The Resistance of a Cow

Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. See you. Simon, back again. Hey, I'm lots of Nasser.

This is Radio Lab. Prodigal's Sun has returned. From the top. Okay, today we got senior producer Macylti, former senior producer of American Correspondent.

Correspondent of American Sign Language. You got my hyphenated title in there. Back from the grid. Yeah, hope you're having fun.

Have a good time. I'm having a ball. Great. Okay, we have a weird story.

Okay. I'm very excited that that was your reaction. I feel like this mystery does start to people. It's like people are like, what?

What are you talking about? Alright, so the story first came to us from... My name is Clara. Clara Grunal.

I'm a Danish journalist. Should I say more? Yeah, like how are you? I'm very happy, very ecstatic and excited.

I can tell. The enthusiasm is important. That's just the Danish way, right? No, no.

So Clara lives in 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, yeah, yeah. I think the first thing that really happened was that we have this internal work.

We used to like in one of our channels, this guy, one of our colleagues posted an article with the headline. Let me see if I can find it. Okay, so it says, Mistik on that little dance galen pole. Clara knick that.

Translation. A mystery about the water on Danish farms. The cows refused to drink. Okay.

Cows are using drink water. Yeah. A little strange. But as she keeps reading this article.

This seems like something's very awful. So Clara grabs a colleague. So Clara grabs a colleague. Clara.

And the two of them drive out of Copenhagen. Some windmills. Out in the countryside. You'll see those everywhere, especially out there.

Mostly just flat, farmland. Of just grass and nothing else. And after a couple hours they pull off the road. On this little gravel driveway.

Where sitting there waiting for them is... Graggers. Graggers. Graggers.

The man whose cows won't drink. Hey, it's really nice. Hi. He's about in his early 40s.

With a sweatshirt, with a lot of like painting stains on his. Do you have to boot? Yeah. Could I say it to us?

Clara says almost like immediately. Hi. I'm just going to help her meet her. He was just like, I don't know what to do.

Er, I'm about to sell all of my cows. This is my life's work. Clara's the only single little bewildered. That was something wrong here.

So the three of them walk down this path through this grassy field to the barn. Big red barn with tin roof. And he starts rolling up the door. And we're like not really sure what to expect.

And then... Graggers opens the door. We go in. There's about 200.

Red-ish cows. Sort of just standing around in this barn. And you know immediately it's not too quickly out to us that they're not well. But he's like, come with me over to the water truck.

So it's a play, it's a fun time. 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 stop kissing. They start urinating. And then they start drinking. What?

The cows start drinking each other's piss. Oh. But the moment a cow starts peeing. All these other cows.

Well immediately run over. And then they're hit to sort of like catch the piss in the air. Oh. Like it shoots out.

I mean it's like a cow pee. It's like a waterfall. Like a bubbler or a water fountain. A water fountain.

Yeah. Wow. All these cows drinking from each other. And the cow said if a cow wasn't peeing, another cow would come over and start licking its behind.

Then the cow said they do that to get them to pee because they're so thirsty. And the cow turned to Graggers 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 found his whole life his father before him. I've never seen cows do this before.

But how long has this been happening? So apparently like months? Months? Yeah months.

But how are they even how are they surviving? Yeah. Well, Graggers 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. Holy shit. It's like I can't bring them water all the time. So he ran tests on the barn water and clean water.

Yeah. Nothing wrong with it. Totally clean. Weird.

He was super desperate. He felt like he was running out of options. And so he started asking other farmers like what should he do? And some people are like, hmm, yeah, maybe you should contact Gita.

Gita? Yeah. She's like the cow whisperer. Not quite.

Gita is a person with farmers and then my call when they have no one else to turn to. So Graggers calls Gita. And she comes out. She's about in her 60s.

Great short hair. Apparently she has brought with her. A copper wire. A long copper wire.

And also this gold chain. Like a little pendulum. No. Okay.

Swinging. And she starts going around with 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. Works very fast over to her car and drives away. Like I'm out of here. I need to get out of here.

This farm is possessed. I mean, so she drives away and I guess is like what the fuck? Like what is this? And she calls, like I guess calls Gita 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. There was coursing through Gragas' farm that she believed was coming from. This like huge...

Haha! Okay, yeah. Building. Picture almost like a Walmart, but black.

Would these pick like viking runes? 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 Gragas' farm. And so what Gita is convinced of is that the big black box next to the barn is sending out so much electricity.

That somehow electricity is getting into the water on Gragas' 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. This sounds like nonsense. I know.

Is any of this physically possible? Well... This is where things get even weirder. So?

I think we got a mystery on our hands. Clara and her colleague. Oh yeah. Go back to their office.

And what was that 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 Gragas' farm.

No, that's what it was about. She finds another farmer in Denmark. Oh yes, someone like this. His cows won't drink water.

They're drinking each other's pea. Then another farmer in Denmark. Same thing. We quickly found that it was the same story again and again.

