Scientists Discover Seaweed Species That Stops Cows from Emitting Methane (cbsnews.com) 106
"Globally, methane is responsible for 30% of global warming. Of that, livestock, such as cattle, account for about one-third of all methane emissions," reports CBS News.
But researchers discovered that feeding seaweed to cattle would reduce greenhouse gases by as much as 40%, they're told by a Canadian farmer named Joe Dorgan who first discovered the connection: Digesting roughage requires extra digestion from cows and causes cows to burp more. Those burps emit methane, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that's 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In a year, a cow emits as much greenhouse gas as a small car. Because animal numbers have skyrocketed to help feed a growing human population, livestock now accounts for 15% of global emissions.
The increase motivated chief scientist at Futurefeed, Rob Kinley, who worked with Dorgan on his organic certification 15 years ago, to find a seaweed species with even more methane-reducing power. "We started testing seaweeds from coastal Australia, and it wasn't long before the Asparagopsis species showed up, and it showed up in a big way. So big that we didn't even believe what we were seeing," Kinley said. "It took multiple runs of testing this before we believed what we were seeing, which was we couldn't find methane anymore." Kinley's research showed Asparagopsis, a common type of red seaweed, has the potential to virtually eliminate methane emissions from livestock.
But there are some obstacles to overcome — it's not easy to harvest from the ocean, so scientists are experimenting with farming it. Kinely's team, along with others like Josh Goldman, project leader at Greener Grazing, are getting much closer to perfecting the techniques.... Still, there's the challenge of encouraging cow owners to use the seaweed supplement. For that, Goldman says there's an incentive: adding seaweed to a cow's diet means they consume less food. And, he says, dairy farmers and cattle ranchers will likely be able to cash in, selling carbon credits for the emissions they reduce.
Eliminating almost all methane from almost all cow's on Earth "would have a tremendous impact, roughly equivalent to eliminating all the emissions from the U.S., or the equivalent of taking every car off the road globally," Goldman said.
"It's clear that methane reduction from seaweed is effective in the short-term," the article concludes, "but there's some fear that its effects may diminish over time as the cow's digestive systems adapt."
But researchers discovered that feeding seaweed to cattle would reduce greenhouse gases by as much as 40%, they're told by a Canadian farmer named Joe Dorgan who first discovered the connection: Digesting roughage requires extra digestion from cows and causes cows to burp more. Those burps emit methane, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that's 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In a year, a cow emits as much greenhouse gas as a small car. Because animal numbers have skyrocketed to help feed a growing human population, livestock now accounts for 15% of global emissions.
The increase motivated chief scientist at Futurefeed, Rob Kinley, who worked with Dorgan on his organic certification 15 years ago, to find a seaweed species with even more methane-reducing power. "We started testing seaweeds from coastal Australia, and it wasn't long before the Asparagopsis species showed up, and it showed up in a big way. So big that we didn't even believe what we were seeing," Kinley said. "It took multiple runs of testing this before we believed what we were seeing, which was we couldn't find methane anymore." Kinley's research showed Asparagopsis, a common type of red seaweed, has the potential to virtually eliminate methane emissions from livestock.
But there are some obstacles to overcome — it's not easy to harvest from the ocean, so scientists are experimenting with farming it. Kinely's team, along with others like Josh Goldman, project leader at Greener Grazing, are getting much closer to perfecting the techniques.... Still, there's the challenge of encouraging cow owners to use the seaweed supplement. For that, Goldman says there's an incentive: adding seaweed to a cow's diet means they consume less food. And, he says, dairy farmers and cattle ranchers will likely be able to cash in, selling carbon credits for the emissions they reduce.
Eliminating almost all methane from almost all cow's on Earth "would have a tremendous impact, roughly equivalent to eliminating all the emissions from the U.S., or the equivalent of taking every car off the road globally," Goldman said.
"It's clear that methane reduction from seaweed is effective in the short-term," the article concludes, "but there's some fear that its effects may diminish over time as the cow's digestive systems adapt."
What's the mechanism? (Score:4, Interesting)
How is it accomplishing this? Suppressing some kind of stomach biota? Making digestion more efficient directly?
Re: What's the mechanism? (Score:2, Troll)
Re:What's the mechanism? (Score:5, Informative)
How is it accomplishing this? Suppressing some kind of stomach biota? Making digestion more efficient directly?
I don't know but perhaps these old stories help:
Australian 'Super Seaweed' Supplement To Reduce Cattle Gas Emissions Wins $1 Million International Prize (2020) https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Seaweed Could Make Cows Burp Less Methane and Cut Their Carbon Hoofprint (2018) https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Feeding Seaweed To Cows Eliminates Methane Emissions (2016) https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Re: What's the mechanism? (Score:1)
Humans would fart if we ate more meat. Less farts if you eat your green vegetables. Its all kind of common sense, just hard for people to admit.
