The Resistance of a Cow

18:06Matt Kielty: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 had it. The wealthy. It's a prestige thing. They had it. So it starts there. But then. The country's still in the dark. It starts spreading. Lights up.

18:47Matt Kielty: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 dishwasher. Appliances. Electric stoves. Refrigerators. Fans. A complete electric laundry. Then motors. Electric razors. Radios. You're not running out of hot water, are you? Vacuum cleaners, water heaters. The miracles of electricity. So by the time you get to the 1960s... We've become dependent on electrical power.

19:22The 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.

19:33Matt Kielty: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.

20:10They now look out in the pasture and see power lines growing. Farm land.

20:14Matt Kielty: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.

20:44Matt Kielty:They managed to topple towers by chopping 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 OK 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. There'd been testing done to make sure that the lines were safe and insulated and things like that.

21:24Matt Kielty: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. And so what happened was after these power lines started going up and there were these protests in the 70s in Minnesota, one state over in Wisconsin, farmers started complaining that all of a sudden their cows are getting sick, their cows aren't drinking water.

22:19Matt Kielty: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 that it was like a million dollar payout for a farm. They argued that the losses were in the milk productivity of their cattle due to this stray voltage. Those were like jury trials, probably. Yeah. And 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.

22:54Matt Kielty:Or was it like, no, there's like very clear connect the dots here. Boop, boop, boop, boop. I mean, they have electricians come out and conduct tests that show there's electricity in the farm. But this is part of the problem is there aren't really experts on this. 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.

23:32Doug 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.

24:01Matt Kielty:So Doug goes and reads whatever he can find. And what he finds is that stray voltage did not begin in Wisconsin. No. Actually, the earliest reports date back to the early 1960s. On the other side of the world. In New Zealand. 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 touched something like the metal pail or the metal water trough. They felt the tingle. Electricity somewhere on that farm getting up into them.

24:38Matt Kielty: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.

25:15They'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.

25:26Matt Kielty:Yeah. And then the other reason is actually... Because cows are bigger. Simplest way to think about this is cows are bigger, so they're like a bigger wire, so it's easier for electricity to pass through them. 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. A specially designed stall. The cow would stand on this fancy scale. So we could measure when the cow shifted their body weight. When they would flinch. And then they would take an electrode, clip it to the snout of the cow, and then clip four more electrodes, one to each hoof.

26:02turn 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 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.

26:29Matt Kielty:generally is a fairly subtle response. The tiniest little indication that the cow feels something that it might not like. Yeah. And they keep doing this until they get to the point where 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.

27:05Matt Kielty:I know I am. I'm actually scared too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, that's no fun. Okay. What'd 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 are you crying about? It's often experienced as a thermal sensation. I'd say he reacted a little stronger than warranted. Matt. But you haven't even done it. So how could you say that? You haven't even done it. Yeah. I'm too scared to. But wait, sorry. But the 9-volt analogy works, the coldness, except the coldness has to be so bad that P is better than that.

27:38Matt Kielty: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.

28:14Matt Kielty: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.

29:05Yeah, wires will always break. You know, hopefully not often, but there's always the possibility that the electrical system can be damaged.

29:17Matt Kielty: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.

29:56Cows will turn to drinking pee if they don't have enough minerals like potassium. Sodium or whatever like that. That generally is the major reason for drinking urine. I guess I'm also a little surprised. Like the, I don't know, I'm sure I'm deficient. I know I'm deficient in vitamin D. I don't know. I'm sure there are a dozen things that I don't have enough of. And yet I'm not going around drinking urine. 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.

30:34And 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.

30:51Matt Kielty: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 cows started lapping at the water, not drinking it normally. Yeah. You know, cows like to stick their nose in and they drink. They slurp it up. So we ended up talking to this guy, Nigel Cook. He's another professor at UW-Madison. In the School of Veterinary Medicine. So he said, okay, so take a cow lapping water. Oh my God, we've got stray voltage because the cows are lapping the water. That's normal.

