Cows Going Underground to Steer Clear of Motorists

Why did the cows cross the road? To graze on the other side. But with 5,000 cars a day speeding by nowadays, the trip across U.S. Highway 2 has become too dangerous for Barbara Bickford’s Holsteins.

So the state is building a $200,000, 80-foot tunnel under the road, and the cows will soon be able to enjoy the morning grass without getting run down.

“It’s a horror,” said Bickford, whose family has owned the 350-acre farm since 1924. “We can try to cross the road and wait for as many as 50 cars.”

Like many other farms in Vermont, the Bickfords’ century-old Echo Dale straddles a major road. When Bickford was a girl, Highway 2 was a newly paved, narrow farm lane.

“I used to hitch the team up and go to Plainfield and get the horses shod, and pick up loads of sawdust for my father, which is something you wouldn’t do today on this road,” she said.

Today, thousands of speeding commuters from Montpelier, 14 miles away, and tourists gawking at the foliage use the two-lane road, which separates the Bickfords’ milking barns from the grazing area.

Several decades ago, Bickford’s mother was hit by a car and seriously injured. In the early 1980s, 12 of the Bickfords’ cows were hit by a truck. Some died instantly; others had to be destroyed.

“The fog is so bad in the morning,” Bickford said. “We would lie in bed and fear getting up to go after the cows, afraid somebody would get hit before we got across the road.”

The tunnel, a steel pipe 8 feet in diameter that will be completed this month to eliminate what the state considers a traffic hazard, will allow the Bickfords’ 70 Holsteins to cross safely--that is, if the cows allow themselves to be herded through it.

“We built a bridge across the Winooski River to connect our land and it was hell putting those cows across it,” Bickford said. “We’ve gotten it now where we can get seven Holsteins at a time across it. We’re hoping in time they’ll like this too.”

The cows once cut across the road twice each day, but the Bickfords built two silos on the barn side so the cows could feed there at night, when the crossing is more dangerous. Signs with flashing lights warn drivers that cows are crossing. But these measures don’t make it safe, the Bickfords said.

“I’ve got three kids of my own now that help get the cattle across,” said Bickford’s son, Dale, the fourth generation of the family to run the farm. “You’re jumping out in the road, trying to make them stop, and quite often they don’t want to.”

With traffic increasing on what were once leisurely country roads, Vermont already has several cow tunnels. But state officials don’t expect farms will need too many more of them.

“The number of farms keeps going down, and many times the expansions of these farms are planned so that they don’t have to have this kind of crossing on the highway,” said Frank Evans, director of engineering for the Vermont Transportation Agency.