Who's killing dairyman's cows?

ENUMCLAW -- Dairy farmer John Koopman was up early on June 6 to milk his cows when he noticed one was sick. Then another and another. All had a strange, reddish-black substance on their backs and their skin bubbled with blisters.

Before the day was done, 10 cows were gravely ill. Three ultimately died.


		Karen Ducey / P-I
	A Holstein dairy cow with blistered sores on its skin is one of 10 that got sick on John Koopman's farm in Enumclaw. Three of the sickened cows ultimately died.

Koopman would like to know who killed his cows. So would the federal Food and Drug Administration, the King County Sheriff's Office and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.

No milk from the sick animals entered the food supply, according to FDA spokesman Larry Bachorik.

Koopman said he immediately segregated the sick cows from the rest of the 330 animals in his herd. "I dumped a lot of milk. We go out of our way to make sure that milk is safe."

About 27,000 pounds of milk -- a day's production worth almost $5,000 to the farmer -- went down the drain.

Investigators have yet to determine what the substance on the cows was, much less who put it on the animals. Koopman sits on the board of WestFarm Foods, which recently resolved a long and bitter dispute with the Teamsters union. The labor dispute was over before Koopman's cows got sick.

The tanned dairyman sat on the front stoop of his farmhouse yesterday and shook his head in disbelief as he recounted the day his cows started dropping.

"We started milking at seven in the morning, and there was this real sick one in the first string," said Koopman. "I didn't think much of it at first. We always deal with sick animals. It's just the natural course of things.

"Then, I was getting ready for church, and we found another one. This one wouldn't even get up off the concrete. I pulled it out of the string and started treating it. Then we started getting more.

"I started noticing stuff on their backs -- kind of like a heavy iodine. And their skin was weltering up. I don't use anything that potent around here. That's when I called the vet.


		Karen Ducey / P-I
	Dairy farmer John Koopman said he first noticed spots on his cows on the morning of June 6. "I'm grasping at straws who would do this," Koopman said.

"When the vet came, he said, 'I don't know of any substance that can do this to a cow.' "

Koopman called the Sheriff's Office and WestFarm Foods, which buys his milk. "That's when we started worrying about substances in the milk and decided we better dump all of it.

"We were frantically trying to save those cows. They were deathly ill."

Yesterday, investigators from the state Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration were at the farm. They referred questions to their offices.

Koopman said FBI agents also visited and asked about who might have done this.

The easygoing dairyman with a quick smile said he couldn't imagine who killed his cows.

"I'm known as a pretty likable guy around here," he said. "I'm grasping at straws who would do this."

In a statement, the FDA said its Office of Criminal Investigations is working closely with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the King County Sheriff's Office, as well as with authorities from the state Department of Agriculture and Seattle-King County Public Health.

"At this point the incident appears to be isolated, involving fewer than 20 dairy cattle, although not all of the exposed cattle became ill," the FDA statement said.

Tissue samples from a cow that died Saturday are being analyzed at the FDA's Forensic Chemical Center, a specialized laboratory in Cincinnati.

Koopman said that the seven surviving cows are slowly recovering and that he continues to keep their milk out of the human supply chain.

Post-mortem examinations were done on two of the cows, and the vet found that the substance penetrated the skin to the tissues below and damaged internal organs, he said.

"This whole thing makes you feel real vulnerable," said the 47-year-old farmer who has been milking cows under the looming, white presence of Mount Rainier for almost 20 years.

All the cows were in their pens and not in open fields. Someone must have snuck into the barns to deliver the poison, he said.

"I don't want to point the finger at anybody," Koopman said.

This is the second time in recent weeks that there has been a serious security incident related to WestFarm Foods, the marketing arm of the Northwest Dairy Association farmer cooperative.

William Anderson, WestFarm's vice president for legal and public affairs, said yesterday that on May 4, vandals struck two trucking companies that haul raw milk for the company. Valves on two tankers were opened, and 119,000 pounds of milk poured onto the ground.

And anti-tampering plastic covers on several other truck tanks were breached as well, he said. Before the tampering was discovered, the milk had already been poured into a silo at WestFarm's Lynden plant.

Anderson said that even though there was no evidence that the milk itself had been adulterated, "600,000 pounds of raw milk was in the silo, and we had to dispose of that."

The vandals also used something like an ice pick to puncture 268 tires on tanker trucks. The tires didn't go flat until the rigs were already on the road, Anderson said. The company lost a total $290,000 worth of milk in the incidents. A reward of up to $51,000 is being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators.

WestFarm and the Teamsters union on May 26 resolved one of the longest lockouts in the recent history of Seattle labor relations.

Union officials said yesterday that they didn't know about the attack on Koopman's cows and that investigators had not contacted them about the instances of vandalism against the tanker trucks.


		Karen Ducey / P-I
	Several agencies, including the FBI and the FDA, are investigating how cows got sickened at John Koopman's farm.

"No one has contacted me at all or anyone in my employ that I know," said Al Hobart, international trustee at Local 66, which represents the workers. "We certainly wouldn't condone anything like this."

WestFarm locked out nearly 200 local workers Aug. 31, arguing that Local 66 officials were not bargaining in good faith and that the company could not operate under a threat of a walkout. The union said it was ready to keep talking, accusing the company of trying to break up its membership.

On May 26, workers ended the bitter dispute by accepting a contract by a vote of 101-43, after some union members concluded they would not get a better offer.

WestFarm Foods processed 6.8 billion pounds of raw milk from April 2002 to April 2003. In that same time, the company produced 65 million gallons of fluid milk.

WestFarm contracts with 723 family dairies in the Pacific Northwest, including 515 farms in Washington.

Its milk goes into the Darigold brand as well as the brands of several supermarkets and other companies.

More headlines and info from Enumclaw.

P-I reporters Paul Nyhan and Candace Heckman contributed to this report. P-I reporter Paul Shukovsky can be reached at 206-448-8072 or paulshukovsky@seattlepi.com

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