"Meat contains high levels of sulfur, and sulfur-laden foods produce more odors as they are digested. ... By contrast, most vegetables produce fewer smelly byproducts during digestion, like hydrogen sulfide, than meat."
Re: What's the mechanism? (Score:2)
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Re: What's the mechanism? (Score:3)
Let's science, shan't we? https://www.ibsdiets.org/fodma... [ibsdiets.org]
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Methane = CH4, there is no sulfur in methane, they are not connected.
Sure meat may may your farts stink more but they won't cause more farts. You have that backwards.
Humans eating vegetation (vegetables) just moves the farts from cows back to humans.
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Does it (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably not (Score:5, Informative)
While the linked to article doesn't say specifically I'd guess probably not based on this bit from it
"There are a lot of mouths to feed. But the good news is we only need to feed those cows 0.2% of their daily ration," said Goldman.
Obviously there's no way for me to know this but I'd guess if the seaweed makes up that little of the cows diet it wouldn't change the taste of the meat. I could be wrong of course.
Re:Probably not (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't just effect CH4 production. The gut chemistry changes a bit. Quote from https://theconversation.com/e-157192:
(A cow eats acround 5,000 grams/day, and they added 50 grams of seaweed.)
(Fascinating, but without absolute numbers a useless factoid. 750% could be off a very low base.)
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- the steers released a lot more hydrogen – up to 750% more, mostly from their mouths – as their systems produced less methane.
So the farmers could collect this hydrogen, sell it as "organic hydrogen," and make even more money!
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You're a paranoid.
Re: Does it (Score:2)
We feed cows a lot of crap because we think they are like pigs. They'll just eat anything remotely edible in front of them. Feeding them healthier food should result in meat that is heathier for humans to eat.
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Yes, it tastes less like methane
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Like sushi, perhaps?
Old news (Score:3)
Thinking the same thing (Score:1)
Seems that this is an improvement over the earlier take.
But then, missing the point is sort of the shtick of these "editors".
Re:Old news (Score:4, Informative)
Didn't Slashdot report on this a year or so ago?
It did. [slashdot.org]
And about four years before that [slashdot.org] as well.
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don't know about /. but I heard this story years ago.
There are other small changes in feed that can significantly reduce methane production and which don't increase costs by much. It is time to include agriculture in our accounting of greenhouse gasses and mitigation efforts.
This isn't an entirely new idea (Score:3)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsroun... [bbc.co.uk]
Look behind the report (Score:2)
Scientists RE-Discover Alzheimer Disease after .. (Score:4, Funny)
.. memory loss due to Alzheimer.
Why is this mis-reported now? (Score:1)
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Perhaps the seaweed could be added to the salt blocks? Or provided in feed made available near the salt blocks - though that might alter their "grass-fed" certification.
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Re: Why is this mis-reported now? (Score:2)
I don't get why its a problem. Make a seaweed vitamin and force feed it to cows. (Patent pending!!! I demand 10% royalties.)
Cow farting adds to global warming (Score:1)
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Methane is responsible for about one-sixth, not 30% according to NOAA's Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) [noaa.gov]. Not sure where "30%" came from but the Slashdot link leads to a video that doesn't even mention the number 30%.
And it's primarily cow burps rather than farts. Just sayin'.
misleading; not eating cows helps more (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Ground mineral resources are a non renewable resource on human timescales given the level of extraction, range grazing won't last.
Remineralize the Earth (Score:2)
What do you think of: https://www.remineralize.org/ [remineralize.org] ?
"REMINERALIZATION utilizes finely ground rock dust and sea-based minerals to restore soils and forests, produce higher yields and more nutritious food, and store carbon in soils to stabilize the climate."
Essentially, grinding up rocks does much the same as what volcanoes do when they spew ash everywhere -- which is why so much fertile soil is farmed near volcanoes despite the obvious danger.
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That's already increasingly being done for pasture and cropland simply for better yields, but doing that on sufficient scale for rangeland will not be profitable (which isn't to say it shouldn't be done, just that the cattle industry won't be paying for it).
