NYTimes: Making cows burp like kangaroos. Methane problem solved?
A few posts down is one on engineering microbes, or using other trickery, to make biofuels from cellulose. Another effort of vaguely similar sort – to alter nature and agriculture so that our collective greenhouse enhancement goes down – is in the NYTimes. There Normitzu Onishi reports from Australia efforts to jigger cattle so that there ruminatious digestion belches little methane. The effort aims to convert cattle digestion to a bovine equivalent of kangaroo innards – which digest the same sort of food but don’t make so much methane.
It’s a somewhat funny and informative story. One thinks, to keep the barnyard and farm mood, however that conversion of cattle digestion is chicken feed compared to the task facing the world before our forcing of the atmosphere drops anywhere near pre-industrial levels. Some of such perspective is in the piece, but not much.
It is more than worth noting that this effort has been widely reported in Australia. For instance:
- AFP via The Age (Dec. 7, 2007) : Quest to make cattle fart like marsupials ; Only problem with that hed is that most emissions come from the front end.
Plus, as seen in this previous post, speculation reported in Australia is that if the Aussies just ranched roos for meat on the same land, they’d get the same yield in steaks and chops, but without the methane.
- Charlie Petit