The farmers whose cows stopped drinking water and started drinking their pea. But either lived next to power lines or a power station. And his clark kept looking into this. She realized that this wasn't something that was just happening in Denmark.

He 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, like, okay, yeah. A dairy farmer in southwest Minnesota. You've got a family that's been on this farm for how long?

Yeah, so my family's been on the farm here since 1884. And I'm the fifth generation. And she said she started noticing problems with her cows long before breakfast, way back in 2008. And it 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. She'll say she remembered this thing she had heard of called Stravoltage.

Stravoltage. What do you heard about Stravoltage? I just 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 Bayron County Fairgrounds. At a county fair. Four H. Fairs underway.

And I just went around asking dairy farms. Have you ever dealt with Stravoltage on your farm? Almost every single one of them was like, yes. Oh yeah.

Everyone of them had been either affected by it or knew someone who'd been affected by it. Give me a number here. Two hundred? Three hundred?

Well, I used to do one a day. And actually Matt and I talked to this dairy electrician. Yeah, a guy named Larry Newbauer. Who told us the number of Stravoltage cases he's worked on.

I would have to say probably close to over four thousand to five thousand. What? Yeah. We found cases of Stravoltage reported in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Idaho.

Basically, it farms all over the country. But 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 as electricity is getting up into that stuff and into their cows. Stravoltage 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 me to count. They kind of starve themselves to death. You heard of cows getting so weak they couldn't stand back up.

I feel like giving up. You know, you have a big cow just died before your eyes. Cows that were born with birth defects. You just didn't want to go to the barn after a while.

I didn't know at any morning or any moment what I would find when I went out to the barn. We were talking cows that had died overnight or what? And that happened a couple of times. 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. 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. Except for the break.

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This is RadioLab. I am joined here with the one and only Matt guilty and Simon Adler. I like it. I take that.

I think basically you have thousands of farmers who have claimed to experience this thing called Street 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, do you understand that?

To understand that, we have to go back. Matt. Yeah. 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? Oh.

So to take us back, we talked 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 of Denmark. David Nye. These are a bunch of books on energy and electricity.

Which of course is why I'm being interviewed like this for this program. Okay, turns out electricity in America is a little bit after Ben Franklin. Oh yeah. Yeah.

It didn't really get going until about 1800. When scientists first started figuring out how to make batteries, how to make generators, so that we could actually create our own electricity. And do things with it like send it down a wire. And then turn that electricity on and off to create a code, which is the Morse code.

And suddenly you could send a message from California to New York like that nearly at the speed of light. So they suddenly realize electricity's got this sort of almost magical power. The first message ever sent by telegraph? What have God wrought?

So 1830, you get the telegraph. 1876. Alexander Graham Bell. Patons 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. If you saw a light, it automatically meant something was burning. And when the electric light came along, David says light bulb makers would have these public demonstrations.

Where for example, they pick up the light bulb in their hand and hold it. Something you could just never do with fire. And then they take the light bulb and turn it upside down. The fire, the flame, always wants to go up.

But now you could point the light. That's kind of always amazing. And at the end of the demo, you demonstrate it would take the light bulb and smash it. And then it immediately goes out.

Now you don't have to worry about your house burning down if you knock over a kerosene lamp, for example. Now you have safe, controllable electric light. Yeah, I mean, capitalists can see that this is going to make money. In fact, on Pearl Street in New York City.

Down the financial district. 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. Yeah, 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. The plaque to commemorate. The first large scale power plant.

The first place 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 an apartment store railway stations. Factories that could run at night out.

The wealthy. It's a prestige thing. They had it. So it starts there.

But then the country is still in the dark. It starts spreading. It's spreading from New York to Boston, from Detroit to Chicago. Light up north, south, east, west.

Up to farm, rural schools, homes. New lines going up almost everywhere. At the rate of 500 miles a day. The whole country light up.

And then Edison and others came up with. So smart, the own and automatic dishwasher. Appliances. Electric stove.

Refrigerators. Fans. The electric laundry. The motor.

Electric razers. Radio. 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.

So power companies do need this demand. This is to build more and more. Oil and gas could be here in quantity. Oil plants, gas plants, coal plants.

Nuclear power programs. Nuclear power plants to generate more electricity. And to get that electricity to the cities, power companies began building these huge power towers that you see out on 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 on the pasture and see power lines growing. Farm land. And for a lot of farmers across America. Farmers angry about a power line being built through their field.

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 deputies trying to protect survey and construction crews. Farmers shot at components of thousands of power lines. And then it's to topple towers, topping out the legs of them, made 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 reserves 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, they've been testing done to make sure that the lines were safe and insulated and things like that. Right. And 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? 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 the sudden their cows are getting sick, their cows aren't drinking water and they actually start finding lawsuits against the power companies saying this is because of you because electricity is getting out into the ground, into our farms, 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 what was the sort of caliber of the scientific experts? I don't know. I was wondering whether it was like a really strong emotional appeal that won those lawsuits or was it like, no, there's like very clear connected dots here, boob, boob, boob, boob.

