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."

Comments

20% of GHGs not from ruminant animals really

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:20% of GHGs not from ruminant animals really

[I'm New Around Here]

The problem is indeed growing cows for food, no matter how it's done. If people stop eating meat and instead ate the vegetables fed to the animals,

That's just it. Very few "vegetables" are eaten by cows. Most of their diet is grass while in pasture, hay over the winter, and grain when fattening them up for slaughter. Grass and corn grow very well with little help beyond planting and limited watering. I grew up on a vegetable farm. The corn rows took very little maintenance, but the juicy vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers took a lot of time and water.

The studies that say beef needs 1000+ gallons of water per pound, while vegetables only need 100-500, don't take into consideration that the cows get most of that water from eating grass in their pasture and drinking from ponds in the pasture. Water for vegetables is mostly coming from a well or dammed river.

If you switched all acreage currently growing field corn for cows, and instead planted all the various vegetables, you would need to use a lot more water to irrigate them, and a lot more labor to tend to them.

Re:20% of GHGs not from ruminant animals really

[lucm]

Our digestive system can't digest corn and soy? That's what cows are fed in industrial agriculture.

Again your are misleading people with your carefully crafted misinformation. For the record, here's what cow eat:

In the beef cattle diet, common roughages include hay, silage and grass. Silage is a crop that has been preserved in a moist, succulent condition by partial fermentation in a tight container (silo) above or below ground. The majority of the food cattle eat comes from this type of feedstuffs.

Much less grain is needed in the cattle’s diet than roughage is. This is because grains fill cattle energy needs more than it fills their stomachs. Cattle are fed more grain the older they get. They gain weight faster when they are on higher amounts of grain. This is how cattle are finished off before they go to market.

http://animalsmart.org/species...

Now why don't you go have a feast of those delicious roughages - that's the bulk of that "40 fold" figure you mentioned - with maybe a small side of grain that was for the most part rejected by beer brewers or left over in the process of cleaning grain destined for human consumption; then you can come back here and educate us about the marvels it did for your digestive system.

Re: 20% of GHGs not from ruminant animals really

[Anonymous Coward]

Most cited human ailments like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, etc are caused by eating too much sugar, which comes from plants, and not from eating meat.

Re: 20% of GHGs not from ruminant animals really

[slew]

Ask a paleoanthropologist and they will tell you that you are full of shit about the lifespan of early humans.

One issue that may be of interest is fossil records show many examples of humans and neaderthals and analysis shows that many were likely to have died at an older age due the observation of common age related dental issues (such as ground-down and missing teeth) and arthritis. Unfortunately fossil records are rare so it isn't possible to determine the average age related issues, and even if there were many more fossil records, they cannot determine cancers or cardiovascular issues from fossil remains.

As mentioned by other posters, refined sugar and other refined carbs have been identified as a likely candidate (potentially more significant than saturated fats from meat) for many of these diseases, but the jury is current out on that topic.

The reason prehistoric man was attributed with short life-expectancy was because of high infant mortality and childhood deaths (disease and other mortality risks). If we factor those things out, prehistoric man is estimated to have lifetimes similar to those in the 16th century humans. These extrapolations were done by a few decades ago in scientific studies of isolated hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and South America before there was significant contact between these isolated groups and modern society (unfortunately that they are difficult if not impossible to repeat now because of widespread cultural contamination).

You can take these with a few grains of salt, but it tracks with estimates done over historical times (where they have better information) that factoring out infant/child mortality effects, the lifespan of humans has been pretty constant until the industrial revolution when people started living a bit longer. Post-childhood causes of deaths that limit life-expectancy have changed greatly over time. In the hunter-gatherer society external injuries dominated the deaths, in the agricultural society the prevalence of infectious diseases dominated, it wasn't until the industrial revolution that cardiovascular diseases dominated, but as we move to a "high-tech" society cancers now dominate over cardio-vascular disease.

Since our diets have changed since the earlier part of the industrial revolution, I don't think we are eating *less* meat than we were before during the industrial revolution (where we were collectively much poor-er and couldn't afford much meat) so I'm not so sure it is conclusive that meat is the cause of all this cardio-vascular disease during the industrial revolution, and I'm not sure it's a cause of the current cancer epidemic either. Personally, I suspect generally higher calorie diets and less exercise for cardio-vascular disease prevalence and prior-generational under-reporting combined with increased industrial pollution for the modern cancer prevalence. I have no evidence to support this, but I suspect many will agree with that assessment.

