A new citrus and garlic feed supplement could help dairy farmers offset their cows’ methane emissions while making them a bit of money in the process.
Swiss Agritech company Mootral developed the supplement, which it says could cut the methane that comes out of cows’ digestive systems by 38 percent. Nonprofit Verra announced Friday that it approved Mootral for the voluntary carbon offset program that it runs.
This means dairy farmers who feed their cows the supplement will be able to sell greenhouse gas credits in carbon offset markets like California’s cap and trade system.
Livestock accounts for 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations. And the bulk of those emissions is methane that cows burp up. (It’s a common misconception that most of the methane produced by cows is released through flatulence, but it actually comes out through the other end.)
The company has said the supplement could cut emissions without the need for consumers to cut down on meat consumption. Mootral has completed a trial of the product at a dairy farm in Lancashire, England and claims that the product does not cause any side effects. The company also said the supplement can actually improve cows’ productivity.
Indigo’s premise is kind of dark. For all the optimistic startup-speak on its website and it the video below, it’s a company that hopes to create seeds resistant to your basic apocalyptic scenario, notably a lack of water, rampant use of fungicides and herbicides, and completely depleted soil. TechCrunch has a nice tour through the company and what it does, but basically, Indigo’s products are seeds coated in a careful mixture of microbes – the very
The idea comes from Professor Jack Schultz at the University of Missouri, who earned a brief mention in Michael Pollan’s amazing article on plant intelligence in the New Yorker. Schultz, a chemical ecologist, pioneered some of the first studies of plant communication in the 1980s. He is now working to develop a mechanical nose a farmer could use to pick up the chemical alarm bells of a crop under attack. If it works (which remains an if) farmers could apply pesticides
It was inspired by John M. Cowden’s “Some Haphazard Aphorisms for Epidemiology and Life,” which appeared in the January 2010 issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases.1 Cowden’s memorable and entertaining article, which the Scottish doctor described as a “ragbag of quotations relevant to epidemiology,” had
A team at Oregon State University has started a three-year study into the effects of poor air quality from wildfires on dairy cows. In an area beset by increasingly severe and numerous wildfires, and where there are large dairy herds, identifying the impacts of wildfires on cows milk production and welfare is crucial. Juliana Ranches, working in eastern Oregon, said cows in that area are grazing outside in some of the most polluted air in the U.S. “We know there is a negative effect,” she