The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

the bovine growth hormone affair, part two 115Massacre on the Farm“Look,” Kinsman said to me, “I kept a promotional leaflet from Monsantosinging the praises of Posilac.” He read: “Cows treated with Posilac are invery good health. . . . The performance of calves born from treated cows isexcellent.”“That’s a lie,” Terry protested. “I used the growth hormone on twelve cowsin my herd. I very soon noticed that they were losing a huge amount ofweight. I kept on increasing the feed rations, but nothing could be done andthey grew thinner right before your eyes. At the end of the lactation period,I wanted to have them inseminated, and I tried four or five times, but itnever worked. None of the cows I had injected gave me a calf. In the end, Isold them for slaughter. Fortunately, I saved the rest of the herd, or else Iwould have lost everything.”“That’s what happened to many farmers in Wisconsin,” said Kinsman,who referred me to a 1995 study by Mark Kastel, an independent consultantworking at the time for the Wisconsin Farmers Union. 9 In late summer1994—that is, six months after Posilac had been put on the market—thefarmers’ organization, in cooperation with the National Farmers Union,based in Denver, set up a toll-free number for users of the hormone. Thefirst farmer who would allow his name to be used was John Shumway ofNew York, who had given an interview about his difficulties to a localweekly. 10 After barely two months of injections, he had had to sacrifice onequarterof his herd, about fifty cows, because of acute problems with mastitis.Recontacted a year later, in September 1995, Shumway said that he hadreplaced 135 of his original herd of 200, and that his losses came to about$100,000, from a combination of the decline in milk production and thepurchase of new animals.The toll-free number was soon swamped with calls from dairy farmersaround the United States. For example, Melvin Van Heel—70 cows inMinnesota—reported that he no longer knew how to treat his animals, whichwere suffering from mastitis and huge abscesses at injection sites. Al Core—150 cows in Florida—noticed that his cows could no longer walk because ofthe great weight of their udders and that they limped because of wounds ontheir legs and hooves; in addition, three treated cows had given birth to deformedcalves (legs above their heads or external stomachs); Jay Livingston—