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Australian trial of seaweed cow feed fails to achieve hoped-for methane cuts (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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One of the world's longest commercial trials of a seaweed supplement that the global meat industry hopes could slash methane from beef cattle has recorded much lower reductions in the potent greenhouse gas than previous studies.

Putting the supplement into the diets of 40 wagyu cattle in an Australian feedlot for 300 days cut the methane they produced by 28%. The supplement was derived from the red seaweed species Asparagopsis, which has been widely promoted as being able to cut methane by more than 80%, with some experiments suggesting reductions as high as 96%. Globally, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, methane from burping cattle - known as enteric emissions - releases about 2.1bn tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year, compared with the 37.5bn tonnes of CO2 from burning fossil fuels.

Because methane is about 80 times more potent than CO2 at warming the planet over a 20-year period, cutting methane is seen as a way to slow global heating faster.

The trial report noted that other experiments over shorter timeframes using the same open-air measurement technique had recorded higher methane reductions.

The latest trial was financially backed by the country's biggest beef producer, the Australian Agricultural Company, which helped run the trial and provided the animals.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Interesting reply!

Yeah, it's just one tiny fraction of a piece of the puzzle (and I dont really hold much hope for us engineering out of this one). We are going to have to do absolutely everything but we can't even stop land clearing or topsoil erosion.

Kelp farming could end up using exotic species just to increase survivability in the water, all our systems aren't going to adapt fast enough to the changes coming. If we had our time again, nice train lanes from kelp farming ports to cycle lost nutrients back onto the land maybe could have created some sort of utopia of rich terrestrial systems with abundant marine resources close to shore.

Back to the article, 28% is something, topped up with some biochar, topped up with bacterial implants or something similar would have been nice. Really, the only answer is those things with about 0.5% of the cows. I can see cows being regenerative in some ways to manage some grasslands back into forested systems. The problem is a lot of our grass species aren't even native, they are selected for production which means management is key.