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, 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 Reyneman, 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. No, 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 meets whatever you can find.

And what he finds is that stray voltage did not begin in Wisconsin. No, actually the earliest reports. Take back to the early 1960s. On the other side of the world.

In New Zealand. Huh. And it was 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. I want to touch something like the metal pail or the metal water trough. They felt the tingle.

Electricity somewhere on that farm, getting up into them. First document in case people out on farms. Then Doug sees reports we mentioned in North America. York, Pennsylvania, all of them involving cows.

Cows maybe. 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?

Wait, wait, wait. Can I stop you for a second? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why are we talking about cows?

Why not any other animals? Like why not a go to a chicken? Yeah. Well, so Doug explained to us that cows, there's a couple of 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. The 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. So we can measure when the cows 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 is the cow feels something that it might not like.

Yeah. And they keep doing this until they get to the point where most of the cows are doing something, like a little head twitch or a little leg kick, something that shows they're reacting. And so at what point is that? So if you want to imagine what the cow experiences put a nine volt battery on your tongue, that's the sort of experience.

Which I did for this story. For this story. You're telling me this is safe? He is now going to place the battery on his tongue.

I'm sort of nervous. I know I am. I'm actually scared too. Oh yeah.

Okay. What do 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 what you're talking about. It's often experienced as a thermal sensation. I'd say he reacted a little stronger than warranted.

But you haven't even done it. So how can you say that? He's scared too. But the nine volt analogy works.

The coldness except the coldness has to be so bad that P is better than that. Right. And they're not even saying that. They're just saying at nine volts, this is where 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. Like a lot below that or a little below that or like how below that says well below that.

Well below that. Okay. So now that 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 spend a lot of time looking at behavior because it is the most sensitive indicator. Like if electricity is harming a cow, hurting a cow, the first thing you're going to notice is some change in the cow's behavior. 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 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 some human 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. Where's where's 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 he practice the vet? 50. Wow.

And Don told us from his 50 years what he'd mostly seen. Is cow drink and urine is when they lack potassium in their diet. Cows will turn to drinking pee if they don't have enough minerals like potassium. Sodium or whatever like that.

That generally is the major reason for drinking urine. I guess I'm also a little surprised. Like the, I don't know, I'm sure I'm decisions. I know I'm decision and vitamin D.

I don't know. I'm sure there are 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, other infections or even pee drinking. Exactly.

Okay, I get that. But that doesn't explain the not drinking water part. Right. So remember our farmer in Minnesota, Jill Nelson, how she said, and then they started lapping at the water.

Her cows started lapping at the water, not drinking normally. Yeah. You know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink. They slurp it up.

So in a talking to this guy, Nigel Cook, he's another professor at UW Madison. In the school of at New Medicine. 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 at Dairy Cow, when she's not eating or being milked, she's sort of just like standing around in a barn. And she's looking for other things to do. It's Nigel Cook.

They like hobbies. How's it 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 wondering though is if you look at the cases of street voltage, like someone started in North America in the late 70s and 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 Tye Stor. What's the Tye Stor?

If you've driven around the upper Midwest, there are little red barns. Those are Tye Stor. And Nigel explained in a Tye Stor, 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 cost for rising margins, tightening, dairy farmers started modernizing. They started to build milking parlors. Now you're not milking them in the stall.

You bring 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-tye 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, 1000 cows. Now we're building 20,000 cow dairies. Nigel's 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 ticetal. Where they grew up, where their 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 got stray voltage. It's somebody else's problem. It's the utilities problem. Now you have somebody to blame.

You've got a boogie man. 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 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 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, and you know what's been, it's been a lot.

So Jill sued her power company. And I didn't read into those court documents. And in them, the power company's 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'd 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? We will get to...

Is the resistance of a cow. It's what we're going to get to when we come back from break. Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a question. What happens if we refund tariffs?

Why are grocery so expensive? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts and start seeing how the economy really works. Okay, here we are.

I'm back with the dime a dozen, Mac guilty and Simon Adler. 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. 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 trying 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. Yeah, you're outside.

And what are you doing this ring? You tend to your garden. You tend to your garden, exactly. And in your garden, in your hand, you have a hose.

Okay, yeah, here I am. We're painting this picture for you because the hose is in fact quite a nice way to understand how electricity works. So what do you have at one end of the hose? 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 got a lot of volts, open a little bit. Tell you a little bit of volts. 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. Your 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 that almost like the hose itself. It has a set diameter, a sort of amount of space that the water can flow through. Yes. So 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 sleep apnea. If you have a hose, it's like a diameter of like a little tangy 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.

Correct. That's why resistance is so important because it affects the flow, the current. How much electricity is actually passing through something? Yeah.