31:28You could go to 100 % of farms and find cows that lick and lap and play with water.

31:35Matt Kielty:And he also said a dairy cow, when she's not eating or being milked, she's sort of just like standing around in a barn. And she's looking for other things to do. As Nigel put it. They like hobbies. Cows like doing stuff. And one of those things is hanging around water troughs and playing with water. And he also told us that cows are just like very social animals. They have social dynamics, hierarchies. Cows will sometimes stand in the water trough and they'll kind of be dominant around it, kind of shoo other cows away. Or they can be really sensitive to overcrowding. We've certainly been to barns where instead of three to four inches of trough perimeter space per cow, which is our design recommendation, now we have two.

32:15That makes a difference to water access.

32:18Matt Kielty: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. Well, work out what was going on in the 90s. So let's take Wisconsin. When I arrived in 1999, we had 25 ,000 dairy herds and most of them were tie stalls. What's a tie stall? If you've driven around the upper Midwest, there are little red barns. Those are tie stalls. And Nigel explained, in a tie stall, what you have is each individual cow...

32:59Matt Kielty: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 to the parlor where you're milking them together with more elaborate milking machines.

33:42And 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, 1 ,000 cows. Now we're building 20 ,000 cow dairies.

34:15Matt Kielty: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 their fathers and grandfathers managed cows. So that's a bitter pill to swallow. Whereas somebody could go on your farm and say, hey, I think you've got stray voltage.

34:55It's somebody else's problem. It's the utility's problem. Now you have somebody to blame. You've 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, know that this is affecting them. And I really love my cows. And I feel, I mean, I'm their caretaker. So when you're not able to take care of them, it's really hard. And it was really hard on my husband because when the cows would get to the point where, you know, they were just suffering, we'd have to put them down and he was the one that had to do that.

35:46So, yeah, when you stop crying because you're putting a cow down, you know, it's been, it's been a lot.

35:59Matt Kielty: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?

36:39Matt Kielty:What is the resistance of a cow? This is what we're going to get to when we come back from break. In a quiet town in the Spanish countryside, Miguel Ángel Hernández's best friend murdered his sister and hours later jumped off a clip, taking his secrets with him. Twenty years later, Miguel returns home in an attempt to reconstruct the tragic night, but revisiting the past will awaken personal ghosts. Based on true events, The Pain of Others is a chilling audiobook that reckons with a question that still haunts the author. Did he miss the warning signs that his best friend could commit murder? Find the pain of others at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever you get your audiobooks.

37:28Matt Kielty:Okay, I'm back with the dime a dozen Matt Kilty and Simon Adler. Great, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we left off with the question, what is the resistance of a cow? 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. Okay. 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. Okay. Which is, imagine it's springtime.

38:07Matt Kielty:It is actually springtime. I don't really need to imagine. Okay, it's springtime. Yeah. 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 because the hose is, in fact, quite a nice way to understand how electricity works. So, what do you have at one end of the hose? At the house, you have the spigot. Right. The spigot that can turn the water up or turn the water down. Sure. So, the spigot is basically the voltage. So, open the spigot way up, you've got a lot of volts.

38:40Matt Kielty:Open it a little bit, tiny little bit of volts. 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 to reason more volts, more flow, more current. Fewer volts, less flow, less current. Totally. Makes sense. However, there is one final piece to this. This is the important part. Okay. The resistance. The resistance. Yes. So think of it almost like the hose itself. It has a set diameter, a sort of amount of space that the water can flow through.

39:15Matt Kielty: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... 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 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. Right. Correct. That's why resistance is so important because it affects the flow, the current, how much electricity is actually passing through something.

39:50Matt Kielty:Yeah. Okay. Okay. So in the real world of electricity, something like rubber, and this stuff gets measured in ohms, so we're not going to get into it, but that's what it's measured in. Yeah. Rubber has the resistance of something like 10 to the 13th power ohms. So rubber is like the brickiest of brick walls. Yeah, or the tiniest of straws of straws. Tiniest of straws of straws, right. So very resistant. So it means you don't get a lot of current, a lot of electricity passing through. Sure. Yeah. And then to keep this going, dry human skin can be about as low as 10 ,000 ohms. Feeble resistance.