Re:misleading; not eating cows helps more (Score:5, Informative)
These cattle allow us to convert inedible native grasses and other weedy plants into excellent protein. For the most part, cattle are not fed human-consumable feed. Cattle hay is mainly grass, alfalfa, or stalks from grain harvested for humans, or damaged grain crops(such as hail damaged wheat and barley, which can result in yields to low to justify the cost of combine harvesting, and instead are simply cut and baled, which is much less equipment intensive). Much of the corn grown for cattle feed has the corn kernel harvested for human use, then the remaining stalk is cut, chopped, and fermented to make cattle feed. Soy beans used for cattle feed can be cull harvests that did not mature properly due to drought or other factors. The waste from processing sugar beets into sugar is often used as cattle feed. Cattle are put into wheat fields after harvest to ‘clean up’ stalks and fertilize the ground.
This sort of feed is used as supplemental feed in winter when conditions require it, and in ‘finishing’ where the cattle are fed to bring their body fat percentage to the ideal ratio before butchering. As this feed is expensive, raisers do their best to get this done in as short a time as possible using as little supplemental feed as possible.
It is not economical to try and feed human grade food to an animal that can happily eat greasewood bushes, and the cattle raisers know this.
Those Feedlots you drive by on the edge of civilization are a tiny fraction of where beef cattle spend their lives.
In short, we use cattle to convert waste material from human crop harvests, and utilize land that otherwise cannot produce human food.
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Regenerative agriculture is just smoke and mirrors. They feed chickens with corn from normal (fossil fertilized) farms, let them run around and shit everywhere and then pretend the animals regenerate the soil.
I'm not a vegan, but animals do fuck all to sustain soil. For intensive agriculture, soil is just a substrate for inputs and outputs, animals change nothing about the equation (even range grazing is intensive, which is why it's going to hit the wall hard because of trace element depletion without ferti
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I'm not a vegan, but animals do fuck all to sustain soil.
Probably not as good as manufactured chemical fertilizers, but still pretty good.
https://slashdot.org/story/21/... [slashdot.org]
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That's not so much animals sustaining the soil, but not depleting it by crapping where they eat. Plants, microbes and fungi would be perfectly capable of sustaining a nutrient cycle without animals.
Crapping where we eat is what humanity will have to do to keep existing at this scale for much longer. We will have to change our sewage system so we can recover the black and yellow gold unpolluted by everything else we flush down the drain.
Re: misleading; not eating cows helps more (Score:1)
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the amount water cattle consume is mind boggling to produce a small amount of nutrition
But nearly all of the water they consume gets pissed on to the land they graze on. In a non-arid climate, that water either gets back into the water table or, when it evaporates, is rained back down.
In arid climates, importing water to feed cattle is wasteful because too much of it evaporates and carried away by the wind.
Re: misleading; not eating cows helps more (Score:1)
Slitting your own throat at age 25 would also lower your carbon footprint. Doing so at age 35 would reduce it less. Doing so at age 20 would reduce it more.
Most people prefer to live. So we don't encourage this sort of behavior. Even though it is guaranteed to meet the narrow objective of reducing per capita cumulative carbon footprint.
Similarly, we can force people on not-quite-starvation diets. But most people prefer to live comfortably, not merely survive. And just as a policy of forced suicide would lea
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What if that 20 year old might otherwise be the person to make cold fusion or zero-point energy generators work? Or even just make a better battery or better home insulation or a more efficient refrigerator? Then such a death would relatively *increase* the carbon footprint of humanity.
Thus "Overpopulation is a Myth:"
https://overpopulationisamyth.... [overpopula...samyth.com]
because people are the "Ultimate Resource" (as Julian L. Simon put it):
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri... [juliansimon.com]
In practice, most scarcity today and most pollution toda
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Exponential growth is poorly understood (Score:2)
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As per the linked to article the seaweed only has to make up .2% of the cows diet to work. If we can figure out a way to farm this stuff I feel like it shouldn't be that hard to keep up with any growth in cattle farming given that fact.
Making sure poor third worlders (where the real major growth in cattle farming is happening) actually use the stuff is a whole other issue to be overcome though.
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We don't farm this specific seaweed jackass and if you read the article farming this specific type of seaweed apparently isnt as straight forward as what we do now.
I can see it now... (Score:2)
The next secret ingredient at Taco Bell for when you've got that board meeting after lunch.
Re: I can see it now... (Score:2)
Taco Bell ground meat product is beef and not just ground up newspapers? Call the press! This is big headline news! :-)
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The next secret ingredient at Taco Bell for when you've got that board meeting after lunch.
I wonder if the anti-gas effect can be passed on through the meat or if the seaweed has to be explicitly added to the refried beans.
Nice (Score:2)
The increase motivated chief scientist at Futurefeed, Rob Kinley, who worked with Dorgan on his organic certification 15 years ago
Well that's enheartening that these guys know what they're doing, and are not just pander generators for buffoons to have a steady supply of asininity to feel outrage over.
