Sometimes you see a headline and just go “huh.”
That happened to me today when I can across an article that said “Can methane burps be bred out of cows?”
Again, “huh.”
I mean, why not? Humans have been selecting traits in livestock for thousands of years. We have bred for milk production, meat production, height, weight, calving ease, even color. Why not methane emissions?
It would seem that this question was asked by a research team working in Europe on a project called Ruminomics. Commissioned by the European Union in 2012, this group of 30 researchers was charged with looking at the connection between livestock production and methane emissions with an eye toward maintaining livestock production while reducing the industries climate impact. The result of their work is the recently published report Connecting the animal genome, gastrointestinal microbiomes and nutrition to improve digestion efficiency and the environmental impacts of ruminant livestock production. In this study researchers looked at Holstein cows on farms in Italy and the United Kingdom, as well as Nordic Red dairy cows in Sweden and Finland. Specialized tools were designed to collect samples from the rumen where the scientists could see a pool of protozoa, fungi, bacteria, archaea, and DNA crucial to the experiment. Breath samples were also taken to measure how much methane cows were burping.
After looking at the core microbes in each cow’s rumen, researchers were able to identify which microbes were passed down from one generation to the next. Some microbes like succinovibrionaceae were common in cows that produced less methane. Researchers then concluded that since they now knew that these organisms were heritable and interconnected, they could be a target for breeding animals with improved milk yields, lower emissions, or other positive traits. The thought being that if they could identify young animals with a low-methane microbiome, they would pass this trait to the next generation, leading to animals producing less methane.
There is some question as to the impact this will have on production (although some of the initial results look promising) and this idea of breeding for lower methane emissions is just beginning to get attention so there is still much to learn. That said, reducing methane emissions from ruminants while maintaining (and perhaps improving) production and improving feed efficiency is something we have written about before and there has been some great research that was conducted at the USDA Grazing Lands Research Laboratory that looked at cattle frame size and methane production (spoiler alert-they found cattle efficiency is not sacrificed with frame size).
We know that most grassland ecosystems need grazing and browsing animals to properly function and we know that, generally speaking, land used for grazing is unsuitable for growing crops. We also know we are losing crop land to erosion at an alarming rate and some of our best farm ground is already under concrete and asphalt in our cities. If we are going to feed and clothe over 9 billion people by mid-century with a declining land base, it only makes sense that livestock utilization will have to be a big part of the strategy to accomplish that. At the same time, we know we need to protect our resource base and address issues like climate change. It only makes sense that selecting cattle (and other animals) that have the traits to meet those goals would be part of the way we do this. “Huh” indeed.
To read this post at the Southern Plains Perspective, click here.
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