Re:20% of GHGs not from ruminant animals really

[Oligonicella]

No, it's the observational view. Cattle are not raised through their first couple of years on grain in a large building. I live surrounded by cattle farmers and their cattle spend the bulk of their time standing out in the pasture chewing grass and mustard and drinking from a standing pool with the occasional stroll to the trough for some of the dietary supplementals. All anyone has to do to see this is get in their car and drive the Midwest. You're being disingenuous, treating the last 4-6 months of their lives in a feed lot as if it describes their entire life 2-3 year life.

Re:I think the article had one thing backward

[flatulus]

Mod point from an AC? Can't say I've seen that before.

Re:I think the article had one thing backward

[Stewie241]

It happens all the time because if you've modded a thread the only way to post without reversing the mod is to do so as AC.

Unrealistic..let's just take a look.

[Vegan Cyclist]

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.

Re:Unrealistic..let's just take a look.

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is a little late, most places reported this back in October. It was 3-5% of the diet for the reduction. Now it is also only one type of seaweed that produces the dramatic reduction.

Now it does bring in a possible business venture of seaweed farming, one of the other articles from when this was first reported estimated roughly 700 square miles of seaweed farms would be needed for the US, and about 250 for Australia. With current seaweed farming basically being null there is plenty of room for growth.

The other option is isolate the compound and supplement existing feed.

Re:I think the article had one thing backward

[93 Escort Wagon]

You sure about that? I though they still track you by cookie or ip or something and un-apply your mod if you post, even as AC.

Nope. I've done this in the past - as long as you don't stand to gain karma from the discussion, you're golden. But you do have to remember to click that "post anonymously" box, which isn't checked by default.

Re:Game Changer

[ClickOnThis]

Climate models that are calibrated to accurately 'predict' weather conditions in the past are not proven to be as accurate in predicting conditions for which they haven't been calibrated, so knowing very well that this will attract a lot of flak from the usual AGW-zealots, and acknowledging that my karma will be reduced based on their disagreeing with me--which means that slashdot effectively already does have the 'fake news' filter that facebook is only still talking about--I will not be compelled to hold back my opinion.

Run-on sentence much? Anyway, for about the bazillionth time, climate != weather.

The AGW people are not zealots, they're scientists, and those who understand how science works. What you seem to interpret as zealotry is actually a genuine concern for the future of the human race.

All models are a compromise, because they attempt to express in mathematics and algorithms the essential parts of a complex real world. They can make wrong predictions in both directions. But the practice of science works to correct this by observing discrepancies and producing better models. And guess what? Models keep improving, and they are becoming quite accurate:

http://www.skepticalscience.co...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
http://www.ucsusa.org/publicat...
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/c...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-g...

Whether you accept what the models say or not, the essential take-away is that CO2 and methane are greenhouse gasses, and humanity is responsible for adding a significant amount of them to the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Enough to cause a problem that we must face and solve, or risk significant global hardship. Temperature is trending upwards. Polar ice is melting. Sea levels are rising. These are observed facts.

And maybe, in fact perhaps quite likely, efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will be a net benefit for economies, rather than a hardship.

Re:I think the article had one thing backward

[ClickOnThis]

I gave you a charity +1 Funny mod, but it really wasn't that funny. Try harder next time, k?

But look at his username (flatulus.) That's FTW.

Re:Simple explanation

[hey!]

But it doesn't taste bad. "Umami", one of the five basic tastes, was discovered by studying seaweeds, and was named for the Japanese word for the flavor seaweeds lend to broth, literally "pleasant savory flavor."

It's a fair bet that every pre-industrial community that lived by a productive ocean ate seaweed, although just like Brussels sprouts not being as popular as corn, not all varieties of seaweed are equally tasty. Nori and Kombu are very tasty. Dulse, fried and salted, is somewhat reminiscent of bacon (it's that umami flavor again). Carageenan is virtually tasteless, which is why it is used as a base for fancy puddings. It is extensively used in prepared foods as a texture improver: half-and-half, ice cream, reduced fat dairy products, candy bars, toothpaste, even soda. Americans are food wimps, but they eat a lot of the stuff without realizing because it's hidden in many of the prepared foods we like to eat, like fast food "shakes".