197: Before It Had A Name
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Brad Hudson grew up on a dairy farm in New Hampshire and worked the farm from the time he was big enough to help out six, seven years old. When his father retired, Brad ran his own operation on his dad's property and did just fine until the mid-1980s. When something strange started to happen with the cows, a series of strange things started to happen actually, beginning with their hooves. - That was the first thing. Cow's feet don't normally have to be trimmed only about once a year, possibly twice, and I was having to trim them three and four times a year. - You mean just trim their hooves? - Right. If they get sore feet, they don't walk around like they should. They won't go and eat like they should. - Do they give as much milk? - No, no, the production was low all the time. - A health account would give rides 75 to 90 pounds of milk a day. These cows were averaging 40, at best. It was hard to even cover expenses. The cows developed other problems. They had trouble conceiving. They started losing weight. They began to get sick. - Oh, I'd have a veterinary in about every six weeks or something like that. - Is that pretty expensive? - It's very expensive. And you could spend $100 per cow pretty quick. And all I'd get out of them is they didn't know what was the matter with them, so. - They tried medicines, they changed the cows' feed, they changed it again. They replaced the cows with new cows. And this went on month after month, year after year, for a decade and a half. And Ron was not a novice. He was an experienced dairy farmer who'd been through a lot, nearly 50 years old, when the troubles began. He tried this, he tried that. All the time, watching himself slowly go broke. - Well, just nobody had any answers. They make suggestions and we try to do what was suggested to us. And nothing seemed to work for us at all. (upbeat music) - It just must've made you feel so crazy. - Well, I blamed it on to myself as much as anything.
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