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Teaching Cattle Good Manners

July 10, 2007

Forget Madonna and her Live Earth performance at the litter-strewn Wembley Stadium.

A more interesting development on the climate change front that came out of London recently was the announcement that improving cattle diets may help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The announcement came from the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research.

To put things bluntly, cattle burp a lot. Not because they are impolite oafs trying to emulate teen-aged human males, but because they are ruminants that can digest large amounts of roughage. Methane is a byproduct of their complex digestive process.

The amounts emitted are not trivial. In the course of a day, a cow can release 200 or so liters of methane, which, molecule for molecule, has more than 20 times the greenhouse warming power of carbon dioxide. In 2005, methane from ruminant livestock accounted for about 1.7 percent of net U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, the percentage is anywhere from 6 percent to 8 percent.

By changing cattle diets to emphasize legumes that are easier to digest, it might be possible, institute scientists said, to reduce the methane outgassing. Australian scientists are trying a different tack: introducing into cattle stomachs microscopic beasties that produce acetate, a derivative of the acid that gives vinegar its bite. By doing so, the Aussies hope, methane production could be drastically reduced, if not eliminated.

Changing the dietary habits of cattle is not as exciting as glamorous rock stars telling us to screw in more compact fluorescent light bulbs. But innovators beavering away in their labs likely will end up doing more good.