voltage because the cows are lapping the water as normal. You could go to 100% of farms and find cows that lick and lap and play with water. And he also said a dairy cow, when she's not eating or being milk, she'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. They have social dynamics, hierarchies. Cows will sometimes stand in the water trough and they'll kind of be dominant around it, kind of shoe 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 learning 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. 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. 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... Confined in a single stall. Tied to that stall.

So she lived in that stall. She fed in front of the stall. She had a little water cup in front of every stall. And so the job of a dairy farmer... 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. They started to build milking parlors.

Now you're not milking them in the stall. You're bringing them over the parlor where you're milking them together with more elaborate milking machines. And now, because you can milk more cows more efficiently, you don't need that old. red-tie stall barn. Instead, you need a new bigger barn. What's called a 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, which cuts costs, it cuts labor, and so now... Now you can have 150 cows, 250 cows, 500 cows, a thousand cows. Now we're building 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 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 they're fathers and grandfathers manage 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

utilities problem. Now you have somebody to blame. You've got a boogeyman. And it's not your fault. It's somebody else's fault. And I would say, you come and milk my cows and tell me that because I know, I know my cows, I, you know that this is affecting them. And I really love my cows. And I feel, I mean, I'm their caretaker. So when you're not able to take care of them, it was really hard. And it was really hard on my husband because when the cows would get to the point where, you know, they were just suffering, we'd have to put him down, and he was the one that had to do that.

So, yeah, when you stop crying because you're putting a cow down, you know, 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. 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? Which we will get to... Is the resistance of a cow? That's what we're going to get to when we come back from break. Okay, here we are.

I'm back with the dime a dozen Matt Kilty and Simon Adler. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so we left off with the question, what is the resistance of a cow? Feels 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. And these three things are always kind of in relation to one another. And it's sort of try to help you make sense of that. We're going to do a little analogy, which is, imagine it's springtime.

It is actually springtime. I don't really need to imagine. Okay, it's springtime. You're outside. And what do you do in the spring? You tend to your garden. You tend to your garden. Exactly.

And in your garden, in your hand, you have a hose. Okay, yeah. Here I am. We're painting this picture for you. 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 a little bit, a tiny little bit of bolts. Like 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 a reason more volts, more flow, more current. Fewer volts,

less flow, less current. Totally. Makes sense. However, there is one final piece to this. This is the important part. Okay.

The resistance. The resistance. Yes. So think of it almost like the hose itself. It has a set diameter, a sort of amount of space that the water can flow through.

Yeah, so it's like if you think if you have like a huge wide fire hose or something and you crank that spigot, you're going to get But if you had like... You're going to get sleep apnea.

Yeah. Okay. If you have a hose that's like the diameter of like a little tiny straw, like a little cocktail straw. It doesn't matter how open that spig it 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. Right. 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 in oms, so 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 oms. So rubber is like the briciest of brickiest of brick walls. Yeah, or the tiniest of straws of straws. Tinyest 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 us going. Dry human skin can be about as low. as 10,000 oms. Feeble resistance. We have very little to no resistance. And then wet human skin can be about a thousand oms. 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? 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. So it's like we're... Yeah. Okay. So we have to take even better care of them. Yeah, because they've always been trying to be cautious and conservative for the sake of the cow. So yeah, they come up with this number.

Yeah. 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... 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 Newbauer, that electrician that we heard from earlier in the story, who's just like, no way, don't believe it. It's nowhere's near 500 oms.

Huh. Why does he think that? Well, yeah, so Larry told us. Well, how is that 500 oms determined? How that was determined makes a big difference. Well, the 500 oms was determined in a stanchion barn, the old milk tie stanchion bar. Have you guys all seen an old stanchion bar? Yeah, the old school red barn.

Right on. One cow in a stall. Right. Well, today they never get tied up in a Thai stall barn. Yeah, they're all in free. Free stall. It's all they roam around now. Yep.

But why should that matter where the cow is? Well, because, so Larry explained, in a freestyle barn or in a big milking parlor, you have all these cows grouped together where they are often coming into contact with this slurry, a slurry of manure, cow urine, and like, water or milk. Yeah. And Larry explained that slurry is highly conducted. is very conductive. And as we already know, when something gets wet, its resistance drops.

Yeah. It's like a straw that when it gets wet, the straw opens up. Right. It's the same thing here with the cows. Right. Yes, they are becoming bigger electricity straws. Right. That's Larry's theory.

The cows are nothing more than like goldfish in a pond. If I gave you an extension cord, I plugged in the drill and I said, go walk across the grass here and go drill into that post, okay? You wouldn't think twice about it. you go over there, drill the hole in the post to come back, right? Yeah. If I gave you that same drill and told you to jump in the pool and go drill out the iron post in the pool, right?

You'd have a second thought about that, now, wouldn't you? 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 you do is because this whole resistance thing. And so the Idaho dairyman told Larry, well, how about we do a study trying to determine the resistance of a cow in these freestall barns. So we called up Richard Norel out of the state of Idaho.

And they invited me out to do some resistance measurements on cows. So, this is Rick. I have a PhD in dairy science. And the reason they reached out to Rick... Well, my PhD, I collected information on resistance of cows. Is Rick had actually done cow resistance studies back in the 80s? And he's like, sure, I can run this study. And then we had a meeting with the dairy industry, with Idaho power.

