varchar(max) getting truncated

Freetds ver 0.82
MS SQL 2008 
Activestate Perl 5.10 on Linux
Perl DBD
I have a program which connects to prod server and makes DMV queries. One of the columns
read is varchar(max). It comes properly via read in fetchrow_array and I pass the array as it
is to the other handle to write the information to a dev database. The varchar(max) col gets
truncated at 80th char. The read from prod server is fine as I can print the whole text fine.
There is no error or warning. 
 
I had to finally do it a crude way of splitting varchar(max) into multiple cols of varchar(80)
and then splitting the long text into tokens of varchar(80) and inserting it.
 
thanks.