TUNBRIDGE — Lauren Gitlin let her small flock of French Alpine goats out to graze in a fresh paddock on July 31. As she herded her goats back into the barn for the evening milking, she saw the first signs of the fiasco that would consume the rest of her summer.
One goat, which usually has a “sassy demeanor,” would not stand up. Another had a green, paint-like substance coating its muzzle.
“She looked drunk, wobbly,” Gitlin said of the doe. Within 12 hours, a third showed symptoms.
Friends who were visiting at the time found a ripped plastic bag half-buried near an electric pole in the pasture. It oozed a greasy, green substance that smelled metallic.
Gitlin started her small goat dairy on pastures she rents from Fledgling Farm last September. Until a third of her milking does consumed the noxious substance, her business had been growing steadily.
She started dumping milk immediately while she waited for instructions from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture. Since then, she has dumped about 60 gallons of milk — about a third of her supply and costing her at least $1,200 in lost potential revenue. She sells “skyr,” an Icelandic fermented dairy product, as well as raw milk at vendors including the Cedar Circle Farmstand and Woodstock Farmers’ Market.
Within days, the Washington Electric Co-op inspected the pole. About 15 years ago, a contractor hired by the utility company had applied a wood preservative to the pole when it was first installed. The chemical was copper naphthenate, an active ingredient sometimes used to protect utility poles from decay. In 2003, an EPA-reviewed label warned that a copper naphthenate wood preservative was “harmful or fatal if swallowed or absorbed through the skin.” The EPA regulates the chemical under the Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act.
Patty Richards, the general manager at the utility, said Tuesday that a “negligent” contractor painted the substance onto part of the electric pole in 2004 and left an approximately two-gallon bag of it a few inches below the surface area with remnants from the application along the sides. The contractor has since gone out of business.
Gitlin’s goats apparently dug into the remnants from more than 15 years ago.
“We freely take responsibility here,” Richards said. “We want to help everyone affected, including the landowner.”
Although she said the incident was a likely “one-off,” Washington Electric committed to checking 10 poles in each direction along its power lines. It will compensate Gitlin for her losses as soon as she submits an “assessment of damages,” Richards said.
Gitlin said she paid “at high cost to myself ” for blood samples to be drawn from the goats. A laboratory at New York’s Cornell University confirmed that the four does that never displayed symptoms did not have elevated levels of copper in their milk.
The three affected goats are healthy and “completely back to normal,” she said. She spoke to toxicologists at Cornell and, from their understanding of a goat’s metabolism, the chemical should be out of their system.
However, more testing is required to release her milk from quarantine.
The Agency of Agriculture has quarantined the milk from the two affected does for over a month. The naphthenate in the compound would “off-flavor” the milk, said Cary Giguere, a public health official at the Agency of Agriculture.
The incident has dragged on in part because the chemical is not used on food crops, so the FDA has no standards for how much can be in a food product safely, said Giguere. The Agency of Agriculture’s in-state laboratory is not equipped to test for it.
“Naphthenate is the food safety hazard, and there’s no easy way to test for that in the blood. I’ve been doing a lot of work to find a laboratory that is even capable of trying to test the milk for that,” Gitlin said.
She found one in Ann Arbor, Mich., but she does not have the money up front to cover its $7,000 estimate.
“There’s a very good chance that I’m dumping this milk for no good reason as I’m waiting for further instruction,” she said.
Her losses go beyond lost revenue and the bills for veterinarian visits and testing. Some of her goats would benefit from medical treatments for unrelated reasons that would require her to stop getting milk from them, but she cannot afford to lose any more milk.
She had to chase down her own answers about rare chemicals, testing and health codes. “Those are hours that should be spent growing my business,” she said.
“As a really small producer, I feel that I’ve just been thrown to the wind and told that I’ve had to figure this out on my own,” she said.
Giguere said the state veterinarian has been using her contacts at Cornell to track down a way to test the milk. He has hit “roadblock after roadblock” as he continues to look for a way to do the testing in-state.
In his 28-year tenure at the agency, he has seen four other incidents of farm animals ingesting a toxic treatment on an electric pole. Another pesticide called pentachlorophenol is usually the culprit. Pentachlorophenol is far more lethal than copper naphthenate, and the utility companies in those incidents typically bought the animals and put them down.
About five years ago, the state put in place regulations to prevent the contamination of wells and groundwater near utility poles. “We missed the boat there,” Giguere said. “We should have discussed whether it’s appropriate to let animals graze in the right of way.”
Despite the cost of the testing, Gitlin said she would not consider culling the goats.
“They are dear to me,” she said. “They are the product of many decades of refined genetics. They are critical to my business, and I can’t afford to lose them.”
The problem with the goats follows another case in Tunbridge where three cows at a dairy farm died after ingesting small pieces of wire left in a field by a subcontractor for a project involving ECFiber.
Claire Potter is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at cpotter@vnews.com or 603-727- 3242.