Sounds like a promising approach (Score:2)
but who is going to teach the cows to swim?
Re: Sounds like a promising approach (Score:2)
We were obviously thinking different things, Pinky. It's TIME TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD! *hops down from mouse cage*
Finally, relief (Score:2)
I hope this also works on a nine year-old collie mix.
Scaling up? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this line of research is really interesting, but I wonder about how it can be scaled up for beef given how beef cattle are generally produced. Calves and young cattle are typically grazed (stockers or backgrounders) along with their mothers on open land for 4-6 months, then auctioned and sent to feedlots for finishing. The mothers are re-inseminated and keep grazing. I could imagine seaweed being incorporated into the finishing/feedlot step given how concentrated the cattle are. But the first part, stocking/backgrounding is essentially open grazing in pastures, taking advantage of prevalent, low-maintenance rangelands where the cows eat grass. It seems to me that to convert this step to seaweed-based would require the cattle at calf-stage to be concentrated and fed the seaweed until auction (maybe there's another way to do this?). I imagine this could be possible, but would pretty dramatically change the industry. This open grazing is a huge part of the beef methane budget, see table 4 here (note that beef "cows" are also generally grazing):
https://www3.epa.gov/ttnchie1/... [epa.gov]
In addition, we'd have to know how to really scale up the seaweed production, and what the emissions (methane and other GHGs) associated with that scaling up are. Naturally harvesting the seaweed seems like a recipe for bad ecological impacts.
Industrial dairy, on the other hand, seems more capable of converting to seaweed, as those cows are rarely grazed, and female calves are grown and generally stay onsite for their lives (male calves are usually sold off or killed).
Old news (Score:3)
https://theconversation.com/se... [theconversation.com]
This has been a known factor for several years now.
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Re: Old news (Score:2)
I can't wait... (Score:2)
...to see underwater cows!
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A milestone (Score:1)
Bison vs Cows (Score:4, Interesting)
It may be that carbon emissions from ruminants have increased over what nature had originally but surely nature's emissions should be the baseline here and we should be comparing the original bison herd vs. the current cow herd (at least in North America) and not pretending that without humans there would be zero carbon emissions from animals.
Re: Bison vs Cows (Score:2)
Not nearly as cool (Score:2)
One common way to get rid of low quality gasses that include methane is to flare them off. The CO2 isn't ideal but it does less damage than the methane in the gas would.
So the obvious solution is fire breathing cows.
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Pictured here [chzbgr.com].
So, overall effect 2%? (Score:2)
That would be my estimate from the numbers in this report. Sure, 2% is nice, but it will not do anything to stop the trend that now goes to 3C or more (with 2.5C pretty much "locked in", i.e. nothing can be done about it anymore).
I would say this is another thing that does very little but looks good in the press.
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Re: So, overall effect 2%? (Score:2)
I'll bet (Score:2)
There are some humans that could use this seaweed also.
Just use GM (Score:1)
It will be much more efficient to find the enzymes/proteins responsible and GM them into a microbe you can grow in fermentation tanks. Seaweed is extremely expensive to farm.
LAB MEAT (Score:1)
The numbers don't add up... (Score:2)
...methane is responsible for 30% of global warming. Of that, livestock, such as cattle, account for about one-third of all methane emissions...
So according to some quick mental arithmetic, "about one-third" of 30% makes livestock responsible for about 10% of global warming.
livestock now accounts for 15% of global emissions
So now the figure has changed to 15% of 30%, which makes livestock responsible for 4.5% of global warming, not 10%.
Eliminating almost all methane from almost all cow's on Earth "would have a tremendous impact, roughly equivalent to eliminating all the emissions from the U.S..."
According to one source the U.S is responsible for 30 percent of global energy use and 28 percent of carbon emissions [eesi.org]
So we have two different figures for reduction in global warming: 10%, and 4.5%. And we're expected to equate one or both of those with eliminating
Rerun? (Score:2)
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You're not the only one. This isn't new at all.
Wired article: Algae Isn’t the Answer (Score:1)
Seaweed can help reduce methane emissions during the minor fraction of most cattle's lives at the end when they are fed in feedlots... not prior to that when they're out on grassland.
"All told, if we accept the most promising claims of the algae boosters, we’re talking about an 80 percent reduction of methane among only 11 percent of all burps—roughly an 8.8 percent reduction total. Maybe a little more if we can work algae into cows’ diets on pastures."
See: "Want Carbon-Neutral Cows? Algae
When? (Score:2)
Another benefit (Score:1)
Haha. (Score:2)
This will be best accomplished by farming cows on board giant ships near seaweed beds.
Long story short (Score:1)