ZAPPED! Farmers hope for solutions to stray voltage

By Terry Meagher and Patrick Meagher

Francois Cayer has had tingle voltage on his St. Albert farm for 30 years. He figures some years he lost as much as $50,000 because of lower milk production, cows dropping dead from heart attacks and stress, calves lost due to spontaneous abortions. He thought the problem was under control until he expanded the tie-stall barn in 2005 and increased from 50 to 75 cows. He saw cows lurching violently from electrical shocks after touching the metal railing on the stalls. He then spent $45,000 on his third tingle voltage monitoring and management system. His father, Andre, died the following year at age 79.

"I’m convinced he died from the stress of all this," Cayer said.

In 2006, a member of provincial parliament, on behalf of a single dairy farmer, Lee Mongomery, proposed a private member’s bill that reached second reading before it met the fate of almost all private member bills. Western Ontario MPP Maria Van Bommel’s bill, the Ground Current Pollution Act, was tabled and died.

But spurred on by that bill the Minister of Energy, Dwight Duncan, a year later created new hope for hundreds of farmers when he sent an obtusely worded order to the Ontario Energy Board. The minister told the board to implement measures that would ensure tingle or stray voltage would not "unduly impact the operation of a farm."

As a result, Ontario Energy Board hearings across the province last year drew 500 farmers, many of whom had been previously shamed into silence.

Ted Cowan, Ontario Federation of Agriculture energy researcher, expects the Ontario Energy Board to come up with guidelines by the end of the year that will address three issues: stray voltage coming through the soil, stray voltage coming through the wires and into the panel, and stray voltage caused inside the barn.

Cowan estimates that farmers in the province, because of stray voltage, have lost between $15 million and $25 million annually in milk production.

Through the last decade, farmers who complained of stray voltage were almost universally accused of poor management. Experts blamed farmers for plummeting milk production, out-of-control mastitis and dying cows. They were failed farmers. Now the minister’s order is shifting a huge share of the burden and blame on to the electrical providers. "He’s saying there is a problem with the system," said MPP Van Bommel, who is also a chicken farmer.

Her bill addressed uncontrolled voltage straying from the electrical system and zapping cows. It assumed sustained and unmanageable problems with stray voltage have been caused by an increase in electrical demand in rural Ontario without a corresponding improvement to an aging infrastructure. Too much electricity has been escaping into the ground and polluting it.

Yet in the mid-90s and still, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) was explaining the power company’s culpability away by saying many non-electrical problems such as improper care have the same symptoms as tingle voltage.

Don’t tell that to Francois Cayer of St-Albert. He is on his third generation of voltage monitors and filters. He paid $45,000 to purchase and install the latest in technology in 2006. He actually purchased the first system from his power company. His lost income over 30 years? About $2 million, he says.

Merton and Jodilyn Albright, of St. Eugene, estimate stray voltage cost them $250,000 over four years. It has become a horror sapping their spirits and pocketbooks. "We are spending a fortune," says Jodilyn Albright. "And there’s been no place for us to turn."

Discouragement is compounded by a widespread view that there is an easy solution to stray voltage. An official OMAFRA document from 2007 states that "a properly equipped and knowledgeable electrical contractor should be able to resolve any farm stray voltage issue with one or more tingle voltage filters and 2 to 10 hours of installation labour. Solutions that cost more than $1000 to $2000 per farm should be viewed with suspicion."

An OMAFRA report last April, noted: "Stray voltage is thoroughly researched and can no longer serve as a scapegoat for the unexplained."

Yet the experts often cannot explain it. In 1996, John Beckstead, of Inkerman near Winchester, brought experts to his farm 22 times. He installed filters and they helped but cattle were still dying. He noticed his problem became worse in the fall when nearby cash croppers were operating grain dryers. This winter, the Albrights do their milking at night when they know their neighbors have finished, when the effect of tingle voltage has been diminished. The hearings revealed, Cowan said, that one farm’s use of hydro power can affect cows on another farm.

Beckstead sued Ontario Hydro in the mid-90s but couldn’t get expert witnesses in from the U.S. to testify. At one point hydro workers, instead of replacing the transformer on the pole in his barn yard, tried to kick start it, he said. The surge of electricity "knocked down all the cows in the barn and quite a few aborted," he said. His brother Allan and father, Albert, settled with Ontario Hydro but had to sign a paper that said they wouldn’t disclose the settlement.

Ironically, the herd was saved by the 1998 ice storm after Ontario Hydro replaced damaged lines. The Becksteads’ problems vanished.

It’s no longer an uphill legal climb for farmers in many U.S. cases. Farmers have been going to court for two decades and winning. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Idaho, utility companies have been paying out sizable settlements and the judgments are making it through the appeal process. In Idaho, a $17 million judgment against a utility company was upheld in 2004 and new cases have come into the courts in 2007. Courts there are treating electricity as a marketed product.

In a Wisconsin case, an energy co-operative paid $80,000 to install six miles of new line to help farmers resolve stray voltage.

Rules are also not consistent across North America. British Columbia guidelines say farmers should try to eliminate voltage above 0.5. Alberta accepts only one volt. Some states permit a maximum of 0.5 volts.

Meantime, Ontario rules that 10 volts of stray voltage in a barn is an acceptable standard. The day Farmers Forum dropped in on Francois Cayer’s St. Albert dairy farm, the monitor showed voltage in the barn that morning peaked at 15 volts.