Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 4

10-A Monday, Apr. 13. 'Tfi DFTROIT FREF, PRESS PBB Has Become a Symbol for Tragedy on Farm 'They tell you you're wrong, that it's mismanagement. It's all right to lose your husiness, hut to he made fun of?" stress and strain, I can see a man getting his back up against the wall and saying to hell with it. It's bound to get a man.

I was to a point I could have walked away from it There is not a lot of difference between what Ken Klaus says and what some Michigan farmers have seen fit to do. about receiving the quarantine report, he says, "Then we got the good news Klaus, who has farmed the same land near Palms for over 20 years, and who saw 215 of his animals go to Kalkaska County because of PBB contamination, says, "If a man has it in his herd, the way farming is today, with the 8t SORT ing PBB damage to their herds, says there has been a cover-up a conspiracy among the Department of Agriculture, the governor's office, the Legislature, the Farm Bureau and Michigan Chemical (neither of which are state agencies), the federal Food and Drug Administration, and the news media "to keep everything calmed down." The reason for the cover-up? "They let this monster get out of hand." "CATTLEGATE Bigger than WATERGATE" say the bumper stickers distributed by Trombley and his friends. Indicative of the polarization between government and some farmers was a scene at the Department of Agriculture last week. When Trombley and two others went to Lansing to meet with agriculture officials, someone called ahead to say Trombley might shoot someone. A cluster of state policemen sat outside the meeting, and one sat in with the group.

There is yet another estrangement in the state. It is between those farmers who say their herds are affected by PBB and those farmers who say the dairy business is jeopardized by all the PBB talk. And indeed there seems to be an inclination toward professional suicide among the dairymen who feel so direly afflicted by PBB. Adept or not, consciously or no, many farmers are turning political in their protest. Tell the truth to the public about PBB in meat and milk, they say to reporters; tell the public what they're getting.

And some see only catastrophe ahead: "Every animal in Michigan is going to have to be destroyed," says Argersinger. All of the protest of vocal harvest in the fall. Frank Mer-riman, a successful dairy farmer near Marlette, says that year he simply could not afford to feed the extra supplements required for maximum milk production. "You give roughage and silage and forget cereal grains, and naturally production is going to fall off," he says. "And if the cows are producing, and taking it off their back and putting it into the pail, naturally an animal is going to deteriorate." Merriman had no lasting problem with his herd because of the reduced feeding program.

But his experience with the 1974-75 price-feeding-production balance coincided with an alarming decline in many Michigan herds. "Those horror stories we read about are real," he says, "but I think they're very much in the minority. I don't think it's epidemic." An agriculture department spokesman says only 400 of the state's 10,000 dairy herds every showed a trace of PBB. "And," Merriman adds, "I don't think the problems are all chemical." Nor does Jack Dendel, an Allegan County dairyman who lost some of his herd because of PBB contamination, but who stayed in production and This is one back-seat driver you can't do without. Jo-Jo tells you where to drive, and where not to drive, every morning and afternoon.

And she does it from the CKLW Traffic Copter. The only traffic report in town with a bird's-eye view. farmers, in the media and in person, stands starkly against the scientific facts: that little is known about the level at which PBB affects animals, and virtually nothing is known about what it will do to you or me. Stack the emotion with the scientific ignorance and you have a situation where superstitition can run rampant. "I've seen a seven-year-old develop clubfoot," says Gerry Woltjer.

"I've seen a woman have to wear diapers because she couldn't control her bowels; I've seen people collapse." "One animal breathes it out, and the other breathes it in," says Eli Argersinger, John's father. Around the dining room table in Donna Green's trailer home near Baldwin an air of doom still lingers from destruction of the family herd in November. "I'm scared," she says. "I wish we could get more people scared." Thirteen-year-old Jack Green pulls up his shirt to show skin rashes that look like ringworm. The family feels they are caused by PBB.

"How come Ford never ate a meal in Michigan since he's been in the White House?" someone explains. "How come he's never skied here?" There's something they're not telling us about this swine flu, says Mrs. Green, and it has to do with PBB. The Greens have a note from a physician, Dr. David WITHOUT DISTURBING BRICK, PLASTER, WOOD rTVi ranked third for herd average among the nation's Guernsey farmers last year.

Dendel was asked to appraise a couple of PBB-con-taminated herds, and "snooped around," he says, to see what they'd been fed. "My cows would have looked like theirs," he says, "if I'd fed that feed." Both Merriman and Dendel are worried, as are other dairymen, about what bad publicity can do to their industry. "There isn't any of us that want to produce milk or meat that will impair your health or mine," Merriman says. "We're not that greedy. I have confidence in the scientific people at Michigan State and in state government when they say a certain tolerance can be safely eaten.

