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Feeding Seaweed To Cows Eliminates Methane Emissions (www.cbc.ca)
Dave Knott writes:
A Canadian farmer has "helped lead to a researcher's discovery of an unlikely weapon in the battle against global warming: a seaweed that nearly eliminates the destructive methane content of cow burps and farts," reports the CBC. "Joe Dorgan began feeding his cattle seaweed from nearby beaches more than a decade ago as a way to cut costs... Then researcher Rob Kinley of Dalhousie University caught wind of it." He tested Dorgan's seaweed mix, discovering that it reduced the methane in the cows' burps and farts by about 20 per cent. "Kinley knew he was on to something, so he did further testing with 30 to 40 other seaweeds. That led him to a red seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis he says reduces methane in cows burps and farts to almost nothing."
"Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, so it's not a small number," said Kinley, an agricultural research scientist now working at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Queensland, Australia. "We're talking numbers equivalent to hundreds of millions of cars."
The researcher predicts a seaweed-based cow feed could be on the market within three to five years, according to the article. "He says the biggest challenge will be growing enough seaweed."
"Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, so it's not a small number," said Kinley, an agricultural research scientist now working at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Queensland, Australia. "We're talking numbers equivalent to hundreds of millions of cars."
The researcher predicts a seaweed-based cow feed could be on the market within three to five years, according to the article. "He says the biggest challenge will be growing enough seaweed."
Seaweed tastes so bad that it makes them puke when the farmer is not looking. That's why they're no longer farting. The guy will come back in 6 months saying all his cows died of hunger and he doesn't understand why.
lucm, indeed.
Those cows are going to taste like shit.
Someone please forward this article to Elon Musk.
Like the article says, this could be a huge game changer. Cows are responsible for nearly twenty percent of global greenhouse emissions.
This improvement would require massive changes to feed production. This is big enough to require government action (e.g. shifting subsidies from corn to seaweed), and that won't happen. There simply isn't incentive for the feed manufacturers to fix the methane problem in cows if they can simply launch a line of "Trump branded Silos" and the problem goes away for a few million dollars. Trump has already said global warming is a Chinese conspiracy, so he's signaled there will be no fixes attempted for the rising CO2 levels and ever increasing temperatures.
"Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions globally". Not really. The *responsibility* is on the humans who are growing cows for food (and other industrial uses). Eating less meat would help GHG reductions.
"Then researcher Rob Kinley of Dalhousie University caught wind of it."
Shouldn't that be "noticed the absence of wind?"
I couldn't resist. I've been waiting years for this opportunity (note my account name)...
The real question is if this new feed costs the same or less than the current feed given to cows.
What incentive does big ag have to do anything to reduce their environmental footprint? They have a get-out-of-jail-free card for emissions, fresh water usage and water system pollution, food poisoning, antibiotics abuse, employee and animal abuse, and land degradation. They're richly subsidized to be the world's greatest pollution offenders.
it eliminates the cow.
Son: Dad when I grow up...I want to be a seaweed farmer.
Dad: That's nice son.
Dad looks at Mom and mumbles..that boy ain't right. Mom just smiles sheepishly.
I can finally eat surf-and-turf while only harming one animal. Take that, vegetarians!
The current system where it's not just subsidies, but we're actually required to burn food, is screwed up enough that it causes noticeable problems. If farmers can grow seaweed in ponds, and we can eat corn, many people would prefer that. I could definitely see that happening IF we can grow it in the US.
"Please pay no attention to all the extra emissions from growing, harvesting, processing, and transporting!"
...weed cures farts?
The ENIAC Demo Competition
too ?
Having beef growers be able to trade carbon credits throws another wrench in ole Algore's carbon Ponzi scheme.
The seaweed contain Bromoform, which like it sounds is related to chloroform. No bacteria = no methane. Bromoform is a confirmed animal carcinogen and lingers in the environment. The seaweed needs to be banned as an animal feed additive before this gets out of hand.
The only way to solve man-made climate change is to tax average people an exorbitant amount.
Am I going to pay a bunch of money for fancy seaweed and force my cows to eat it, or will I continue to let them graze my land that costs me nothing?
Decisions, decisions...
Not feeding the cows also does that, because they die. Can I have a research grant?
There are ~100 million cows in the US.
