From the Toronto Globe and Mail:
Finding a cure for dancing cows
Ontario farmers point to excess electricity after livestock adopt strange behaviour
Some dairy farmers in Ontario have begun noticing peculiar goings-on with their cows, odd movements similar to dancing.
Robert Jantzi, who has a 70-head herd of Holsteins in this rural community west of Kitchener, started seeing the behaviour about three years ago. "They'd get up, they'd just be wiggling their back ends," he says.
Normally, cows lounge peacefully in their stalls, with just a bit of shuffling and tail-swishing. But Mr. Jantzi says the dancing wasn't the only worrisome thing. Cows were producing less milk of poorer quality and his animals would often kick him.
"Something was bothering them," he says.
Mr. Jantzi has since discovered that his herd was being affected by a manmade electrical phenomenon known as stray voltage or tingle voltage. In many rural areas of Ontario, so much electricity is sloshing around antiquated power lines that some of the juice is leaking into the surrounding countryside and into barns, discomfiting cows and causing them to unwillingly shuffle about.
It is largely for the sake of the uncomfortable cows that many farmers in Ontario have been lobbying for a solution. They've persuaded one of their own, Maria Van Bommel, a chicken farmer and Liberal MPP for a rural area around the city of London, to introduce a private member's bill in the legislature that would force power utilities to upgrade their lines.
Most private member's bills languish in obscurity, but in Ontario, the possibility that so many dairy cattle are being bothered by errant voltage has struck a nerve.
Last month, Ms. Van Bommel's bill, the Ground Current Pollution Act, received second reading -- a rare milestone for legislation not sponsored by a governing party -- after receiving praise from politicians in all three parties.
Since the vote, Ms. Van Bommel says she has received dozens of calls from concerned farmers in Ontario and Alberta complaining of the same problem.
The utility companies are in agreement:
The issue is well known in the utility industry. Hydro One, an electricity distributor owned by the provincial government, has recently issued a statement on it and concedes that varying amounts of low-level voltage may exist between the earth and electrically grounded farm equipment such as stanchion pipes, feeders, milk pipelines or even wet concrete floors.
"The issue of tingle voltage is a phenomenon that is not unique to the province of Ontario or to Hydro One," it says.
And the cause:
The stray voltage problem occurs when the neutral wires used to return electricity from a site to power substations don't have the capacity to handle all the juice. The excess power completes the circuit by travelling through yards, cattle and barns.
The problem has recently become worse because rural electricity demand has been increasing due to suburban encroachment and growing farm usage, and outstripping the capacity of the wires.
In cities, the grid tends to be more modern and up-to-date, making urban areas less vulnerable -- although there are some worries that stray voltage can get into residential plumbing.
The problem "is extremely widespread. It's endemic," says Ted Cowan, a researcher for the Ontario Federation of Agriculture. The federation estimates that several hundred of the province's 6,000 dairy barns are dealing with it at any given time.
And one farmer's story:
Besides the dancing, his cows were experiencing a condition that looked like mastitis (infected udders). This would also suddenly worsen on weekends, when there was more power usage in a suburban development near his farm.
It will be interesting to see if this happens in my area as a lot of farmland is being developed near places like Lynden and north of Bellingham.