To be like, can you guys help out? Can you fund any of this? And Idaho Power brought in. Doug Reinewan. Oh. Our Wisconsin guy. Yeah. He was representing Idaho Power as their expert.

Interesting. But it's also like Doug is the national expert, like the go-to person on this. So if he says thumbs down, well, then you have quite a 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. Did Idaho Power sign off on the research? Um, not really. I mean, they sent us a letter and said that they didn't believe we were going to find anything and they were not going to support it anyway. Oh, that sounds like a pretty definitive note. Right.

But anyhow, Rick goes out with the dairyman, with Larry. Looked at six different Idaho dairies. Modern commercial dairy farms. Where the cows. They're walking in manure. They're all together. They're wet. They set up all these tests where they hook up different electrodes to different parts of the cows.

Because straight voltages can go from front feet to rear feet. It can go from mouth to all four feet. You can touch the belly of the cow and that goes out through all four feet. And so they run all these different tests on like over 170 cows and ultimately come up with a number. What is it? 200. 200. From 500 to 200.

So what does that actually mean? Well, if you take a 500-on cow and you put one volt across it, that would be 2 milanphers. 2 millie amps of current, which is the current threshold. Well, yeah, according to them at 500. Yeah. If you take a 250-oom cow and you had one volt under the perfect conditions, you'd have 4 milliamps through her. So it'd be double.

Be double what's allowed under regulatory thresholds. And if you had a 200-oom cow, okay? No, even higher. It'd be even higher. 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. In a wet environment like that, yes. Based on your studies, if public policy was strictly directed by the scientific evidence, should that 500-oom cows, be reduced to something closer to a 200-ohom resistance? I believe it should, but I also believe that, you know, my data needs to be published, and it needs to be critically evaluated.

And I'm sure there'll be some people poking some holes at it, but I think it's pretty good. Do you have a timetable for when you might publish? I don't. The weight of the dairy world is on your shoulders, Rick. I know, I know. And I'm embarrassed to say this, but when I retired, I packed everything up out of my office that I 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. 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 Reinheman, they're like, look, there's other data out there, current data looking at freestall cows that continue to suggest that 500 oms is actually the correct number. Like, that's what the data supports. That fight is still strong. That fight is still, nobody has changed their minds. Yeah.

So you have farmers who still believe that the resistance should be lower, but all the data, peer reviewed, published, still points to 500. So the farmers are all, like, low resistance. Look, like, it's getting 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. Right. Other things we can definitively say.

So where we started this whole story with that guy, What happened with Kragus? He sold the cows. Oh, he did? Yeah. And he started growing potatoes. No. Yeah.

Really? He's now a potato farmer. He gave up. Yeah, and apparently his cows, which are on a different farm in a different part of Denmark now. From what I hear, they are thriving and drinking water. God! Here are the cows! And then there's Jill.

Oh, my God. There's so many cows. Who, after years of being told, she did not have stray voltage on her farm, got in touch was our guy Larry. I said, I'll take a look at it, and whatever I find, I'll tell you. Told her, you're not imagining things. There is stray voltage here. He got in touch with the power company.

You know, he knew how to talk the talk and talk the language with them. Eventually, they came out, made a bunch of changes to Jill's electrical system. So how many cows out here? There's 130 in this barn. Things went back to normal. Wild. They're so big and pretty. Thank you.

I kind of think so, too. Yeah. No, they're gorgeous. What is it again? Star dazzle? Star dazzle. Oh, is it baby? Oh. Your tongue is so big.

It's going to be at the Minnesota State Fair. Because you're so pretty? Because you're so pretty. You get to go to the fair to bell at a ball. That's right. Well, that's, because that's hard to argue it. That is really the proof is in the pudding kind of thing. Well.

Oh, baby calves. Oh, my God. Jill. Like, it's a really compelling story, but it is like, it's one. story. Star Dazzles baby, do you also love petting? She does. Come on.

Come on, sweetie. I don't think it definitively proves anything. 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. 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 to. through another very hot day.

With an eye towards the future, a 70-mile transmission line capable of carrying 500,000 volts. These towers that carry the power mess up our farms. We know across the country we need to generate more power. It's a big day for Cal Train, the agency rolling out its new fully electric fleet. Meet the state's mandate to transition bus fleets to completely electric. What they basically want to do is come from over the hill there. It comes straight across everything, come across the crop, land, across the point.

This episode was reported by Matt Kilty and Simon Adler. The episode was produced by Matt Kilty with help from Maria Paz Gutierrez, reporting help from Clara Grunit and Rebecca Rand. Original music and sound design contributed by Jeremy Bloom and Matt Kilty. The episode was mixed by Jeremy Bloom, fact-checking by Angeloie Mercado and Sophie Sammy. 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 Winstar Solutions.com.

No cows were harmed in the making of... of this episode, so far as I know. Catch you next week. Bye, bye, bye. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Soron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editors, Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Naina Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Morgauker, Annie McEwan, Alex Nissen, Sara Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vizza, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santis.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Samay. Hi, I'm Maddie and I'm from Frederick Maryland. Leadership support for Radio Lab's science programming is provided by the Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.