They each eat about 24lbs of food a day.
Doesn't say what proportion of that has to be seaweed, but even if it's just a pound a day, that's 100 million pounds of seaweed every day. 36.5 billion pounds a year.
Annual global seaweed harvest was 28,000 metric tons (61,729,433lbs) in '88 according to Wikipedia.
And there are lots more cows around the rest of the world (upwards of 1.5 billion).
People think *I'm* crazy as a vegan. But take note, according to this pro-meat article, livestock accounts for 20% of greenhouse emissions. Should be worrisome to anyone consuming cows or dairy...that's a lot we could cut out very quickly if the will existed.
biggest challenge I would have thought would be ensuring cost effectiveness, a key part of producing Cattle feed is getting the cost right. processing seaweed surely can't be cheap?
Grass.
Rather than trying to turn ocean into seaweed producing 'fields', finding out just what in that particular seaweed eliminates methane and try to splice it into regular cattle feed might be the way to go. Also if they do that they will patent it to keep market to themselves/create 'climate change' laws to force it's use/$$$$$...
The real problem in the world is overpopulation of the human filth.
A P.E.I. farmer has helped lead to a researcher's discovery of an unlikely weapon in the battle against global warming: a seaweed that nearly eliminates the destructive methane content of cow burps and farts. Stronghold Crusader Game Joe Dorgan began feeding his cattle seaweed from nearby beaches more than a decade ago as a way to cut costs on his farm in Seacow Pond. He was so impressed with the improvements he saw in his herd, he decided to turn the seaweed into a product. "There's a mixture of Irish moss, rockweed and kelp, and just going to waste," he said. "And I knew it was good because years ago, our ancestors, that's what they done their business with." Then researcher Rob Kinley caught wind of it.
What does it do to the fatty acids in the beef?
Mammals are unable to relocate the double bond in fatty acids that we eat. (If you aren't up on this stuff, that is the omega number.) To make a long story short, the essential fatty acids in our bodies are the essential fatty acids in the feed that we raise our food with. Switching most of our beef and milk from grass to corn changed the balance that they eat and thus the balance that we eat. And it was probably unwise to do that without any understanding of what that would do (is doing) to us.
I don't care about methane one way or the other, but the long running chemistry experiment that is our food supply bothers me a little bit.
See that "Preview" button?
you know, if you stopped force-feeding cattle something they weren't evolved to eat (corn) and let them eat grass, that whole methane problem would go away.
Trump appointed a lawyer from a climate denial lobby outfit to his EPA transition team, so you can expect the EPA to withdraw the CO2 as pollutant legal basis for their climate studies.
Here in the UK,it used to be common practice for farmers on islands or coastal regions to feed stock seaweed and/or allow stock to graze on beaches etc.
There were a couple of premium meats obtained from seaweed Fed animals,one was lamb from an area of Wales,if I remember correctly and another was beef from some whete in Scotland I believe..
I think they still do feed seaweed on the Hebrides and faroe islands..
Another one place that fed seaweed was Tristan da cunha,down in the south atlantic,when the islands were evacuated in the 1960's,many of them settled around the new forest area and I can remember playing and talking with some of the kids who complained that our meats didn't taste right to them,but they soon discovered a farm on the local coast where cattle grazed on beaches and tidal marshes and got some of their meat from there..
It's usually done out of necessity because of a shortage of other forage and grass..
The world turns and turns and we discover that some of the old ways had other unknown advantages,just like some of the old breeds of farm stock had advantages over our current cloned,small gene-pool mass production breeds..
We still have an awful lot to learn or sometimes re-learn..
What's the vitamin K2 or precursors of the seaweed in question? What's the typical route for materials in cow food to K2 in cows?
Most seaweeds have no taste at all.
Many of them can be processed to create jelly like "agar" with even less taste.
You seem to be showing yourself as a blithering idiot.
This is about Methane, not CO2.
Methane has a half life of 7 years in the atmosphere. It seems like this shouldn'the be our main concern.
Good scientific questions that should have been answered and have the answers compared before stating that seaweed is a solution for cow feeds.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Even better,
If you feed Marijuana to a cow the bovine just stops giving a shit.
Just lies there all week listening to Marley and getting the whole wheat munchies.
