Sep 7, 2016 2 min read

It comes in the hay.

Your goat, or your cow, or even your perfectly healthy horse has suddenly sickened and died.

Doing some investigation, you find that there is poison hemlock in the hay that you had delivered. Or perhaps you find that there is a stand of it growing in your pasture. You didn’t expect this because you may have never even heard of the plant, let alone known what it looked like.

I urge everyone who has livestock, or who cuts hay for animal use, or is responsible for roadside or waterway management, to go online and study poison hemlock. Get to know it and how to deal with it, because things are going to get a lot worse.

Poison hemlock spreads downstream every time waterways go over their banks. It spreads from every truckload of hay that is delivered containing it. It spreads through vehicular use on all of the highways.

It is terrible everywhere along the I-79 corridor and in towns along it like Canonsburg, where its unhealthy, pungent odor filled the air all spring. It was particularly awful around Canonsburg Hospital, of all places.

The poison hemlock problem is not going to go away. It is a foreign invader that was not here when your parents were kids. The plant has been spreading for years without much attention being paid to it. But now, its numbers are getting so large, and it seeds so successfully, that I think we are reaching a tipping point. Pastures and waste places are becoming completely overrun. I predict that there will be more and more livestock lost to this plant in the coming years, not to mention the possible threat to the human population, if we don’t start to address this now.

Tom Waters

Aleppo