40:24We have very little to no resistance. And then wet human skin can be about a thousand ohms.

40:31Matt Kielty: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 were doing all this work on cows, they came up with a number. They settled on a number, 500 ohms. So less than wet humans. 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. Okay, as they should be. I think as they should be. Yeah, of course.

41:06Matt Kielty:And so they come up with this number, 500. This is known in the world as— 500-ohm cow. The 500-ohm cow. But the thing is— And in my world, that just does not exist, okay? There are people like Larry Neubauer, that electrician that we heard from earlier in the story, who's just like, no way, don't believe it. It's nowhere near 500 ohms. Huh. Why does he think that? Well, yeah, so Larry told us— Well, how is that 500 ohms determined? How that was determined makes a big difference. Well, the 500 ohms was determined in a stanchion barn, the old milk tie stanchion barn. Have you guys all seen an old stanchion barn?

41:42Matt Kielty:Yeah, the old school red barn. Right on. One cow in a stall. Right. Well, today, they never get tied up in a tie stall barn. Yeah, they're all in free stall. It's all they roam around now. Yep. But why should that matter where the cow is? Well, because, so let me explain. 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.

42:22Matt Kielty: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, 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?

42:56Matt Kielty: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? So we called up Richard Norell 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.

43:29Matt Kielty:Well, my PhD, I collected information on resistance of cows. 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 Reinman. Ooh. 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.

44:05So 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? Not really. I mean, they sent us a letter and said that they didn't believe we were going to find anything and they were not going to support it in any way. 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.

44:40Because stray voltage can go from front feet to rear feet.

44:43Matt Kielty: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-ohm cow and you put one volt across it, that would be two milliampers. Two milliamps of current, which is the current threshold. Well, yeah, according to them at 500. Yeah. If you take a 250-ohm cow and you had one volt under the perfect conditions, you'd have four milliamps through her.

45:22Matt Kielty:So it'd be double what's allowed under regulatory thresholds. And if you had a 200-ohm cow, okay, 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 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-ohm cow be reduced to something closer to a 200-ohm 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.

46:22And I'm sure there'll be some people poking some holes at it, but I think it's pretty good.

46:28Matt Kielty: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 could not find it. I know I put it in my vehicle to bring it home, but it's just gone. Now, okay. Yeah. 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.

47:21Matt Kielty:And when I talk to people like Doug Reinemann, 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 that's what's 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 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.

47:53Matt Kielty: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, Kragus, 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. 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 with our guy Larry.

48:33I 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.

48:45Matt Kielty:Eventually they came out, made a bunch of changes to Jill's electrical system. So how many cows are 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. Star Dazzle. Oh, is it baby? Oh. Your tongue is so big. I'm going to be at the Minnesota State Fair. Because you're so pretty? Because she's so pretty. Because you're so pretty. You get to go to the fair to bellow the ball. That's right. Well, that's, because that's hard to argue with. That is really the proof is in the pudding kind of thing.

49:24Matt Kielty:Well... Oh, baby calves. Oh, my God. Jill, this is amazing. Like, it's a really compelling story, but it is, like, it's one story. Stardazzles baby, do you also love petting? She does. Come on. Come on, sweetie. I don't think it definitively proves anything. I know. What a sweet pet. 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 centers. Record demand for electricity today. Energy-hungry tech. Because, again, much of the state is about to go through another very hot day. With an eye towards the future, a 70-mile transmission line capable of carrying 500 ,000 volts.

50:09These 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 Caltrain, 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 and come straight across everything, come across the ground, land, across the land.

50:36Matt Kielty: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 Grunett 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 Anjali Mercado and Sophie Samiyi. 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.

51:20Matt Kielty: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.

52:17with help from Gabby Santas. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Anjali Mercado, and Sophie Semayi.

52:36Hi, I'm Maddie, and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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