A quick search nets me http://journals.plos.org/ploso... a 2013 submission. Quote: "The most effective species, Asparagopsis, offers the most promising alternative for mitigation of enteric CH4 emissions."
Seaweed is also being studied as a means of carbon sequestration.
So grow vast amounts of seaweed, feed some of it to cows, and you've got a "two for the price of one" effect on global warming.
Cows: "Seaweed day! Is it Green, Yellow, Red today?"
A cow that has seen the truth: "Green, it's made of cows! Moo!"
Methane, not CO2, if you were careful to read. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 (30 times more potent) so the effects on reducing global warming would be much higher.
be allowed to talk about this in the Canadian parliament, given the fuss the last time fart was said in parliament?
Fucking humans keep breeding more and more cows, not to mention all the other ways they're polluting the environment. I say we kill and eat those fuckers instead!
Soon it will be the "secret ingredient" in your wife's new chili recipe!
Actually, that was the first thing I wondered - do the cows like it? Or are they SOL since they have no way of telling their owners that it sucks?
Better idea for reducing AGW - just legislate that all animals - including human beings - should perform photosynthesis, so that the carbon footprint is heavily reduced
NT
The study hypothesizes (but only cursorily investigates) two mechanisms for the methane reduction:
- the seaweed is eating part of the cow's food and producing natural antibiotics
- the seaweed contains heavy metals that are antibiotic
The bacteria/protozoans/etc. in the cow's gut are nutritionally necessary, and the heavy metals may be poisonous to humans.
I think this might be okay because everything in biology is a matter of concentration, and there's nothing too magical about the default gut flora. There are a lot of gut fermentation reactions happening, and it's plausible rifling through ocean algae might target mostly methane-producing fermentation while leaving most useful fermentation alone. It's reasonable to expect tampering with these reactions can net-improve them even if the tampering does harm some useful reactions. But it also seems reasonable to be concerned about wasted feed or subtly poisoned meat with this approach, so I'd be happier to see a study that included that constraint in its selection of the best algae.
It may be also that a chemical antibiotic (gasp!) would be safer than the natural ones. If the hypothesis is correct, it's not so different: the antibiotic-"free" alternative is like growing penicillin in the cow's gut instead of in a drug company vat. I feel like some of this organic, antibiotic-free stuff is tying the hands of the agricultural industry so they can't cheat us. If we instead had a sincere agricultural industry, like academia decides the methods and industry must choose from the menu, we might not benefit from the fancy-food restrictions any more.
I was stationed in the UK in the early 80's. The British farmers providing our chicken were feeding their chickens fish meal. This gave the chicken a decidedly fishy taste. The Brits couldn't taste it, but us Americans could. It actually caused a revolt amongst the military wives and because we could not find a British supplier that could reliably provide non-fish flavored chicken, we were able to go around the Status of Forces Agreement's local suppliers clause and import American chicken. Can you imagine what will happen if American beef or pork starts to taste like it came from the sea?
Seaweed grows faster with more CO2 - just one of those facts that interferes with the dominate narrative.
That being said - Instead, they should feed seaweed to chickens instead of corn - chicken meat is super high in LA(the most common O-6) - I think LA is the likely cause of the obesity pandemic and the great increase in depression after the 1960's when it was introduced on the market. Concentrated veg oils are obviously not human food.
The increase in CO2 has slowed - in part due to the great increase of plant mass:
http://www.nature.com/articles...
"Over the past 50 years, the amount of CO2 absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial biosphere annually has more than doubled"
Not sure how this can be happening - as everyone says the science is settled...
So what happens if it doubles again over the next 50 years?
... of seaweed? Just something to consider as every action in the environment has consequences.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Seriously, ~330 million people and ~100 million cows? Holy shit. No wonder they chose to kill all those bison to have space!
because cows are friends to me.
They live beneath the ocean and that's where I will be, beneath the waves, the waves. That's where I'll be. I'm goin' to see the cows beneath the sea.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
"Feeding Seaweed To Cows Eliminates Methane Emissions"
The summary and article says:
"it reduced the methane in the cows' burps and farts by about 20 per cent"
Bacteria convert the K1 in grass to K2. That being said, we could always eat natto.
Will any of this stuff be available for humans to slip into their gaseous partner’s feed trough? :-O
I've been feeding my cows chili-dogs and onion-rings!