Treated lumber and cattle

However, if you someday think of going organic, or you wish to run a dairy, there are some rules forbidding it. Some people got a little over ambusious on the Green Team, and made some rules. There are a lot worst things that should be regulated & are not, but - it's the world we live in.

If a cow chews on that bunk every day she would pick up a tiny tiny bit of the treatment, and she passes on a tiny bit in her milk; and that milk is concentrated down into butter; and if you eat 100 lbs of butter a day that treated wood will likely show up in your blood stream in some billionths per.

Things do get concentrated down on butter & cheese - so it's good people are watching too - don't want to be against all regulations either. ;)

--->Paul

I spent 4 years working as a truck driver over 20 years ago delivering the older type of materials, and have picked up freshly treated materials directly from the plant. One thing I did notice was that some of the materials would have a heavy crystallized residue on the ends or in the small defects, open voids etc. inherent to any kind of lumber. Some of the individual pieces of lumber had heavy concentrations of this visible, a blue'ish green solid substance that could be scraped off. I'd imagine that this substance was highly toxic. I also believed in keeping the material wet, and or fabricating while still saturated from the plant to avoid the airborne dust and to prevent warpage until after the material was used for constructing whatever it was to be built because when individual pieces were left in the open, especially the summer months, it would quickly become a banana shaped, twisted or otherwise completely warped.

Most of the pressure treated lumber I remember hauling was of the southern yellow pine species, kiln dried first, then pressure treated .40 CCA blue tag or in some instances .60 CCA red tag, last I recall seeing the latter and more heavily saturated was 12" x 12" timbers in the mid to late 80's.

That said, it is hard to predict what surface residue may be left on the lumber, I would think more so when fresh from the plant and still in the bundle. Even with the new material, there would have to have been some kind of analysis done to determine residual surface content of the preservative used, I would suggest getting a Material Safety Data Sheet for the materials you are concerned about. You would think that with age and weathering the surface content of left over residue from the treatment process would be minimal, very hard to make that call and know that to be true, maybe the msds sheets will have some information about this.

The treatment process was something I had never seen as I remember back then, there is a huge pressure vessel in the plant and the unitized bundles were placed inside them to be treated by use of pressurization.

• CCA