Lead poisening cattle

I see in the Sioux Falls SD news paper that 40 head of cattle have already died as a result of a battery being put in a feeder wagon. The said it was ground up and fed to the stock. They are going blind and dying with lead levels so high that nothing can be done as per the paper.

When they find the person they ought to give them lead poisoning, literally.

someone was probably protesting the ranchers inhumane treatment of his cattle. Wonder if they stuck around to see them suffer??

I can see it oops where did that battery
go I just put down. A lot of weird things
have gone through feed mills wasn't it in
Michigan that some chemical got mixed in
and whole herds had to be destroyed? I
think the worst for me was wire and an
occasional rat or mouse my cousin tried a
hammer through a re cutter .

Back in the early 1970s a chemical called PBB (Polybrominated Biphenyl) was introduced into the food chain by a Michigan Farm Bureau elevator. PBB is a closely related chemical to PCBs (Polychlorinted Biphenyls) only the halogen is Bromine instead of Chlorine it was produced by the Michigan Chemical Corporation in St Louis Michigan, MCC was a subsidiary of the Velisicol Chemical Corporation. PBB was manufactured as a fire retardant sold under the trade name "Firemaster" it was often added into plastics, the same plant also produced magnesium oxide which is used as a rumen buffer in dairy rations to prevent high rumen acidity and butterfat depression caused by dairy rations that were low on long stem roughage. it was sold under the trade name "Feedmaster". What exactly happened is still not clear it is thought that between 150 and 1500 pounds of PBB was mis-packaged in Feedmaster bags and eventually sold and shipped to Farm Bureau who incorporated it into Dairy rations. The resulting contamination and attempted cover up of it by Michigan Farm Bureau, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and eventually the US Department of Agriculture is documented in several books. The farmers who had their herds poisoned were told they were incompetent, didn't know what they were doing and were trying to blame the results of their poor herd management on Farm Bureau and trying to scam Farm Bureau and their insurance company. Understand at this time it was only the most progressive and educated dairymen that were adding rumen buffers, it was a new practice and hadn't been fully accepted by most dairymen.

The only reason we eventually found out what happened and we only found out after several years of contaminated and poisoned cattle being sent off to slaughter to further poison people was that one of the farmers who was contaminated was a 3rd or 4th generation dairyman who originally didn't want to run his family dairy. He studied Chemical Engineering at Michigan State University and worked for DOW chemical in Midland Michigan. He changed his mind and returned to his family's dairy in Western Michigan a few years before the contamination. The combination of his education and the determination to find out why his dairy herd was sick meant he became a formidable adversary to Michigan Farm Bureau and the Michigan Department of Agriculture and eventually the USDA. He had asked one of his friends still in the chemical business to run a Gas chromatography analysis of the feed he believed was contaminated. Their milk production radically dropped after receiving one particular batch of feed that looked different, they had segregated that batch of feed and purchased a new batch of feed trying to re-establish their milk production. To make a long story short (to late eh?) the friend forgot to turn of the gas chromatograph and they got a distinct peak in the results 12-14 hours into the test that indicated the presence pf PBB.

This might of caused science to progress and modern scientific methods to trickle down to industry much faster than otherwise might happen. When in college in the late 70's and early 80's at Michigan State University I was told that unless I went to work in some analytical chemical field I would never see a gas chromotgraph, 10 years later the rendering company I worked for had two of them running side by side on the bench in our corporate lab.

The farmer who unraveled all of this wrote a book about it called "Bitter Harvest" detailing what happened to him and his families farm, other farmers and the efforts of himself, his DVM and others. Other books are "PBB an American Tragedy" and "The poisoning of Michigan"

I earned probably one of the last Dairy Science Degrees Michigan State University ever conferred since they switched everything over to Animal Science while I was attending. I attended between 1977 on 1982 so some of the fall out was still pretty fresh in the Dairy Science Department and yes I am probably still carrying trace amounts of PBB in my body fat 40 years later, we don't know the long term effects but it is probably a carcinogen so I may have some rare and unusual cancer in my future, isn't that just wonderful?

Do you consider the movie Bitter Harvest ( Ron Howard and Art Carney) an accurate portrayal? Also. Did this lead to Farm Bureau getting out of commodities? This incident aside, I miss their stores. Most important of all I hope you continue with good health.

Wow.
I could see something like that happening.
It's a shame they tried a cover-up instead of helping the farmers.