If we indicate we have no tolerance at all, the food industry couldn't exist." Jim Frey, a Brown City farmer, recently attended a national dairyman's convention in Philadelphia. Farmers from no other state reported a PBB problem, he said. Many wanted to know what was wrong in Michigan. But all this says is that no one has correctly or adequately addressed the Michigan problem yet; it is not to say there is no problem. Whatever the cause, the doubt and despair in many farmers' minds is real.

In Sanilac County, L.J. Terpenning had so many problems with his herd he actively sought quar-natine for PBB contamination. With quarantine, he could get rid of the herd with some hope of compensation. Talking 1 1 1 I JB .1 J.T I 1 .1 .1 01 DURING THE XXIX CROWN FURNITURE SELLS BALANCE OF joshuafDooreix BANKRUPT STOCK SALE T. Salvati of Big Rapids, saying their 15-year-old son has a "liver problem caused from ingestion of PBB contaminated food." The Argersingers suffered stomach cramps, lightheadedness and tiredness last summers and stopped eating their meat and milk, though it never exceeded what the FDA considered a safe PBB level of 0.3 parts per million.

"I've got it in my body now," Gerry Woltjer says. YET THREE Sanilac County dairymen, all with PBB exposures apparently as high or higher than the Woltjers, Greens and Argersingers, said last week they had experienced no health problems in their families they could lay to PBB. There are some dairymen who suggest that PBB may be an overly simple and inadequate explanation for the farming problems people have been experiencing. Milk does come from contented cows; it comes from highly complicated chemical equations that vary daily with food, weather, stress. Upset the balance just a bit and you have a situation with immediate physical and monetary ramifications.

And plenty of forces act to upset the balance. In 1974, for example, the price of milk was down in this country because of a lot of cheap imports; at the same time feed costs were up because of a late spring planting, and early frost and poor or WOOD ALUMINUM. AAA Custom Built Mow Replacements WOOD PRE-FINISHED, INTERIOR EXTERIOR WITH SCREENS SOLID VINYL INSULATED GLASS WITH SCREENS ALUMINUM, BAKED ENAMEL FINISHES, INSULATED GLASS WITH SCREEN IN LESS THAN 1 HOUR WE CHANGE THIS TO THIS tats J0SHIM DOME SHOP I COMPARE PUCE Continued from Page 3A Woltjer was another significant victim of the worst thing that has ever happened in the Michigan dairy business. The damage among Michigan farmers is not unrecom-pensed. An estimated $28 million in claim and suit settlements have been paid to some 475 farmers by private insurers.

Nearly 500 more suits and claims are pending, and undoubtedly many of those will also bring financial relief for the farmers. But what has happened in many cases through the PBB episode, money cannot repay. "Who is going to pay me for 28 years of breeding in my own herd," says dairyman Ken Klaus in northeast Sanilac County. "They tell you you're wrong, that it's mismanagement," says 23-year-old John Argersinger, who farms near LeRoy. "It's all right to lose your business, but to be made fun of? No way can they replace to a farmer what it costs after three years of this." THERE HAS BEEN a dreadful loss in trust of state government among many farmers.

"You can't get an honest test out of Michigan Department of Agriculture," says Argersinger, who with his father and brother killed their 98-cow herd in January. Louis Trombley, the most strident of the farmers claim- Rain Falls On Arid Southwest Continued from Page 1A ing to the National Weather Service. The Cimarron River, which begins in northern New Mexico and meanders across the Oklahoma Panhandle, southwest Kansas and back down into central Oklahoma, has been dry so long huge cracks have developed in some areas of the riverbed. A special Agriculture Department report a week ago estimated 1976 production in the five states of Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado at 521.7 million bushels, 181.6 million fewer than last year. The National Association of Wheat Growers reported production could be 250 million bushels below the "unusually good" 1975 crop and 73 million bushels below average.

But it added that the 1976 harvest, coupled with reserves from last year, will be large enough to meet all domestic and export needs and grocery prices should not increase. COLORADO agriculture official Erwin Witte said the drought is spreading northward. "We've gotten reports of some fields in jeopardy as far north as Sterling," about 20 miles from the Nebraska border, he said. Witte said about one-third of the potential wheat crop in Colorado has been lost. Sweltering 90-degree temperatures gripped the East Coast from Boston to South Carolina Sunday in the hottest Easter on record.

The stifling heat wave did not prevent a full day of holiday celebrations and recreation. Thousands of New Yorkers turned out in 96-degree weather, a record for any day in April, to stroll along Fifth Avenue in the annual Easter Parade. In Washington, D.C., a parks spokesman said sightseeing tickets for the Washington Monument were gone by mid-afternoon Sunday. Easter services conducted at the monument's Sylvan Theater and at the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials were well attended in spite of the heat. It was 93 degrees in Boston and Washington, 90 in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, and the mercury soared well into the 90s at Myrtle Beach, S.C., where throngs of recreation-ers overflowed Atlantic coast resorts.

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