Customer Reviews

Bitter Harvest (1981 TV-movie) [VHS]

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I remember seeing this movie in my high school science class. No kidding. I can see you're thinking how a movie shown in science class can be interesting--I was thinking the same thing. But this movie is actually pretty good. Bitter Harvest tells the story of a family of farmers that have a bunch of cows that they milk, then bottle and sell the milk. But suddenly the cows start to die off from some mysterious disease. The farmers call the authorities to find out what's wrong with the cows. They don't know, because it's probably a new disease. Then, towards the middle of the movie, the people in the area find out that when humans drink the milk, you can lose hair and your memory. Most frightening to me was this scene where this farmer was on his tractor, sitting slumped over the wheel. The disease had made him--a veteran farmer, no less--forget how to operate his tractor! Finally, at the end of the movie, it turns out there is no other choice than to stop the disease from spreading--but I won't tell you how they do it. As you can see, this is a pretty interesting movie, but not very well known. But what is most scary about it is this: It's a True Story.

This movie is a true story from back in the '70s on a dairy farm in Michigan. The movie details how the cattle were dying, for unbeknownst reasons, and the hoops the farmer had to jump through to finally figure out what was causing it. To today, this has played a major area of interest in MI. People who lived in MI during the '70s or consumed milk from MI during this time, have higher levels of PBB's in the blood. Many studies have been conducted to see if this has had any after effects.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED WHY ISNT THIS MOVIE ON DVD? IT IS A REAL TEAR JERKER AND WILL REALLY MOVE YOU .THIS MOVIE WILL KEEP YOU ON THE EDGE OF YOUR SEAT.THE MOVI IS BASED ON A TRUE STORY WHERE TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WERE CONTAMINATED BY CHEMICAL POISIONING A COVER-UP INSUED MANY PEOPLE AND ANIMALS DIED FROM THIS I WONT GIVE AWAY THE ENDING AS YOU SHOULD BUY OR RENT THIS MOVIE .

The Bitter Harvest is an excellent drama, I would recommend it to anyone. Having been married to one of the Michigan dairy farmers who fed the contaminated feed and having two young children at the time, our family watches The Bitter Harvest every few years. We recognize many situations in the movie that we experienced and also there is some drama added to make it a real tear-jerker. This movie is not readily available so if you want a copy, you better get it now.

This movie aired on National Television on May 4th 1981 where it was based on a true story that occurred in Michigan back in the late sixties. This movie starred Ron Howard as Ned De Vries, Art Carney as Walter Peary and Tarah Nutter as Kate De Vries. This movie about a young man named Ned who went to college to study business. He married his child hood sweet heart Katie and they have a newborn baby boy. Ned had just found out that his father died so when Ned and Katie heard that they might sale his dads farm Ned and Katie moved back home to the farm to help run it. After being there for a while Ned discovers his love for farming and that he didn't want to be any where else. It's about one year later and everything is going fine. It's early in the morning and Ned goes to barn to Harold his handy man to milk cows and clean stalls. Katie takes there son and goes to another building where she feeds the little calves. Later in the day in a pouring rain storm Katie's favorite cow named Test is ready to give birth. She does and she gave birth to very healthy baby bull. Things start to go wrong so along comes Walter Peary. Walter has a dairy farm of his own across the street from the De Vries place. They kids ask Walter to come over because the baby bull won't nurse of his mother or out of a bottle. As time goes on Ned starts to notice that his milking production is down and his cows are slowly getting sick. However, what really was noticeable was the rash on Ned's baby boy. So he talks to Walter and Walter suggests to Ned that he calls in the state. Along comes a state Agriculture figure and a state appointed doctor. They examined Ned's cows, check his barn and his feed. The state tells Ned that his cows are suffering from mild nutrition and bad management. One day while digging around Ned finds a dead rat, so after pounding a hole in the wall Ned finds another dozen dead rats. What is going on here? Will the state's agricultural officials do something about Howard's plight, or will red tape and bureaucracy ruled the day. What happens to Ned's herd? Will his milk production go down to no production at all? Most of all what happens to Ned's fathers farm. Here are some thoughts of my own about this movie. I thought this was and excellent movie. I was raise in the country and there nothing that smells better then a dairy farm. The longer I watch this the more home sick I became. I remember the days of cleaning hog stalls, separating pigs, baling hay, picking rocks, and not eating until 7 or 8pm at night. However, the one good thing about eating that late is that you were hungry and you ate a lot. This movie was based on a book written by Frederick and Sandra Halbert. A lot of people were affected by this poison that showed in milk and tainted foods. Some people even died and some people developed horrible cancer growths. The government really tried it's hardest to cover this story up and farmers that lived through this still won't talk about what happen in the state of Michigan. This movie was filmed in southern California and was nominated for 4 Emmy awards. I give this movie 10 weasel stars alone based on the true story and the beautiful farm sites.

Every once in awhile a film comes along that you can't shake after watching it and this film falls into that category. Bitter Harvest is a true story based on the life of a Michigan dairy farmer who unknowingly was poisoning his cows with a flame retardant accidently mixed in with cattle feed which in turn was passed along to people along the meat and dairy food chain. However, once the problem's cause was determined, it was easier said than done to get state and company executives to back the quarantine of the cattle contaminated with the poisoned feed and their meat/dairy by products for fear of nothing more than their losing profits. Chilling to think that people walk around today with this chemical in their system with no way to extract it while awaiting one of it's ill effects.

It's hard to understand why this film has not yet been cleaned up and transferred to DVD. If you can find a copy on VHS, get it.

You will never forget the last 5 minutes of Bitter Harvest as it winds down to it's only possible, sad conclusion. As much as I recommend it to anyone with it's flawless acting and direction, and as much as I applaud the truth that it exposed, I hope I never have to see another motion picture like Bitter Harvest.

love this movie ..everyone should see this
it should be shown every year on tv
important and still quite relevant today
wish i had it on dvd

I was a kid in Michigan when this event happened. The nightmare occurred because the feed bag looked almost exactly like the fire retardant bag, hence the farmer inadvertently poisoned a lot of folks as a result. As for myself, I had two REALLY, REALLY strange and disturbing experiences of the mental/spiritual variety happen to me, but my calculations deem those events to have occurred prior to the poisoning in question. This is a good movie to show now and then just to get people to understand that a lot of harm can be done due to not thinking about what one is doing.

Dragon55lad has it wrong, this story happen in Michigan in 1973-74 I'm from Michigan and lived it!what happend in California was something else,but I know this was Michigan I was 12 years old at the time, good movie been looking for it for years.

A young Michigan dairy farmer and his family start having illness among their herd. The government agencies he turns to for help are inadequate to research the problem. The farmer conducts his own investigation and dicovers PBB contamination, carelessness, government lack of action and coverups. He must take action to protect the public.