I read that book "Bitter Harvest" Such a sad story and what honest hardworking people went through. Ben

I only saw the movie once, it came out while I was in College and don't remember much about it. If I remember correctly some points the Fredric Halbert put in his book where there and some weren't and some he he didn't have were brought up (Ron Howard's wife being told not to nurse her child) if I remember the Halbert's didn't have any infants when the contamination occurred. I also don't think the movie dove into the resistance the MDA used in trying to find out what really happened, and the hint that maybe Farm Bureau was behind some of it. Then in a movie it's hard to pack all the facts in and there is also the concern for slander and defamation of character so they might of slacked off on some of the darker themes. The TV series Lou Grant also had an episode that was quite familiar only the animal feed was contaminated with anti freeze. I pretty much left Michigan having only spent maybe 5 years in Michigan since I graduated and three of those were while serving in the Air Force at K.I Sawyer Air Force Base, was a Michigan resident for about 5 more years but didn't actually live there. I have since heard the Burial pits they implemented when it was finally decided that contaminated livestock should be removed from the food chain are restricted areas and the state is spending a lot of time and money trying to keep the contamination from getting out of the burial pits and the Michigan Chemical Corporation's plant in St Louis is managed as a major super fund site and a lot of money has been spent trying to contain the toxic mess they left behind.

You're right, they still monitor the pollution at the burial pits here in MI, trying to keep it contained. And I think there is 3 or 4 different spots that Velsicol owned that are all grossly polluted. At least there is fences around them keeping people out, but with it's one location directly on the Pine River, it has really ruined the area. The fishing on the Pine River is phenomenal, only because you can't eat the fish so nobody keeps them. A relative of a friend used to work for Velsicol. He said one of his jobs was to dump drums of chemicals in the river to get rid of them. He said he hated to do it, but really needed the job. Just last year there was some funding that paid to remove all of the trees in one part of city, remove all of the dirt from resident's yards, down to about 6' deep I think, and haul it away and replace with clean topsoil. That's how polluted residential areas are, just saturated with PBB in the trees, water, soil, and residents. It's a bad deal, and just think that all of the stuff that is built in China, they do the same kinds of things every day.

Here is a link to a news story about the case. Bad deal all around!!!!
Lead poisoning of cattle

http://ymaout.blogspot.com/2013/03/pbb-disaster-of-1970s-poisons-all-of.html

WOW

in mid 1980's farmer near Thompson, Il had his dairy cows get very sick across the fence from his farm was a battery recycling plant sometimes he would find batteries in his pasture that rolled of their pile of batteries.
some of cows died others dried up he and his family got sick.
farmer was branded some kind of nut case battery company said there was nothing to his claims said farmer was going broke and was trying to bail himself out.
kraft cheese quit taking his milk as is was contaminated as i remember the cows that were alive were shot buried in a large pit some were sent to U of Illinois for research.
the soil on farm was so contaminated ant thing growing in fields could not be used for anything.
as i understand the farm can never be farmed ever again.
it was later learned this same company moved here from somewhere out east as they had done the same kind of bs there.

(quoted from post at 13:49:26 10/16/16) I can see it oops where did that battery
go I just put down. A lot of weird things
have gone through feed mills wasn't it in
Michigan that some chemical got mixed in
and whole herds had to be destroyed? I
think the worst for me was wire and an
occasional rat or mouse my cousin tried a
hammer through a re cutter .

Click to expand...

Yes, I've occasionally caught myself almost leaving something like a box of nails (or a dead battery) in the loader bucket and then going for a scoop of silage to dump in the mixer.

Wonder what the REAL story is???

I remember dad accidentally chopping up a skunk in the mixer wagon. He said it was weeks til the wagon stopped stinking.

Related to the lead poisoning, there's a farm near me that about 2 weeks ago had 34 cows killed instantly in a parlor. They were all touching metal and got electrocuted. It was never investigated, so I don't know if they suspect foul play or not, but that kind of loss is really tough.

I have a copy of that book and found it very interesting. I also have an old Successful Farming that talks about the Hailbert farm a year or to before the bad feed. It was a new big dairy. Tom

Sounds like an accident although if there was any bulk feed that was bought from a shady dealer he could have put a battery in the bulk feed to raise the weight.

I worked at a paper mill that pulped recycled paper and we had to shut the pulper off at least once a month to remove the batteries, starters, and angle iron from the bottom that scrap dealers would embed in the paper bales to raise the weight. The feed stock was bought from so many different dealers that it was not possible to trace the junk back. It was just an accepted part of the business.